Why digital body language is so much more than personalization

With customer experience set to overtake price as the key brand differentiator across both B2C and B2B by 2020, brands must exceed their customers’ expectations and provide an increasingly streamlined, and memorable, experience for visitors to their stores, sites and apps.

Personalization offers a reasonable starting point, but cannot be the be-all and end-all of a successful customer experience, as it relies almost exclusively on behaviors which took place in the past. Instead of looking at what customers did previously, brands must be much more aware of what their customers are doing now – examining the demands and behaviors that they exhibit as they interact with a site.

Our experiences are influenced by many factors when browsing online and on the move, including our moods, expectations and reasons for browsing in the first place. Personalization can be useful in the short term, and is an easy solution, but is not dynamic enough to maintain a successful CX strategy. A customer may have their needs met the first time they visit a website or app, but could require a completely different experience upon visiting a week later, and may be left disappointed if the brand fails to adjust quickly enough to this new expectation.

To keep up with this challenge, brands much draw upon complex digital body language to ensure their growth remains steady in competitive industries. Digital body language is a combination of all the digital gestures and micro-signals made by customers, including mouse moves, scrolls and taps – ideal for drawing patterns and anomalies to understand behaviour and mindset. These patterns help brands move beyond simple personalization to become more knowledgeable and adaptive, in turn preventing their customer experience from becoming stagnant.

Rich data from experience analytics, combining data and cognitive intelligence, can be used to quantify customer experience at multiple touchpoints, whether online, in a mobile browser or via an app. Useful visualization tools help to break down changes in mindset over time, allowing brands to maintain a dynamic approach and keep up with important changes that personalization-centric brands would be missing out on.

By analyzing a customer’s digital body language, brands can start to think of experience as a form of currency. The better the experience, the higher the chance of customers making a purchase – a correlation that can, and should, be built upon to drive customer loyalty in the long term.

Clicktale was acquired by Contentsquare in 2019. Since then, tools and features mentioned in this blog may have evolved. Learn more about our Digital Experience Analytics Platform.