More and more coworking spaces are popping up all over the states, even internationally. People and businesses enjoy coworking spaces' flexibility, convenience, and affordability. Not to mention the chance to network and build relationships with other professionals.
However, because coworking spaces are growing in popularity, it’s important to prioritize differentiating your space from the competition in your area if you want to thrive. Personalizing the customer experience is one of the best ways to do this.
This article will offer tips for personalizing the customer experience for your coworking space. But first, let’s briefly cover how personalization benefits the customer experience and your business.
How Personalization Benefits the Customer Experience and Fuels Success
People are getting away from doing business with a company just for the sake of doing business.
According to HubSpot, “66% of customers expect companies to understand their needs.
So it seems they’re holding out for businesses that offer exceptional customer experiences tailored to who they are.
Personalized experiences give customers that “wow” factor. There’s just something about doing business with a company that feels like it was made for you. It enhances the customer experience and makes you want to come back.
A personalized customer experience helps you build customer loyalty. This is because, as mentioned above, people are drawn to businesses and brands that feel like they were made for them.
So, when they find them, they’re more likely to stick with them. And repeat purchases, high engagement, and word-of-mouth marketing follow. As a result, your custom retention rates and profitability will go up, and your churn rates down.
With these benefits in mind, you’re probably wondering what the first step is in offering a more personalized coworking experience.
1. Start With Marketing
A personalized coworking experience must start before the customer visits your actual space. The way you market your coworking space should be personalized, too, so it’s a cohesive experience.
1. Analyze your data
You can’t personalize anything if you don’t know the people you’re personalizing things for. Going with what you think your customers will like almost guarantees your personalization efforts won’t work. Everything you do will be hit-and-miss.
If you learn more about who your customers are and what they want, you can create a genuine, personalized experience for them that results in loyalty and continued conversions.
Data analytics is the best pathway to personalizing your customers’ experience. First, review all of the data you have on your customers from every marketing channel. Next, dig into demographic, psychographic, and behavioral data that reveal their identity and the marketing content they’re attracted to. Then, dive into data that indicate what they’re looking for in a coworking experience.
If you need to enlist the help of a data specialist to get a complete picture of your customers and best use data for marketing personalization, do it.
2. Segment your customer base
Not all your customers will like the same thing, whether in your marketing or your coworking space. So, segmenting your customers based on similarities will help you tailor your marketing and coworking space to as many people as possible.
Common criteria to use to segment your audience are:
- Where they’re located
- Psychographic information like personality traits, values, and lifestyle
- The channels they use to interact with your business
- Their behaviors, like purchase and search intent
- The size of the group
- Demographic information
Breaking your customer base down into smaller groups makes it easier to create marketing content they can resonate with.
3. Revisit your content
Once you learn more about your customers and segment them, it’s a good idea to revisit your marketing content. How can you better your content so that it feels more personalized to your customers while also persuading them to become a member of your coworking space?
Review each marketing channel’s content and gauge whether it meets your goals. Use data to see what content gets the most engagement and prompts the most conversions. Then, make adjustments to content that isn’t supporting your personalization goals.
4. Rely on digitalization
Of course, traditional marketing methods can be helpful. But at the end of the day, relying on digitalization is critical in your attempts to personalize your marketing. This is because digitalization makes information, markets, work, education, and services accessible to everyone, regardless of their ability, location, or socioeconomic status.
Your personalized marketing messages can reach many more people through digital marketing. So, rely on it and online spaces to ensure your marketing resonates with most, if not all, of your target audience.
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2. Revamp the Customer Journey
Aside from marketing, you’ll want to ensure the customer journey is personalized. Not only should the customer journey be tailored to the person in it, but the process of becoming a member of your coworking space should also be seamless.
Study how your customers go from being introduced to your coworking space to becoming members to sustaining that membership long-term. Be sure to look at how various customer segments engage in the customer journey.
Then, identify friction points as well as points when personalization can be better. Work on both to ensure the customer journey is customized and seamless for a diverse group.
3. Study Your Competition
In addition to studying your customers, you’ll want to study your competition. Successful coworking spaces in your area are likely to lean on personalization in some way. So, it’s an excellent opportunity to learn from what they’re doing.
Visit your neighboring coworking spaces. Have chats with owners and develop genuine relationships with them. You can also do online research and learn about their personalization efforts.
4. Ask for Customer Feedback
Customer feedback is integral to creating a more personalized coworking experience. Your members can tell you precisely what they want and need for a tailored experience.
On one hand, asking for feedback is easy. On the other hand, getting well-thought-out, genuine responses from customers is much more complex. So, you must approach feedback with a strategy.
Determine how you want to collect feedback, whether through surveys, one-to-one emails, polls, or another avenue. After that, make sure the questions you’re asking are important enough to your customers for them to answer and leverage an effective customer feedback platform for it. And finally, offer incentives for feedback, like discounts on monthly membership fees or access to exclusive amenities.
And implement it
Collecting feedback doesn’t mean much if you don’t use it. Likewise, personalizing your coworking experience to the satisfaction of your customers won’t happen either.
Make sure you’re implementing the suggestions your customers offer. Of course, you won’t be able to do everything they ask or implement all their feedback simultaneously. But you can keep track of their feedback, prioritize it by importance, and work to implement each suggestion individually.
5. Provide What Customers Keep Asking For
In collecting customer feedback, you’ll learn a lot about what they want inside your coworking space. And you’ll see that some suggestions keep coming up in conversation, no matter who you’re talking with.
If this is happening, it’s a clear indicator that your customers want these things. So, provide them. Give your customers what they keep asking for. Providing the amenities, culture, service, and access they’re asking for keeps you aligned with their vision for a personalized coworking experience.
Whether it’s childcare, 24/7 hours, or networking events, see what you can do to ensure your customers have what they want.
6. Ensure Every New Member Gets a Warm Welcome
What do you do once someone becomes a member of your coworking space? Send them an email with an access code and rules, and say good luck. We hope not. Sign-up and someone’s first visit to your coworking space is a massive personalization opportunity.
A welcome email isn’t a bad idea. However, a much better idea is to make it a series instead of a single email and tailor it to what you’ve learned about the person. Then, make it memorable when they come in for the first time. Give them a tour of your facility, merch, and supplies, and introduce them to some of the other members.
Get creative when it comes to the welcome experience.
7. Encourage Customers to Personalize Their Spaces
You can personalize the customer experience even more by encouraging customers to bring things that make the space feel like home.
Of course, you’ll need rules, as members must clean up after every visit. In addition, there will need to be limits on what they can bring. Still, being able to decorate their spaces in some capacity will help your personalization efforts.
Make sure that you determine clear guidelines around customers personalizing their spaces. Then, provide every member with a copy of these guidelines and ensure they know who to contact for questions and concerns.
8. Bring More Employees on Board
Personalizing your coworking space is a team job. There are so many layers to it that it would be naive to think you can do it all on your own. So, if it’s financially feasible, consider bringing more employees on board to help with your efforts.
Determine where you could use the most help, whether with marketing, community management, event coordination, or another department. Once you know where you need assistance, create detailed job listings that emphasize the need for help with personalization.
Then, you can move forward with interviewing and selecting the best candidates for the job.
Personalization is the answer if you’re hoping to boost the success of your coworking space. Tailoring your space and marketing to your customers will inspire them to be loyal, improving customer retention and profitability. Use the tips above to get started.
The article was written by Sam Bowman. Sam writes about people, tech, wellness, and how they merge. Before becoming a freelance writer, Sam was employed in coworking spaces and has plenty of behind-the-scenes experience. He enjoys getting to utilize the internet for community without actually having to leave his house. In his spare time, he likes running, reading, and combining the two in a run to his local bookstore.
