Placing a strong emphasis on customer experience is a growing priority. As the need to engage customers with more relevant, meaningful and authentic customer experiences rises, many brands and organizations are claiming to champion a wide range of such personalized strategies. However, a new Munich-based study suggests that most brands are failing to meet consumer expectations on this front.
In fact, according to hybris, even though 91% of brands claim to prioritize personalized customer experiences, only 16% are actually able to deliver the nuances and contextualized experiences that consumers crave.
hybris, an SAP company that provides omni-channel and real-time customer engagement solutions, revealed these results in a new report titled, “The Contextual Marketing Imperative: the evolution of personalization from push messaging to one-to-one personal customer experiences,” which illuminated how significantly many brands are falling short in this regard.
After surveying 1,200 consumers and 200 marketing professionals across Europe, the Middle East and Africa and beyond, hybris discovered a looming disparity between consumers’ expectations of personalized customer experiences and what marketers are actually delivering.
This should be a major concern for brands as attracting the time, attention, and share of wallet is becoming increasingly difficult.
“Consumers today are bombarded with more marketing messages across more channels than ever before, and the vast majority of these communications are irrelevant,” said Charles Nicholls, SVP Product Strategy, Marketing Solutions at SAP hybris. “For this reason, it’s paramount that organizations are able to break through the noise and engage with customers on a one-to-one basis. To make this a reality, marketers must go beyond traditional personalization and towards contextualization by leveraging real-time signals of customer intent at the moment when the customer chooses to interact with the brand.”
The hybris study also uncovered a number of additional insights including:
• 66% of marketers rate their efforts at personalization as “excellent,” but only 31% of consumers felt that these same efforts were consistent and personalized
• 40% of consumers say most promotions don’t deliver anything of interest
• 44% of consumers say they receive too many offers and promotions
• 37% percent of consumers say they delete most email offers and promotions without reading them
• Among those consumers reporting less-than-satisfactory personalized experiences, 61% said they were “much less likely” to take advantage of future offers