Behavioral science, data science, and advanced analytics are essential to improving customer relationships in the digital age. In every interaction, customers expect good will, empowerment, and personalization. Data-driven behavioral science is the key to achieving meaningful engagement and creating customers for life.
Implementing this type of strategy can be complicated and intimidating. That doesn't have to be the case. Your organization can successfully navigate behavioral science and advanced analytics and use them to improve your customer engagement strategy. Technology can capture the knowledge of a full team of behavioral scientists and data analysts to scale your efforts.
It's important to first start with an understanding of how these technologies are changing customer engagement. You need to know your customers deeply and focus on personalization that matters.
This is where behavioral science and advanced analytics come in. Customized algorithms can be used to identify and predict key variations in customer behavior based on the way they interact with the communications they receive. That could include changing when communications are sent or using a specific communications channel (email, SMS, social media) based on the observed behavior.
This information can then be used to develop personalized and targeted strategies to empower customers. These strategies can be continuously refined based on real-time behavior. Experimentation can help validate new strategies by measuring results against proven behavioral strategies. By using science-based research, you can better predict how your customers will respond before you send your first outreach. And ultimately, you can make a greater impact with fewer outreaches. All of this leads to a better customer experience, more engagement, and a superior impression of your brand regardless of where customers are in their journeys.
Getting Started with Behavioral Science
Behavioral science can be daunting and sound expensive, particularly if you are considering building out a behavioral science program from scratch. Fortunately, there are software-as-a-service offerings that allow you access to productized behavioral science while allowing all users to benefit from the insights generated. Learnings and data from one industry, geography, or customer demographic can be applied to others to maximize impact. Consumer trend data can be used to establish well-known behavioral patterns, and all users can benefit without each user having to execute individual analytics and experiments.
This democratization of adaptive behavioral science strategies and advanced analytics techniques can help you create better engagement and outcomes with your customers. And the best part is you don't have to be a behavioral scientist or an expert in distributed systems to use such a platform.
It's crucial to understand what you are up against as you compete for your customers' attention. You're not only competing with other service providers; you're competing with every digital communication your customer receives. Static outreach will no longer allow you to engage your customers effectively.
Behavioral concepts are highly effective for driving the optimal result because they can help you tap into your customers' motivations and preferences to further personalize their experiences. However, the way we interpret and apply those insights can make or break a strategy. For example, while urgency might work for most people, it won't work for everyone. Learning what works for different personas within your customer base is key, and moving away from what works for most can exponentially improve the effectiveness of your engagement strategy and overall customer experience.
While you might achieve a great result with a customer by using a particular concept, that concept might not always be effective. Changing circumstances and evolving motivations are two of the many factors that can change the way customers behave. That's why it's important to continuously iterate on your outreach strategy based on behavior.
Behavioral science and analytics have a reputation for being complex and beyond the reach of most enterprises. Fortunately, a new generation of solutions and technologies are demystifying the process and making it easier for companies to glean insights from behavioral science and analytics. In fact, you can use behavioral science to improve your customer engagement strategy without needing a full team of deeply technical data analysts. Just be sure to find a solution that uses behavioral science in an impactful way that aligns with your values and then follow the best industry best practices laid out above. These steps will empower you to create opportunities to improve customer relationships across the entire customer lifecycle and increase the odds of creating customers for life.
Corey Scobie is chief technology officer of Symend. He is a software expert with more than 25 years of global experience with top enterprise technologies and Fortune 500 companies.