Section: Blog

Customer Cultivation in a Customer-Centric Organization

Written by Stewart Balanchine | Aug 18, 2021 8:03:32 AM

More and more companies these days use customer-centric models to increase their sales and retain customers. They hope their efforts will improve their customer cultivation efforts. As such, these organization developed their operations around what their customers need to progress in the buyer's journey. 

Customer Cultivation is achieved with AI solutions for websites, especially eCommerce and retail sites. This is a crucial step in the so-called Smart Selling, where a business uses advanced technology to improve sales, marketing communications, and overall how customers engage with the brand's communications.

Below, you can read more about customer cultivation and one of the AI-powered tactics to make your clients more engaged: personalization and customization.

Cultivating Customers through Personalization and Customization in eCommerce

Customer behavior analysis served as the gold standard for lead generation and conversion over the past year. Companies hope the process will:

  • Break customers into segments
  • Help them understand their behaviors
  • Generate automated personalized content to enforce predictable growth

But what if you could become even more customer-centric?

Customer-Centric Meaning and Use in Customer Cultivation

A customer cultivation approach promotes long-term customer relationships to establish a core customer base. Its core understanding is that no solution is truly one-size-fits-all. Under this model, your customers determine the value of your products. As a result, they can change based on your customer’s needs and desires.

Companies who take a customer-centric approach to customer cultivation understand that different customers value their products or service differently. As such, they must identify their core customers or the ones who value their product the most.

Therefore, all customer-centric organizations focus on their core customers to save time and money. Fortunately, they can use AI personalization tools to attract, cultivate, and retain these customers. If done right, these core customers will do much of your marketing for you. 

Attract Customers with Personalized Content

You will find over a million articles out there about how to attract customers. But, what about attracting the right customers? Sure, you could spend time and money marketing to anyone under the sun. However, you would be wasting that time and money if those potential customers don’t convert.

Use customer-centric methods

Instead, you can focus your time and money on attracting your core customers. These customers see the most value in your product. As a result, they will not only convert but may even advertise for you. 

To attract these customers, your marketing strategies must focus on where they spend their time. Meet them where they are in the most organic way possible.

For example:

  • For college students, you can grab a booth at college events. You can also advertise on popular social media channels.
  • For young professionals, you can sponsor a networking event or advertise on LinkedIn.

Attracting a core customer rather than just any customer will give you more success in the cultivation step.

Cultivate Customers Using Personalization Statistics

This is the core of any customer cultivation process.

While traditional approaches emphasized engagement and loyalty, customer-centric cultivation requires hyper-personalization as well. It demands that you guide your customers into your core customer base.

Because of this, you must focus on the customers who identify with your company's value on a deeper level. It is these customers who will become your repeat customers, returning to you time after time. 

Profiling and personalization in eCommerce take time to develop

The cultivation step involves developing deep, emotional connections with your customers through hyper-personalization. It requires:

  • Checking in with them throughout the product’s lifecycle.
  • Showing that you still care about them even without another sale.

Ultimately, this personalized content will lead to another sale. It will come from either them or from someone in their network.

However, it will take time to properly develop this level of hyper-personalization. This is because you must learn what makes your customer tick. It requires setting up AI personalization tools to process customer behavior then acting on the results. 

For instance, you must adjust to their ever-changing evaluation of your product, which can change as your customers change. Retail website personalization statistics monitoring tools can help, but it may require watching your customers for months or even years before you see any noticeable changes. 

For example, phones started out as communication tools. They are now our calendar, our entertainment, and our source of information.

Retain Customers by Designing Personalized User Experiences in eCommerce

No one wants to feel like a number. This is the most important thing to remember when trying to retain customers using a customer-centric customer cultivation approach.

The customer-centric approach focuses on increasing sales through retention. If a customer feels connected with the company and its products, they are more likely to return to purchase again. They may also recommend the company to others in their social or professional circles.

Develop a Customer-Centric Mindset with Personalized Content

You can develop this connection with a consultative rather than sales-based approach. This might include using personalized content such as:

  • FAQ page that can solve a customer’s solution with a simple search
  • Automated messaging based on customer behaviors
  • Communication via social media.

Never underestimate the power of connecting on social media when developing a customer-centric strategy. Customers love companies that are full of real people who are listening to them.

You can do this by showing appreciation towards core customers who respond to your social media posts. It can be a simple thank you, a gift, a reward, or a digital badge. If you go the extra mile for your customers, they would do likewise for you. 

However, you must do it sparingly. Overdoing company-specific discounts and rewards may convince customers that you only care about sales.

Instead, use personalization machine learning tools to know what your customers really value, and modify your offerings accordingly. For instance, try featuring them in case studies or re-sharing their social media posts. 

Using Website Personalization to Become Customer-Centric

There are numerous ways to sell smarter and scale your business, but they all center around providing personalized content. That includes offering your customers some sort of website personalization experience. 

What is Website Personalization?

The days of gimmicks and hard sales pushes are coming to a close. Customers don’t want the “latest and greatest” just because you say so. In the world of social media, customers want to know the products or services their friends, coworkers, or favorite icons use.

Therefore, the best marketing strategies focus on personal connections and personalized content. However, they must be true, honest connections. You can easily do it with a customer-centric approach to customer cultivation.

The goal here is to identify how you can best serve your core customers using personalization and customization. You can personalize your customer’s experience on your website by using their name, displaying relevant content, or offering product suggestions.

You can also customize the design of your website based on your interests. Allowing customers to personalize their experience is a crucial step for a customer centric-organization and to achieve a higher engagement rate.

Using Artificial Intelligence in Customer-centric Organizations

Properly constructed website personalization utilizes AI-powered systems to develop personalized recommendations and other unique user experiences. 

These artificial intelligence systems use machine learning techniques to draw valuable insights from customer data, personalization statistics, and web page bounce rates. They have become the key customer service standard for any customer-centric organization. 

The use of AI in e-commerce and retail websites is a very efficient and intelligent way of customer cultivation. If you want to take your company to the next level, you might want to learn how to become a data-driven organization.

These companies use AI to automate such things as:

  • Data consolidation and basic trend analyses
  • Recording and transcribing meeting minutes
  • Coordinating schedules and product launches
  • Monitoring customer activity and responses
  • Optimizing inventory levels and sales forecasts

While AI requires a lot of data to deliver results, a good customer-centric organization already has the appropriate data collection and management infrastructure in place. This is because you collect this data with every interaction you have with your customers. 

Leverage Artificial Intelligence to Achieve Website Personalization

The heart of website personalization is using AI-powered customer data processing to develop personalized user experiences. AI systems can determine what factors and elements impact customer behavior. They can then generate personalized content through real-time, rules-based algorithms. 

This content can be:

  • Personalized recommendations
  • Self-service customer support
  • Custom products and offers
  • Personal landing pages
  • And much, much more

AI tools can even let you anticipate the needs of your customers. Through this unprecedented insight, you can provide the right marketing prescriptions and messages at the right time.

Become a Customer-Centric Organization Today!

If your company is ready to become a customer-centric organization and start cultivating customers today, visit our "why Cetrix?" page. You can also contact us at info@cetrixcloudservices.com. We look forward to hearing from you!