Understanding Personalization at Scale to Meet Customer Expectations
Providing seamless, personalized user experiences is a requirement for all companies. Customer expectations are set by the last great experience they had, requiring brands to continuously assess and evolve how they are approaching personalization. These personalized experiences reflect a business’s agility, efficiency, and dedication to its customers.
Simply put, getting personalization right is critical.
However, companies are facing multiple challenges in pursuing personalization, including:
- Cookie deprecation reducing the ability to directly identify, target, and track customers
- Privacy & regulation making it more difficult to establish a unified view across a customer’s journey
- Data proliferation and fragmentation caused by the rapid growth in systems and data leading to hurdles in creating a unified view of a company’s customers across channels and devices
- Poor orchestration and out-of-context user experience due to disjointed systems, data silos, and fragmented data
- Walled gardens that limit a brand’s ability to have a holistic representation of their users
- Rapid technology growth and an unwieldy, unfolding MarTech landscape with thousands of platforms providing capabilities across data collection, analytics, identity management, and more
- Poor experience design and lack of insight into intentional/unintentional outcomes of personalization
By focusing on data, intelligence, design, orchestration, and activation, companies can overcome these challenges to deliver meaningful user experiences.
Data
It has become increasingly difficult for companies across industries to create a holistic view of their consumers because of fragmented customer data across multiple systems and data silos, coupled with cookie deprecation and an ever-evolving privacy and regulation landscape. Internal identity resolution is one of the most important marketing activities because it allows companies to reconcile, identify, and de-dupe customers, resulting in a 360-degree view of their customers.
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Building these capabilities with existing tools like customer data platforms (CDPs) and identity access management (IAM) solutions can accelerate internal identity resolution time-to-value. Enrichment partners that offer data collaboration platforms and domain name system (DNS) services can also enhance customer identity resolution by providing pseudonymized people-based identity frameworks, allowing enterprises to join clean rooms with their first-party identities. This then helps all participants to create a more robust view of known and unknown customers. What’s more, by engaging with clean rooms, companies can have a clearer understanding of the impact of their personalization by gaining access to anonymized third-party data, enabling organizations to target, re-target, model, and analyze performance to make informed decisions.
Together, clean rooms and identity resolution allow companies to truly understand their customers by enabling more accurate personalization delivery and measurement.
Intelligence
Insights and predictive analytics are key to driving personalized user experiences. Overlaying data analysis with user research helps to fundamentally understand customer journeys, experiences, and needs. Companies are then able to identify areas of improvement for their user experience and provide personalization where it matters most.
Harnessing predictive analytics allows companies to create propensity scores, predict user churn, provide recommendations, and build customer segments and look-a-likes. Many CDPs provide pre-built AI/ML capabilities for these common use cases enabling companies to quickly benefit from predictive analytics. Ultimately, this empowers businesses to identify changing behaviors, anticipate shifts in customers’ needs, and preempt any attrition by providing personalized and preferred experiences to their customers.
Measuring the success of personalization is critical to ensure that what the company is optimizing against does not inadvertently negatively impact customers’ experiences. This requires companies to carefully define their KPIs and identify and understand the levers that drive the movement of the KPIs they are tracking.
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Design
Driving improvements to user experience with a test-and-learn design approach ensures that user experiences are constantly iterated and enhanced as users’ behaviors and expectations evolve. User-centric experience design ensures that the user experiences a company creates resonate with their customers. By putting the customer first and identifying customer pain points and needs ensures that the right problems are defined. All of this cannot be achieved without the right team in place though. Cross-functional teams with experts in design, research, UI/UX, MarTech, and data and analytics are essential to create user experiences, drive cross-organizational, and accelerate problem-solving.
Orchestration & Activation
Personalization requires orchestration across internal and external systems. Data must be continually ingested, stitched, and shaped to be utilized in downstream predictive analytics and dashboards underpinning a company’s personalization systems. These personalization systems must then integrate with activation channels and partners who provide solutions to deliver personalization, enabling companies to deliver user experiences. Orchestration of these processes is critical to ensure that the right experiences are delivered to consumers. CDPs enable enterprises to easily manage this process. CDPs integrate with upstream data sources to create unified customer profiles and provide companies with the ability to create segments, push real-time activations, and orchestrate customer journeys to provide omnichannel contextual user experiences.
Today’s consumers expect heightened, digital, personalized experiences in every facet of their lives—especially when interacting with brands. That’s why companies across industries must enhance their CX strategies, doubling down on data, intelligence, design, orchestration, and activation to deliver meaningful personalized user experiences.
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