Personalization at Scale

By Raymond Chan

Customer expectations are higher than ever in their digital experience. Accelerating growth through personalized customer engagement is ultimately good for your bottom line. To win customer attention and loyalty, you need to know how to scale their digital experience in your organization. However, most organizations struggle to transform and achieve their full potential when customers are interacting through more channels and data is coming in from more sources.

McKinsey & Co., the global management-consulting firm’s research shows that personalization, fully implemented at scale, can unlock 10 to 20 percent more efficient marketing and greater cost savings, as well as a 10 to 30 percent uplift in revenue and retention with a long-term positive effect on customer satisfaction. Therefore, they defined a strategy to their clients: a path to combine both practices and technologies for the deliberation of the personalized customer experience. Its main components are as follows...

• Start with what you have. Naturally people would strive for the full customer-data platform. However, companies should not wait for perfection. The team can start personalized cross-selling with basic information on past behavior. For example, a simple set of data that combines basic demographic information with transaction history and product details to get a preliminary understanding of the customer is better than a long quest for a 360-degree view of the same customer.

• Decision making. Start with the data and look at customer behaviors, and identify the key triggers that companies can act on immediately. Much of the initial data mining is simply hypothesis-driven, according to McKinsey, and a lot of the lowhanging fruit that drives momentum is common sense. Accelerate the launch of pilot campaigns. Based on response rates, refining the campaigns week by week would be the key to get progressively better response rates.

• The right tech tools. Technology is crucial to scaling personalization. One way to simplify the start the technology side is to understand these needs: 1) Integration of consumer data; 2) Decision and signal enabling, and 3) Distribution of coordinated content offers, with the ability to adjust them based on feedback.

• Cross-functional teams and the specialist. Engage with marketing, operations and tech experts. The specialists should be the “translators” who can communicate insights effectively across the business functions.

IBM is also sharing a similar strategy in terms of the personalization at scale with five key areas:

1. Data. Use the best quality data sets that have already gathered in order to form meaningful hypotheses to test and learn from.

2. Content. Implement an AI-driven, intelligent pipeline or platform for relevant content to be delivered at speed and to scale.

3. Experience. By combining the first two steps, organizations should orchestrate the customer’s experience with a personalized experience at scale.

4. Measurement. Set up customer-journey analytics to measure success.

About Raymond Chan

Raymond is a software engineer, product designer, and digital technology veteran. He cofounded two technology startups - TGG Interactive and Global Gaming Group in Asia, served as director and CEO to lead the in-depth customer intelligence and electronic gaming business from 2007-2018. Earlier in his career, Raymond was a founding member of the data science team at E*TRADE from Morgan Stanley and played a key role in the design of the TiVo customer intelligence system for the internet unicorn in Silicon Valley.

5. Customer service. Establishing efficient, seamless customer onboarding, and self-service, as well as making relevant and appropriate offers, would be the key to complete the effort.

The ROI of personalization at scale can be well worth the effort. Its success can drive greater customer retention and lifetime value for the company. It can create competitive advantages at every stage of customer management. Furthermore, organizations shall increase in customer engagement, achieve higher efficiency in marketing campaigns and improvement in workflow efficiency.

Customer expectations are higher than ever before, and the technology advances are speeding up the competitions and narrowing the gap in difference. We are hoping the concept of Personalization at Scale can present a new angle for the industry. It would follow the experience of digital transformation that transformed organizations like Apple and Tesla to drive loyalty. Therefore, employ it to compete with upstarts, access new customer segments and bring new business opportunities to win fans again.