By Alex Burnham, Head of Customer Strategy & Success at Tryzens Global 

As customer experience becomes a key battleground in commerce and consumers cut their spending, investment in personalization is intensifying.  

Almost 70% of businesses are increasing their investments in personalization despite the challenging economic climate, while 65% of consumers say personalization can earn their loyalty as they cut back on their general spending. 

However, beneath the flurry of tools and platforms that promise to enhance the customer experience, there lies a personalization gap: the distance between the expected outcomes and the actual results.  

In its State of Digital Customer Experience Report, CMSWire found that while a growing number of solutions are lowering the barrier to entry for adding personalization capabilities, businesses are still suffering from low maturity. It found that just 18% of brands were getting the benefits from their personalization programs. 

Part of the explanation is that many businesses take shortcuts in their CX strategy. For example, in their drive to boost repeat purchases, AoV, and LTV, they bolt on a loyalty program to their existing technology stack, bypassing important steps. 

Their websites simply aren’t ready for it; their digital architecture lacks maturity. 

The result is an uneven digital presence where experiences are disjointed across channels, slow page speeds draw frustration, and loyalty programs fall short of their potential. 

Imagine a brand that wants to drive customer loyalty. Its first step is to jump straight into a plug-and-play loyalty system, laying out the associated costs and resources. But its website is slow and not responsive, its route to purchase complicated, and its email marketing is generic. 

New visitors will slip through these cracks that are scattered across the customer journey; they won’t make that first purchase. Any thought of signing up for a rewards program is quickly forgotten, like a newly built neighborhood left abandoned, a ghost town of customer activity.  

But what are the customer experience foundations that drive customer loyalty? 

Tryzens Global partners with international brands to design and develop leading customer experiences. In helping to deliver personalized, omnichannel experiences, our clients have benefited from growth in conversions, average order value, lifetime value, and overall sales. 

We’ve identified 3 core steps of customer experience that drive customer loyalty.

Look at your ecommerce website and ensure you have the modern building blocks of a good customer experience. Critically assess the existing landscape of your digital infrastructure by working through these questions: 

1. What existing tools does your team have to offer personalized features such as intelligent search and recommended products? 

2. How user friendly is your current ecommerce site? What is the user interface like? Is it optimized for mobile? 

3. Have you gathered customer feedback regarding their experience navigating the website? And have you used it to remap the customer journey? 

4. When was the last time you carried out a site audit, identifying issues such as broken links, slow page speeds? 

5. Have you evaluated the checkout process and removed unnecessary barriers to streamline the journey? 

6. Where does your website fit into the brand’s overall digital presence? Is it integrated with your other channels? 

Whatever digital commerce platform powers your online store, ensure you’re maximizing its out-of-the-box personalization functionality. For Salesforce Commerce Cloud it’s Einstein; Adobe Commerce has Sensei. Headless platforms have the flexibility to integrate customized solutions. 

With personalization thread across digital channels, brands can be more effective in how they engage customers, serving tailored offers, promotions, and recommendations that help elevate the overall experience. 

Only when your ecommerce site is up to speed, responsive, and personalized can brands move on to the next step.

With a positive experience laid out, it’s time to look at customer data. Harnessing this raw material can make or break your customer loyalty strategy. A Twilio Segment report found that half of all companies find it challenging to get accurate data. 

To ensure you’re effectively leveraging data, consider these questions: 

1. How do you currently collect customer data across different touchpoints? 

2. Are you able to create unified customer profiles from multiple data sources? And where do you store them? 

3. What tools are you currently using to analyze customer data? And how do you turn raw data into actionable insights? 

4. Are you using customer data to test personalization to continually optimize your strategy? 

Many brands and retailers lack a holistic view of their customers, despite juggling multiple platforms. If customer data is siloed across your OMS, CRM, and ERP, then it’s limiting your ability to both understand your customers and deliver experiences that nurture loyalty.  

With a single customer view, you can take personalization to the next level. You can offer products in online marketing campaigns that relate to products bought in-store. You can segment customer groups to tailor specific offers, deals and recommendations. For example, bigger discounts for MVP customers based on revenue spend or top buyers of certain products. Or early access for frequent buyers of seasonal items. 

These tactics engage and re-engage customers, bringing them back to the website. They are the difference between personalized experiences that customers have come to expect and experiences that are memorable. 

By fully integrating your data and harnessing its potential, you now have solid foundations to implement an effective loyalty program.

Loyalty platforms are only as good as the data that powers them. With a scarcity of rich and accurate customer data, there’s little to enable effective customer segmentation and tailored rewards and incentives. That’s why data integration, along with an intuitive UX, are prerequisites for an effective loyalty program that adds value and gets customers coming back. 

Before you develop a loyalty program, consider these questions: 

1. What kind of loyalty program is right for your business? Is a points system enough? What about a tier-based system? 

2. How can it feel authentic to your brand? 

3. What types of rewards will resonate most with your customers? Understanding customer data can drive you in the right direction. 

4. How will you personalize your loyalty program for different customer segments? 

5. How will you integrate and communicate the program across all of your touchpoints? 

6. What systems outside of the loyalty software do you need to enable an omnichannel loyalty program? 

7. What will be in place to track and measure the success of the loyalty program? 

The loyalty landscape has been a hotspot for rapid development, growing into a bustling city of customer engagement strategies. Yet like the urban cityscape, competition is everywhere. Almost all brands and retailers have some type of loyalty program; customers are swimming in a sea of choice.

To rise above the competition and drive customer lifetime value, you need to think of loyalty beyond points. By centering your loyalty strategy around the authenticity of your brand, you can build long-lasting loyalty. Integrate service- and experience-based rewards such as VIP treatments, personal shopping sessions, and physical events, and tailor these rewards to your different customer segments.  

This approach better engages customers. According to a Retail TouchPoints report, customers are looking for brands to recognize them as individuals and deliver relevant experiences that add real value. For that to happen, businesses need to integrate data held in multiple platforms (ERP, CRM, OMS) to power a single view of their customers. 

Brands can then continually analyze their supply of data to inform and refine their customer loyalty strategy, using purchase history, behavior, and preferences to tailor offers and incentives to not only meet the wants of each customer but anticipate their future needs. 

To broaden your loyalty ecosystem, you can build outside the walls of your program by cultivating a community around your brand. Away from the louder and more crowded online spaces, you can offer a dedicated space for customers to talk about products or share personal stories they wouldn’t feel comfortable doing elsewhere.

To sum up, here are 3 core steps of customer experience that helps drive customer loyalty:  

• An intuitive and user-friendly website that can deliver personalization 

• The ability to bring together customer data from different systems to provide a single customer view 

• A well-integrated loyalty program that is authentic to your brand and can tailor rewards to different customer segments  

By addressing these foundational elements, businesses can not only attract new customers but keep them coming back, fostering long-term loyalty and driving sustainable growth. 

Are you stuck on the first step of enhancing your website? Struggling on the second step in your bringing data together from siloed systems?   

Tryzens Global partners with major brands and retailers to roadmap the way to loyalty, developing customer experience strategies that are authentic to each business. 

To bridge the gap between aspiration and execution, contact Tryzens Global.