The connection between personalized experiences, customer loyalty, and engagement is undeniable. According to Accenture, 91% of consumers are more likely to shop with brands that recognize and remember them, and provide relevant offers and recommendations. Research from McKinsey found that 71% of consumers expect companies to deliver personalized interactions, with 76% getting upset when that doesn’t happen.
Across all industries, companies in both the consumer and business environments are exploring how they can make their offerings and interactions with customers more personal and customized. The ability to access and use essential and contextually rich billing data, captured and fed from a modern billing and back-office technology system, can help advance and enhance these ambitions in the following ways:
From rigid catalog to customer-led product customization
To satisfy the varying preferences of their customers, service providers have seen their product catalogs expand dramatically with a seemingly infinite number of combinations and permutations. The rigid nature of the typical product catalog, however, is a barrier to deeper personalization as it means that configurations must be set by the service provider itself. Sure, customers can scroll through the various offerings, but they are restricted to choosing from what the provider has made available to them and predefined in the catalog.
True personalization means empowering customers to pick, choose, and configure the service or product bundle to their exact specifications. This means eschewing the rigidity of the product catalog, deconstructing the long list of SKUs, and adopting the modern systems and back-office technologies that remove confinements and allow the customer to create the bundle, package, and subscription options that work best for them.
Driving deeper engagement via more accurate and relevant recommendations
Anyone who has purchased a product from an online retailer or created an account with any of the myriad streaming content providers is surely familiar with the idea of personalized service delivery. These companies use the vast amount of purchase history data to extend offers and make suggestions that keep customers engaged. Leveraging and incorporating real-time streamed billing data can help service providers better understand the make-up and behaviors of their customers and create deeply personalized offers that align with their unique preferences.
Elevate proactive and customer-initiated support experiences
After the customer has been successfully onboarded and an ongoing relationship has been established, another critical phase of the personalization continuum involves ensuring a superior and robust customer engagement experience. For customer-initiated engagement, Generative AI has emerged as a critical tool for enhancing customer support. With its ability to respond to queries and generate natural language responses, AI enables service providers to address customer inquiries quickly, answer common questions, and solve problems while freeing human support specialists to focus on more complex issues, such as those that require empathy. With more than 40 percent of incoming customer inquiries related to their invoice or subscription status, companies that can enrich AI models with intelligent billing data will have the ability to further elevate and deepen the personalized nature of customer-initiated interactions, leading to more successful engagement.
Learn how Aria’s AI Datashare enriches Generative AI solutions with contextual billing data
From the standpoint of proactive care, capturing the customer’s unique billing preferences, such as how frequently they want to be alerted, or the communications channel by which those notifications should be delivered, provides yet another opportunity for the enterprise to deliver a more personalized customer care experience.
From service delivery to customer onboarding to support experience, personalization manifests itself in many different ways from one enterprise to the next. By accessing the wealth of real-time billing and subscription account data, enterprises can take their personalization efforts to a new level, delivering a more delightful experience that results in greater loyalty and engagement and produces happy customers.
