How to Improve Your Personalised Search & Customer Experiences

Imagine you are in a store, a huuuge one, and you are trying to find what you are looking for. You begin your search and slowly get past many things that don’t catch your eye. There are too many options, and you get slightly overwhelmed. You think you are wasting your time and don’t think well about your experience. So, you ask one of the employees to help you find what you’re looking for and expect that they get what you exactly need and walk you through the rest of the experience. What a relief, right?

Well, personalised search is better than that. And we will talk about its benefits and how to optimise it and create better customer experiences.

Key Takeaways

Personalised search brings higher revenue, optimised customer experience, better conversion rates and customer lifetime value.

Customer data can be used and analysed to understand your customers better and provide better personalised experiences.

Tailoring your website and customer service to each customer is essential to customer engagement and a good conversion rate.

What is Personalised Search?

Personalised search is the set of results tailored to each searcher’s data, including their location, online behaviours, purchase and search history, and any information available. It prevents visitors from going to another website and increases the possibility of them leaving an eCommerce site having bought something.

What are the Benefits of Personalised Search?

Back to the store example: Such a convenient shopping experience to have a personal assistant by your side, right? It’s the number one benefit of personalised search. That means higher revenue, improved customer engagement, better conversion rates and customer lifetime value.

How to Improve Personalised Search?

Use Customer Data to Improve the Customer Experience

Data is essential to personalisation and a good customer experience. Customer data shows you what kind of experiences your customers have. Any information can be used and analysed to understand your customers better—from their interests to their shopping habits, the customer journeys and what kind of experience they previously had. That way, you can optimise your search and customise it to your visitors’ unique needs.

Understand What Your Customers Want

You should take careful note of your customers’ feedback and take action accordingly. The way to do that is to give an ear to their feedback while analysing their purchase and search behaviour and their customer personas.

Use Customer Data to Improve Search Relevance

After analysing the said data, you’ll have an insight into your customers’ wants. Use that insight to improve your search and show relevant recommendations, both in the search box and the search results page.

Offer a Personalised Experience

After all, personalisation is the key that we are looking for. All we’ve discussed is possible through personalising content and recommendations based on each customer’s unique interests and shopping habits.

Tools and Resources for Personalised Search

Google Search Console

This tool helps you see how many times your site was seen or clicked and its position on Google Search. It alerts you when an issue on your website needs to be fixed. It also comes with free training videos about how to increase your site’s traffic and how to optimise it.

Google Analytics

It is a set of tools that gives you in-detail analysis of your site. Collecting the data from your site and apps, and creating a report for you, it helps you have a better understanding of your business and make more grounded future decisions.

Segmentify

Segmentify provides the most relevant and accurate search results via search analytics as it paints a clear picture of customer search behaviour and intent. It allows customising search box and search page results with the help of rule-based boosting..

And with Segmentify Analytics, have deeper insight into your website and see real-time data of your products, like how many times they have been clicked, added to the cart etc. This insight will help you improve your search box and search page personalisation, resulting in a higher conversion due to the most relevant results.

Watch: How Segmentify Solved Sephora’s Complex Searchandising Needs

Bing Webmaster Tools

They focus on increasing the traffic to your site with its SEO tools and providing in-detail reports with in-depth information about your website, such as what attracted the customers to it and what they are looking for.

Yandex Metrica

It is a versatile data analysis tool that gives you in-detail information about your target audience and visitors and analyses visitor behaviour. You can have a performance analysis with real-time data.

How to Improve Customer Experiences?

Use Customer Data

We already talked about customer data and its importance. You need to know your customers and understand their needs based on their personal data, including gender, location, age etc. Utilise all this information to create better customer experiences and decide on the changes you need to make or map out a new strategy for customer engagement.

Understand Customer Journeys

Keep track of what they are searching for and which products they are looking at the most, they are adding to the cart and finally purchasing or leaving in the cart.

Personalise the Experience

76% of customers prefer businesses that provide personalised experiences. So, tailoring your website and customer service to each customer is essential to engaging customers and encouraging them to repurchase.

Create relevant and personalised customer experiences across all channels from the beginning of the first visit until after the check-out process.

Tools and Resources for Improving Customer Experiences

UX Research Tools

Building a strategy and working for customer experience is necessary. Yet, without doing research, your basis won’t be as strong. You need to know your customer’s needs and expectations to create relevant and personalised customer experiences. UX research tools are great helpers and provide you with a deeper insight into the situation of your user experience so that you can have a solid foundation on which to base your work.

Customer Experience Platforms

These platforms help businesses understand customer journeys. Here are a few things you need to look for in CX platforms:

Multiple survey contact methods
Customisable templates
Customer journey mapping
Feedback segmentation and analysis
APIs and integrations

User Testing Tools

These tools help you evaluate the experiences users have with a product and identify possible problems with the experience and product.

Wrapping Up

Businesses that deliver personalised customer experiences have stood out from their competitors for a while now. In fact, the ones that don’t provide personalised experiences fall short of meeting customer expectations. Personalising search and customer journey is key to a satisfied customer, while data evaluation is necessary to provide relevant search results and optimise the customer experience.

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