Current State: Customer Experience and Personalization

Customer Experience (CX) encompasses all interactions between a brand and its customers, including inspiration, learning, buying, and usage. And let's be honest–we haven't always gotten it right. Remember those frustrating experiences with companies that left us scratching our heads?

These mishaps highlight why CX remains a top priority for organizations. In fact, more than half of business executives (58%) rank improving CX as a top-five business priority.**

In response, marketers are now equipped with a universal CX toolkit, finding new ways to empathize with and deliver customer value.

Organizations are also actively tackling CX managerial challenges. Key imperatives include having an executive-level owner of the customer experience; forming a clear vision for CX; aligning customer experience priorities to roadmap investments; and implementing measurement systems to track satisfaction and investment impacts on key growth metrics.

With this new focus, marketers are creating new forms of CX relevancy through personalized content, products, services, platforms, and customer outcomes. And then AI entered the scene.

How AI is Changing the CX Landscape

AI is accelerating personalization while adding complexity for marketers. It holds the promise of accelerating personalization efforts while delivering richer customer experiences. The benefits are clear for both brands and customers, including cost and time savings, improved performance, better use of insights and data, and competitive differentiation.

However, implementing AI solutions isn't without its challenges. Marketers face perceived cost barriers, uncertainty about where to start, and a lack of internal expertise. Ethical and regulatory considerations also come into play, requiring alignment across the organization.

Despite these challenges, AI offers practical applications for personalization across the customer experience journey:

• Planning: AI helps marketers plan by providing insights into customer preferences and behavior.
• Content Generation: AI-powered tools can generate personalized content at scale, from product recommendations to email copy.
• Production: Automation streamlines content production processes, reducing the amount of time and resources needed.
• Testing and Optimization: AI enables marketers to test different versions of content and optimize campaigns in real-time based on performance metrics.

Moving to Action: Infusing AI into Your Personalization Strategy

To harness the power of AI for personalization, marketers must take deliberate steps.

Step 1: Create the Right Foundation

• Establish a clear vision aligned with business priorities.
• Create test and use case hypotheses.
• Define success (including measures).

Step 2: Learn from the Industry

• Pressure test your vision and hypotheses.
• Leapfrog pitfalls via past experiments.
• Clearly define solution needs and requirements.

Step 3: Start Now and Learn as You Go

• Don't wait for perfection; embrace experimentation.
• Foster a culture of continuous learning and improvement.

Remember, we didn't get mobile, social, CX, or personalization right at first either. The key is to start, learn, and iterate.  AI is the solution to personalization at scale - unlocking the promise for customers and unrealized potential for marketers.

You’re not alone. Need help getting started? CourtAvenue’s proprietary AI and Experience Acceleration Programis a 4-week engagement that helps brands develop AI opportunity statements, define the solutions landscape, select test pilots, and navigate the managerial AI challenges.

We can help save you time with AI-powered personalization.