How Marketers Can Match the Pace of Customer Change with Real-Time Experiences

Real-time experiences are the key to inspiring lifetime customer loyalty, according to Shashi Seth, Senior Vice President, Oracle CX Marketing.

At the Oracle CX Cloud Virtual Summit on personalized marketing that took place August 6th, he spoke about the importance of customer data, real-time experiences, and hyper-personalization.

Marketers work to keep up with customers who frequently switch between channels, brands, and buying options almost on a whim. Earning and retaining customer loyalty, Seth feels, comes down to offering hyper-personalized experiences.

The importance of real-time, relevant experiences

How do marketers stand out from competitors with the experiences they deliver? Seth thinks that marketers should bear these three important points in mind:

It’s more important than ever to keep customers engaged. Marketers must make every interaction matter and provide relevant experiences. They should be reaching out to customers, especially during times of uncertainty, to show that they care and how they can help.
To provide relevant experiences, get personalization right. Getting personalization right means going deeper than typical personalization and aiming for hyper-personalization, which is more of a one-to-one conversation. Customers engage with brands in real time, and interactions happen in micro-seconds, which means that hyper-personalization must happen in real time as well. How does a marketer deliver on a real-time, hyper-personalized experience? They gain an understanding of their customers by using their customer data.
Innovation must happen at the right pace. Business are figuring out what’s next and what customers will do next. To help with this, businesses should embrace experimentation at scale, and use their martech stack to learn and respond to customer change. Only then will they be able to grow and evolve their business. For example, is B2B taking a page from B2C? Would a commerce site for B2B be a good idea? Are marketers offering a cross-channel experience and not just relying on email? Are they using hyper-personalization to have the right conversations at the right moments with customers?

Challenges marketers face

Seth thinks that marketers run into obstacles when creating hyper-personalized experiences and contextual content. Both require obtaining a strong understanding of customers, and that comes from bringing together and parsing a huge amount of customer data. It could be demographical data, transactional data, behavioral data, and even data in apps and data links that marketers might not have ready access to.

However, marketers should aim to leverage this data in real time, as a customer will make decisions in real time. Marketers are personalizing to the moment and have only a micro-second to make the right impression with relevant content or a relevant offer.

Pleasing a customer means engaging them at the right moment with the right content with the right intent. Customers also shouldn’t be overloaded with content. They just receive just the right amount, and they don’t feel that their time is wasted. They get the content and offer in real time and impacts the next decisions they make and how they progress in their customer journey.

Real-time, relevant experiences depend upon martech stacks

Managing large amounts of data and crafting experiences also depends on the reliability of a martech stack. A business stack should strive to be able to scale and act at speed to drive real-time experiences. For example, a B2C business can’t afford any downtime during the holiday season, as they will be reaching out across multiple channels to a plethora of customers as much as they can. Every hour lost to the system being down can mean millions of dollars lost.

Therefore, customer loyalty springs from:

A dependable and effective martech stack
Listening to customers
Using data to hyper-personalize and provide a relevant, real-time experience
Realizing interactions and customer decisions happen in micro-seconds, and so must marketing