4 steps for addressing Personalisation challenges in Customer Experience

"For the lover, a beautiful woman is an object of desire;
 for the hermit, a distraction; 
 for the wolf, a good meal" -Canonical buddhist verse quoted

I love the quote above which, in the context of customer experience, highlights both the importance of getting personalisation right and dangers of generalisation.

My definition of Personalisation is 'truly' understanding your customer and adjusting/changing your service/content/interactions with the customer's context and needs in mind. This is not an easy task especially in a consumer facing situation - this is borne out by the high failure rates of the proliferation of startups in the online space (Check out this article on reasons for the failure).

Why is Personalisation Important?

There are a number of reasons for getting personalisation right related to customer loyalty which can be summed up as follows:

• Build a deeper emotional connect with customer The key ingredient for building loyalty and trust with your customer is by having an emotional connect - the feelings your every interaction with the customer (be it in an online context or in person or any other channel) will drive the customer lifetime value.
• Drive Top line Growth According to a July 2018 Mckinsey article Personalization at scale can drive between 5 and 15 percent revenue growth for companies in the retail, travel, entertainment, telecom, and financial-services sectors.
• Develop a Strategic Advantage Emotional connect with your customers → better understanding of customers → insights on the direction your product/service → Strategic Advantage. 

Types of Personalisation

So what're the different levels of personalisation any organisation can offer, irrespective of whether you're a B2B (business to business) or a B2C (business to consumer) organisation? Although there are other tiers you can define based on industry and maturity of your customer data/understanding, I like to think of it in the following terms (obviously technology, organisational maturity and data play a huge role in progressing from one level to the next):

• Basic This is the basic level where some generic aspect of a customer is used to differ the experience e.g. a country/region specific page is displayed for a user based on his/her location
• Demographic or Interaction based Here some of the basic data the customer has shared or product he/she is looking at is used to tailor the customer experience (again it is basic level - age, gender etc.) - this is also where online data based insights like 'people who bought this, also looked at' etc come into play
• Self-service Personalisation In addition to the previous two level, here the customer is given an opportunity to control his/her experience by tailoring (e.g. how the page components are displayed in a news website or nickname used in Online shopping etc.)
• Deep Personalisation Combining all the power of the previous 3 levels, deep personalisation uses all the statistics from customer's interaction with your organisation across channels to deliver a tailored and continuously evolving experience. This is a Big-Data enabled personalisation.

A word of caution here is that it may not be necessary to aim to move to deep personalisation for all industries or all organisations. The regulatory environment, product/service features, channel of interaction and company value proposition may necessitate just the basic personalisation in some cases.

4 Step Personalisation Transformation 

Getting personalisation right is not easy, takes time and is a continuous process. I believe the following four steps, from my experience of working with customers and learning from the experts in the field, will help organisations make the journey to optimal personalisation with their customers. 

Step 1: Make customers an ally in your transformation

Customer trust is a linchpin of any successful customer experience transformation. It is important to get existing customer excited and bought into any customer experience transformation you have planned - you need honest feedback and desire to make things better for both themselves and others. Open, honest relationship along with a superior product or service is key. A structured program to recruit pilot customers who are representative of your wider customer base is necessary if you're trying to experiment different personalisation approaches.

Step 2: Become a Customer Data Focused Organisation

All organisation collect a lot of data but most lack focus in their collection and usage of data. In the journey to being an organisation further along the personalisation maturity, the data strategy needs to have 

Step 3: Connect all your sales, service, marketing and other channels

Once you've nailed your data strategy with a customer experience improvement focus, the biggest impact on your overall customer experience is by being consistent across every interaction point. This should be right from the first marketing message to sale to customer onboarding to ongoing service to even an exit scenario. With the right data strategy coupled with building and providing a holistic picture of your customer at all touch points, consistency across all interactions is possible. Consistency also means that the ability to use data from previous interactions (both positive and negative) becomes extremely important - for instance, your call centre agents having access to the same customer data as someone in a retail center (This has been the promise of omni-channel software).

Step 4: Tweak your customer experiences, continuously

With Steps 1-3 accomplished, the next step is about agility in your customer interaction channels. The ability to do A/B testing on your changes to understand customer responses is critical as well.Your personalisation approaches should be able to change based on changing customer habits, better technology availability and individual customer's preferences. It is also about realising that, like any other transformation initiative, there is no 'end-state' in a personalisation transformation journey. Personalisation is a continuous improvement initiative which needs to be constantly adjusted for it to remain relevant for your customers.

 Although I have used these steps in the context of personalisation transformation, it is generic enough to be applied to other areas of customer/employee experience transformations as well.

Competitive advantage and evolution of technology

As someone who is a keen student of business strategy and technology as an enabler of competitive advantage, I want to take a look at how the evolution of the technology landscape has helped businesses in their quest for competitive advantage. This post is my attempt at simplifying the radical changes the business technology/software landscape has gone through. As you'll note, I have taken several broad sweepes and editorial freedoms :) to make things simpler.

I have divided the evolution into four distinct eras:
A) Mainframe
B) Client Server
C) Cloud Computing
D) Mobile Cloud

Please note that I have not considered the move from client server to a internet based model, referred to by the business vendors in the early 2000 as e-business suites, as a separate era since it felt like an extension of client server with the server being at data centres and served to clients through the internet.

Let's look at each of these eras in the context of what the advantage it gave to firms in the context of Business agility and the end user experience (refer fig 1 below). I am of the opinion that both agility and user experience factors along with the technology evolution gave the companies who adopted these technologies a distinct 'competitive advantage' compared to their peers. My premise is also that these advantages became a baseline as everyone adopted those technologies, hence the move to the next technology disruption by itself is a 'competitive advantage'. Expanding on it further, the more agile an enterprise is, the better placed it is compared to its peers to respond to broader market or economic changes. And better user experience it provides it customers and employees, greater their loyalty and again a definite competitive advantage.

Fig1: Business Agility vs User Experience  - Technology

A. Mainframe Era

Mainframes helped address the issues with the data processing requirements of large business - the shift from manual, error prone to the reliability and stability of computers gave large businesses a huge advantage compared to other businesses. The shift from manual to mainframes was good from a reliability standpoint but was not a quick fix or a great user experience - this meant that the users were primarily large businesses who could afford the expense. Check out this IBM article on Mainframe usage - which looks at current usage as well and is slightly different from my consideration in the previous era.

Mainframe, to an extent, drove the growth of larger businesses since now they could scale to handle large order processing, payroll management and other processes. 

From a business agility perspective, mainframes meant long expensive implementation cycles and once defined a process remained fairly standard. And user had to be content with blue screens and had to remember transaction codes etc , hence with minimal user convenience in mind. 

B. Client Server 

The move to client server made things better both from an agility point of view as well as user experience. The era of desktop application meant that you could give a little bit more consideration for the user and also application development itself had more options with the likes of languages like C, Visual Basic, PowerBuilder etc. 

In terms of competitive advantage, this meant that only organisations with access to developers could build application according to their needs. This meant that there were more options for differentiation in certain areas. 

This was also an era when ERP vendors like SAP, PeopleSoft, Oracle et al extended their reach across the enterprise and came up with the idea of a best-in-class process for the standard back-office processes. This was also an era were computerisation took hold with packaged software across both small and large businesses - the greater your access to capital, the greater was your ability to make something specific which offered you a competitive advantage.

C. Cloud Computing

 With advent of greater connectivity speed and establishment of the idea of sharing computing resources, cloud computing has established itself as key model for delivering software. This has done away with the need for businesses to have capital expenses for their IT estate and turning software as a regular service which buy on an ongoing basis. The key competitive advantage comes with the agility it affords in terms getting your employees and customers enabled with a process delivered in the cloud. 

Businesses are taking this agility to the next level by using business platforms which they can use to develop differentiated services or automation quickly.

Services still were delivered via browser and user experience wasn't as good as a customised client server model with a dedicated WAN/LAN could provide especially in scenarios where internet connection wasn't good enough.

Hence cloud computing by itself scored high on business agility but not as high on user experience.

D. Mobile Cloud

The advent of mobile and the app economy has meant that the users are always connected and can work anywhere anytime. Apps and device agnostic software combined with the agility delivered by cloud has meant that user and business agility are both high.
Competitive advantage now arises in the ability of businesses to cater to their stakeholder, be it customers, employees or partner with a value proposition which is differentiated and high on user experience.

Future looks very exciting and there are multiple scenarios which could lead us to the next phase in the evolution - could be IoT combined with wearables providing us with context relevant help and driving greater automation.

Here is to the next phase in software evolution - agility and user experience rules :).