By: Jesse Cryderman

The theme song of the long-running sitcom Cheers had a prescient hook that should be absorbed by everyone working in telecom today: “You wanna be where everybody knows your name.”

Customers want to feel special. They want services that meet their specific needs, bills they can understand and personalized customer care. When you envision your customers, do you see them as unique users or simply members of a segment? Similarly, when they look in the mirror, do you think they see themselves as generic buckets or as noteworthy individuals? And, last but not least, are your call centers capable of putting the “custom” in customer support?

These questions are at the heart of a transformation in perspective that is essential to potent customer experience management (CEM). Differentiating your company in a crowded, highly competitive market means delivering services and experiences that connect at the core of the customer. To attract new customers, lower churn, improve loyalty, boost average revenue per user (ARPU), and grow revenue in general, communications service providers (CSPs) must embrace personalization as a foundational element of their CEM strategy.

Today the customer’s presence — as well as every touchpoint, from presales and activation to billing and support — can and should be personalized. Customers themselves have voiced their preference for greater personalization, and market analysts agree that if CSPs hope to stay relevant in the coming decade, they must move beyond basic levels of customization in order to devise, offer, deliver, and support truly unique service packages.

Personalization 2.0

Four words summarize the essence of personalization: Stop selling to buckets. Customers may share numerous qualities, but they most certainly don’t think of themselves as clones. While segmentation is traditionally a good tool for marketing, it’s bad for CEM in these rapidly changing times. Consider these examples outside of telecom:

• Microsoft, once relegated to dork status by Apple’s “I’m a Mac” ads, has wholly embraced personalization in its campaign for the Windows Phone 8 platform, using the tag line “Reinvented around you.” Numerous billboards showcase different users alongside text like “Meet Jessica, multi-tasking mom” or “Meet Gwen, music and fashion lover.”

• Amazon’s exemplary use of personalization to recommend products, engage with the customer, reduce order time, and auto-populate commonly used fields has resulted in explosive growth.

• A wide range of companies, from TripAdvisor and Airbnb to CNN and Red Bull, effectively use Facebook as a personalization tool for their user bases.

• Compared to the scrolling grid associated with traditional cable television, Netflix has made browsing personal. At the International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) this year the company unveiled personalized profiles.