Unlike their counterparts from a decade (or just a few years) ago, today’s consumers expect everything to be immediately available, always within reach, and reflective of their unique needs—wherever, whenever. Delay is a major turn-off, and it’s doubly risky when every other brand is investing heavily in the latest solutions to accelerate the speed at which they can engage and understand their customers.

Defining the New Paradigm

“Real time” often gets mistaken for a need for SPEED—an incessant, rapid-fire onslaught of messages, offers, and notifications to the target audience at every possible opportunity. That is far from the truth.

Real-time customer engagement simply means delivering the interactions, content, and experiences most relevant to the evolving needs of the individual customer—engaging them at just time and place, every time. In the context of data-driven engagement, the brand needs to continually collate data on the customer, unify it into a singular profile, and tailor their experience based on past interactions and real-time behavior.

Instead of pure speed, real-time customer engagement represents personalization at greater speed, with a sharper focus, and across the diverse touchpoints traversed by the customer—online and offline.

How to Make It Happen

Making the transition to real time will require throughout planning, re/up-skilling of your teams, and some serious commitment to reinventing your tech stack.

While a singular focus on speed is a reductive characterization of real-time customer engagement, it is nevertheless imperative that you minimize lags in customer experiences. This can happen through improvements in data processing speed and a unified data foundation, one that obviates the need to manually sort through siloed channels and systems to execute contextual engagement repeatedly.

Equally critical is a mechanism or technology in place that can recognize the wide array of signals and behaviors from the customer and initiate individually relevant, contextually appropriate responses, one that can continue the current journey, speed up conversion, and/or retain a returning client. You need to be able to decide when, where, and how to respond to a customer—the next step in their experience, the offer that will pique their interest, the tailored content that will keep them returning for more.

And all of it needs to happen at scale.

Whether you’re a small or medium-sized business giving the real-time thing a try, or an established enterprise looking to implement a CX transformation, Resulticks has the technologies you need to make that evolution more streamlined. From IT-independent, multichannel trigger campaigns to cross-subsidiary personalization, our turnkey solutions have enabled brands across the world to give their customer engagement efforts a big data-driven, AI-powered upgrade—with top-line achievements to prove their impact.