Personalising a customer’s experience

should mean that brands respond

in real time to the context of each

individual’s natural journey.

To achieve this requires companies to take the lead in breaking down their silos.

Being able to effectively serve customers in three or more channels leads to more than double the revenue per customer compared with one channel. More channels also mean more complex personalisation, making a holistic customer view even more important.

A key factor in achieving this is having the right proposition, technology and the skills to utilise it. Legacy technology, cost and a lack of resources are the three biggest barriers to achieving customer-led personalised journeys, and this may be overestimating the difficulty.

Today’s software tools can integrate quickly with most existing platforms, providing a shorter timeframe for paying back an investment. Similarly, the skills are usually present in an organisation, but often confined to their individual silos.

The more significant challenges are organisations’ conflicting priorities and the need for “change and change agents”, only 4% of marketers in recent research say their general management is responsible for customer experience  – a “scary number”.

With that leadership lacking at the top of most organisations, it’s up to marketers to drive the change they want to see in their companies.

Customer Experience

The foundation of a personalised user experience is consistency and contextual relevance.

The Results

“There is no point in sending me generic messages that don’t apply to me. There is no point in telling me to go to the gym when I am on a journey to a football match. If you get the timings right and get the understanding of me right, I’m much more likely to engage,” said Cooper of AXA PPP.

Marketers have been debating personalisation in earnest for over a decade, since the time when it meant no more than including someone’s name in an email or on a piece of direct mail.

The sophistication of targeting technology has undoubtedly increased since then, yet there remains a sense that the potential of personalised marketing still hasn’t quite been fulfilled.

Sarah Mansfield, Unilever vice-president of global media for Europe and the Americas, neatly explained the trajectory that many companies have been following – and where they would like to end up;

“What we say is it’s a journey from mass reach to mass customisation to mass personalisation. It’s about reaching large audiences but doing it in a really smart way.” To achieve this requires “understanding consumers, their traits and behaviours, to identify actionable targeting segments for which we can develop different messages”.

In summary, true mass personalisation means “right time, right place, right targeting”.

Yet even if some companies are now beginning to achieve this, in reality most brands have been stuck for too long at the mass customisation stage; perhaps believing they were delivering personalisation, but in fact failing on at least one of Mansfield’s three requirements. The most common reason is a lack of information about – or even a lack of interest in – context.

When marketers talk about contextual targeting, they are usually referring to the page someone is browsing at a given time – but there are more important contexts for consumer behaviour than this. When people engage with brands, they always do so with a specific intent guided by their individual interests at a point in time, which can’t be gleaned from their demographic profile or even their past behaviour.

186

Percent increase in overall business

847

Products sold during the ad campaign

239

Raving reviews written since the launch

Understanding the context of engagement

Personalisation has become one of the health insurer’s AXA PPP key objectives as it attempts to be seen not just as the provider of a financial product but as a “health partner” for consumers. This involves being able to give advice based on an individual’s unique circumstances at times when it will be genuinely useful and welcome.

Without an understanding of a customer’s motivations at the time they receive a communication, the company knows it is at risk of giving the wrong advice, or advice that is missed or ignored.

“There is no point in sending me generic messages that don’t apply to me. There is no point in telling me to go to the gym when I am on a journey to a football match. If you get the timings right and get the understanding of me right, I’m much more likely to engage,” said Cooper of AXA PPP.

Five modes of behaviour

In a completely different sector – consumer media – and with different objectives on customer acquisition, Bauer Media has had the same realisation that context is key. In its case, the context is about the nature and intent of a user’s visit, which cannot be gleaned from data about historic behaviour or a static profile of who they are.

“Our customers expect more from us in terms of intuitive user experience than the old model of personalisation can deliver. It’s not so much about knowing demographic details but understanding and pre-empting what each website visitor expects to see, based on the journey that led them there,” says Bauer Media’s head of acquisition Leah Roberts. 

“We aim to deliver a personalised user experience, the foundation of which is consistency and contextual relevance.” 

To achieve this it ensures that when a consumer comes to one of its websites via online advertising, the experience and the content they see chimes with the creative in the ad that brought them there.

Without the correct context of why a consumer is engaging at a particular time, efforts at personalisation can actually hinder rather than help commercial objectives.

More and more, we are uncovering that the typical [user journey] is not linear, and behaviours are changing so aggressively over time that to follow the typical funnel from awareness to consideration to purchase…just isn’t enough any more. Behaviours are so sporadic depending on the context and intent of the user.

Managing data carefully

Of course, there are also quick and data-light ways that brands can approach personalisation of the customer experience, particularly where customer service is concerned. For example, by using messaging and chatbots to automate predictable queries but then handing over to a human operator for more complex questions, brands can manage their resources efficiently while also offering a one-to-one response when it is needed.

As Facebook planning director told the Festival of Marketing: “The top 10 questions [customers have] cover 90% of their queries – there or thereabouts – that’s what bots are brilliant at. The questions you’re getting when making most of the purchase decisions are generally covered by these 10 questions.” But he added: “You need a hand-off, you need a way to take that to a real person when something really weird comes in.”

The personal touch can also be enhanced simply through using the right tone of voice. Edwards pointed to Lego’s gift recommendation chatbot on Messenger, named Ralph, as a good example.

“A lot of chatbots are done in a very transactional way. You want a gift? These are your options. What’s your price point?” he said. “What was lovely about what Lego did was they used Ralph to bring the Lego brand to life as well.”

The approach brands take to personalisation in future will probably need to be much less data-heavy in order to comply with the requirements of GDPR. Research from Accenture suggests as much as 75% of marketing data has been rendered obsolete by the new regulation, shrinking some databases numbering millions of individuals down to five figures.

But this doesn’t necessarily mean opportunities are closed off. In fact, it may mean marketers can focus less on working out what to do with masses of irrelevant historical data and more on gaining consent to collect that which is contextually important, and designing innovative services around them.

AXA’s Cooper admits to frustrations that GDPR “has probably slowed us down on the journey we were on a little bit”, however he believes “the output is much more usable”. The future, he said, lies in giving the consumer control.

“Health and wellbeing data needs to be managed by need. This will never work if people have random access to your most personal data – your health and wellbeing data. But you need to be able to then share it with health systems, with insurance companies, with medical providers. You need to give them access and then take that access back or reduce that access once you’ve finished that interaction. This doesn’t exist today.”

Not only in health, but in all sectors, such innovations could pave the way to a model of personalisation that’s better at giving customers what they want, in turn creating much more valuable relationships for brands.