How personalization can help you build massive customer trust.

Gen Y and Z are now representing the majority of the consumer market, and they want to feel special. How can small and medium businesses build trust with them? Personalizing the customer experience can be time consuming, so it’s crucial for SMBs to use the right tools and language. But what do Personalization and Trust really mean?

Personalize*: to change or design (something) for a particular person.

Trust*: assured reliance on the character, ability, strength, or truth of someone or something.

In other words, changing or designing the experience around each customer can help you become a more reliable business. Let's dive in with Eitan Katz, CMO of Sperling Dermatology and see how personalization helped him grow his business:

“Lio Slama: In the 1 hour or 30 minutes after a customer abandons the cart, companies say “hey, I noticed you like the skincare products, so here's 20% off if you purchase in the next two hours”. Just click and boom!

Eitan Katz: Yeah, it's something that a lot of other companies also intuitively know but they don't necessarily do which is: the goal of a text message shouldn't be to purchase. It's not a great customer experience to me to get a text and then self-serve a purchase unless it's really targeted.

You want to ask the exact question that's going to get someone to be excited and interested in texting you back! For us a really good question is: “which area are you looking to treat?” If someone is looking at our stuff, it means that there's a part of their body that they're frustrated with and they want to change and so when we asked them, that's an emotional question that elicits a response so often. It's a really powerful question.

For other people, maybe if you're a t-shirt store, your question is, what kind of t-shirt do you want to buy? It's like a more specific question that elicits engagement to me. And again, if you're not doing that, then a tool like Neo is less valuable because the point of Neo is to have a conversation. So if you're just trying to get them to buy based on a trigger, there's a bunch of tools out there that will integrate with Zapier and do that. But what takes it to the next level is when you turn Neo into this advisor. The way that I explained it to the people that I just hired is that Neo has to act as an advisor. It's an advisor.

So Lululemon has this new thing now where you can speak to an advisor and they help you pick out which is the right thing for you like "I really like this shirt. Are there other shirts similar to this that maybe I should try?" or "I'm looking for pants that's good for commuting but also for warm weather" and it's like if you were in the store talking to a salesperson and they have your full attention.

To me, that's the part where Neo shines and what that means is you need to ask a question or say the thing in the text that's going to elicit a response, and that's when you start building trust and really get to the core of what they want.

And then you can sell them the product that they want and will have the highest satisfaction with. They'll come back for more. By the way, almost every conversation that I had, whether it ended in a sale or not, I said: "I'm here anytime. If you have any questions, text me back" and who knows? I promise you in a month, someone's going to text me and say: "Hey, I'm ready to buy" and that's because they feel like they're my friend now and they can text me.

Another powerful thing is the segmentation, and the triggers and the automation, but don't forget about the one-to-one, start the conversation, get them to converse with you. If you get them to converse, you're way more likely than even if you send them a discount code to me because now you're a friend, you're not a business. It's amazing.”

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If you have any questions or feedback, text Neo to (917) 451-5515 or visit www.askneo.io

Check out Sperling Dermatology here: https://www.sperlingdermatology.com

(*Merriam-Webster dictionary)