How to Personalize Your Customer’s Buying Experience – Blake Morgan, Customer Experience Futurist

As we head into 2019, it’s more important now than ever to be more thoughtful and considerate toward your individual customer and personalize their buying experience using technology. On today’s show, we speak to Blake Morgan, customer experience futurist and author of More Is More: How the Best Companies Go Farther and Work Harder to Create Knock-Your-Socks-Off Customer Experiences.

Customer experience is a huge competitive advantage according to Blake, and the idea that “more is more” is not about acquiring more stuff for your customers. It’s about being more thoughtful, and more considerate about what life is like for the individual customer. Then, in turn, doing something that makes life easier for that specific customer. That’s the name of that game.

As for small business owners who find it difficult to compete online with the big retailers, Blake says the secret sauce is your mindset. Being small is actually an advantage. You can talk to customers on an individual basis, and you have the ability to personalize that experience and do something extra for your customer. Customers today love the personalized interaction that they don’t get from larger tech companies. You have the opportunity to be nimble and responsive.

There’s a lot of talk today about digital transformation, however, taking that a step further would be transcendence. Transcendence is when you change your business model and shed your old skin overnight in order to change with the times and change with customer behavior. When you find that you do need to pivot, being small is an incredible advantage.

To increase this competitiveness further, Blake recommends the DOMORE customer experience framework which has six components:

Blake also reminds us how important it is to truly understand your customer’s experience. She explains, “If you personally wouldn’t want to go through that customer journey of the website or mobile, then, of course, we’d never want to offer that experience to someone else.”

If a customer does happen to have a bad experience with your business, there are ways to fix the relationship and right the ship. You have an opportunity to respond directly to the customer and find out what you can do to make it right. This does not go unnoticed by other people online. Once you have redeemed yourself out of a negative review, patrons will start to believe that you are trustworthy.

Blake also discusses how you can leverage AI or artificial intelligence, in order to make customers’ lives easier and better. The beauty of machine learning is its ability to plow through billions of pieces of data and then ultimately make connections among the data that a human being would never be able to.

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