Building a direct relationship between brand and consumer is essential, according to various studies, but the link can have a different depth. We have been talking about “customer intimacy”, or rather how to gain confidence with the consumer, for many years but today it is really possible. This is because the number of contact points between consumer and brand has increased, but, above all, technological tools are increasingly powerful.
By customer intimacy we mean the marketing strategy aimed at establishing the most powerful connection between brand and consumer. This means, in particular, basing the relationship on personalisation, sharing clear and indissoluble values and creating truly valuable interaction experiences.
By entering (more) confidence, brands acquire greater knowledge of their customers, thanks to a greater number of data to be processed to satisfy personalized desires and expectations. And it’s already well documented that companies that build a deep bond with their customers, forge a lasting relationship and achieve a high level of loyalty, which automatically leads to concrete results for the business.
On the other hand, the forecasts are very clear. By 2026, Gen Z will account for the largest share of consumers in the United States. And this new generation, the analyzes always maintain, is asking brands to be able to “read their minds” and to offer increasingly personalized and customizable experiences.
What it takes to achieve customer intimacy
Receiving a message, and perhaps a discount voucher, on your birthday, having a personalized interface available or establishing a conversation with customer service in which the brand demonstrates that it knows us thoroughly are the simplest examples of customer intimacy.
Discovering what matters most to each customer, hitting their emotions and offering a personalized experience at every interaction is a challenge that can only be overcome with the use of adequate platforms, such as Salesforce’s Customer Data Platform, and Intelligence algorithms Generative artificial. And it couldn’t be otherwise, given that it is unthinkable to build a personal interaction between a corporate resource and each customer. For this reason, today a technology that has never shown itself to be so ready comes to our aid, enabling automatic processes, personalized “intelligent” communications and making itself proactive, representing a very useful support also in the creative phase.
At first glance, a customer intimacy strategy can be complex to implement but, on the other hand, what you are building is a relationship that will bring great results in the long run. Because the most solid relationships are long-standing ones and are built day after day.
The technological starting point is a CDP (Customer Data Platform), i.e. a platform capable of aggregating customer data collected by the various business applications on the various interaction channels. Whether it’s a visit to a physical store or a comment left on the brand’s social page, each data becomes invaluable information for the company, if processed by a CDP.
A CDP is able to generate useful information and suggestions to grow the bond with the consumer, sharing them through specific matching models and exploiting Artificial Intelligence. AI algorithms, in particular machine learning, are useful in the predictive phase of possible activities, but they also provide fundamental help in process automation, freeing corporate resources from low-level operations.
Furthermore, a quality CDP is able to propose reports and analyses, with operational suggestions on what to do, which differ according to the division that requests them. Because the marketing, the commercial division, the technicians who take care of the ecommerce site or the customer service team often speak different languages.
In the latest versions of their own solutions Salesforce it also introduced generative Artificial Intelligence. This is an important evolution that adds the ability to autonomously create valuable content for interaction with customers to intelligent data analysis. With a Consumer Data Platform well configured by Salesforce partners and with generative Artificial Intelligence features, not only are company resources freed from long and repetitive operational activities, but they can also count on valuable content that minimizes human intervention.
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