Less Is More: 3 Ways Contextual Notifications Improve CX
Notification overload: it’s happening. Brands are sending the same message, multiple times, through email, text, voice and social media. They’re trying to move consumers along in their journeys, whether it’s nudging them to complete their online account registrations or reminding them to pick up an item they ordered to a store location.
When customer journeys aren’t progressing at a satisfactory rate, however, the instinct is often to send more notifications—which brands are definitely doing. We saw a 950% YOY jump in SMS notifications that businesses sent to consumers in 2021, and a 270% increase in voice notifications over the same period. That’s how much more competition is out there for consumers’ attention.
So now the question is, how do you break through all that noise to not just capture consumers’ attention with your messaging, but get them to act on it? Answer: By prioritizing message quality over quantity .
But by message quality, we don’t just mean how well-crafted the message content is, but also its timing, channel and relevance . It doesn’t matter how grabby a promotional email’s subject line is if the promotion itself isn’t appealing to the customer, or comes at a time they can’t use it, or they don’t even read their emails. What we mean is proactive, predictive and personalized messaging that generates more customer engagement on a per-notification basis.
Here are three things a contextual notifications strategy does when it cuts through the notification noise, and examples of how.
1. Flip Customer Frustration to Appreciation
Seventy-six percent of consumers get frustrated when they receive offers that are irrelevant to them. Batch-and-blast messaging is turning off customers and racking up unsubscribes. But contextual notifications that are driven by customer behavioral data should generate brand ambassadors instead of more noise.
Track Customer Activity Type and Recency
This is how brands avoid sending the right message at the wrong time. If a cable broadband customer is experiencing a service outage, they’ll be frustrated to get a text from their provider trying to upsell them on a new TV/internet bundle (even if it’s a terrific deal for them). Brands need the ability to automate a suspension on certain communications when customers enter certain journeys, activities, account statuses, etc. In the case of the cable broadband company, the brand could send the customer real-time updates on their service outage getting resolved (which they’ll appreciate) and then resume the promos once it is (which they should, at that point, appreciate too).