Personalization Maturity: The Path to Hyperpersonalization

Transcript

There’s a new teen feature that when you started recording, it automatically mutes you. So thanks for being with me on that. I’m excited to be here with all of you today to talk about the path to hyper personalization. Our agenda for today. We’re going to talk first about what is the modern customer journey? How has customer behavior, customer themselves and customer journeys evolved over the past few years? And we’re going to talk a little bit about what that really means for personalization and how has that impacted our idea of maturity models of attributes, and how has it changed the value of personalization in? And then at the end, I want to make sure that this is practical for all of you and talk about the path to hyper personalization. So we’ll walk through some steps that you can take to move forward when you’re within your own organization that kind of would serve as a foundation and a vision of working towards hyper personalization. Anthony said Feel free to drop things in the chat. I have it open, so hopefully I will be able to see it and we can answer some questions at the end. So let’s talk about the modern customer journey. Everyone has its problems. I’m not seeing the shared content. Thank you. I guess it stops sharing, too. There you go. Now, can you see it? Yes. Thank you. Great. Thank you for letting me know. All of us are probably familiar with something that looks generally like this. A very traditional customer journey through retention and loyalty. I think this class, anyone who saw something or promotion has has seen something that looks like this. And, well, it’s a good place to get started. This kind of traditional path where a customer is moving from one place to the to the next to the next isn’t really serving the customer any more. And it’s certainly not serving your business. It’s simply not the case that this is the way every customer that you’re interacting with is going to trickle through a funnel. In reality, it looks a lot like this. There is no linear path anymore. There’s no traditional funnel and really successful modern customer journeys rely on the measurement and analysis of unique customer journeys, which is actually where we see a lot of customer success because the tools that we’re using, if you’re looking at analytics dashboard of any kind or if you’re familiar with CGI, you see how this really looks at individual customer journeys and you’re able to map what those looks like. But successful modern customer journeys also rely on developing content and prioritizing your internal initiatives, things like capability, prioritization or use case prioritization based on these really unique experiences as well. This is partly due to the fact that your customers are just interacting in lots of different ways and you cannot control the order that they’re doing it. And we need to start managing that change within an organization to be able to create and analyze content that aligns to their journey. There’s especially important because in recent years we’ve been seeing this trend that we’re calling the decline of customer obsession, especially when customers are moving through that journey and getting to the phase where maybe they’ve already purchased and you want them to be that loyal customer. You want them to hopefully even be an advocate for your organization. We’re not seeing that happen as much. That particular piece has changed immensely, and in consumer behavior, we have a lot more readily available options and they are available in a lot more ways. 57% of Gen-z Americans are less loyal to brands when they were even four years ago, which is a pretty tremendous number. If you if you think about the vast demographic and ratio of the population that Gen Z is. This is due to a lot of reasons. Some of that is societal factors, people moving away more often from where they were born or delaying life milestones impacting customer loyalty. And we know that return customers tend to spend a lot more money. You get a larger share of their wallet than first time customers. This is a really unique risk to business. I want to make sure that although a lot of the content in this is very geared towards me talking about an individual customer and maybe a more retail or travel and hospitality way, this is still really important for B2B as well because of economic impacts, because of changes that we’re seeing in organizations is a lot more vendor reviews. There’s a lot more cost savings measures that are being implemented that also really impact that loyalty phase. It is not necessarily always something to count on that they will not like the cost. Switching to switch to a new tool or service that it has been in the past. You still have to be kind of crafting those customer journeys for B2B as well. When we’re putting the customer first, 65% of customers across all generations really expecting those personalized experiences. And importantly here, when they’re talking about personalized, they aren’t talking about very basic personalization. You’re talking about putting their name in an email. They’re talking about very hyper personalized, consistent personalization across platforms. And we see a 10 to 30% lift in return on investment, on customer experiences when they are personalized. The second column here is a little more geared towards travel and hospitality, but I think it’s still relevant as we’re thinking about how this cultural shift is really taking shape. Less than 40% of customers get travel and hospitality companies high marks on personalization and but 35% of travel and hospitality companies are starting to use predictive models to create customer segments. I think that’s really important to see in tandem that even these these travel and hospitality where you really expect even a higher degree of personalization because you’re in the plane or you’re in a hotel somewhere where you really need to feel like they understand your needs. Still, less than 40% of customers are really giving those high marks on personalization. 66% of consumers say encountering content that isn’t personalized would prevent them from purchasing. And of course, this is self-reported. So we can think about how that number would shift based on real behavior. But customers really are expecting to see that it is a crucial part of their journey, while at the same time we’re seeing a big trend in customers also being a lot safeguarding their data a lot more so getting less data on the customer while they are expecting even more. Personalization is a challenge that we’re seeing a lot. So how can you incentivize that customer to share more of their information with you so that you can deliver those experiences? And there’s a 50% reduction in customer acquisition costs when it experiences are personalized. We know it’s a lot harder and a lot more expensive to get new customers than it is to keep them within the journey. So I think this is really important to consider moving into. What does this really mean for personalization as we’ve seen these shifts, these huge changes in customer behavior and in capabilities of what level of experience are we really able to provide to customers? How has this changed personalization? And this is where we get into the concept of hyper personalization. You’ll hear this called 1 to 1 personalization as well. It’s perfectly fine and we usually call it hyper personalization here to really drive home the point that you’re working toward is an ever changing experience and growth towards hyper personalization and towards knowing your customer 1 to 1. And the goal of that is for customers have a unified, consistent experience across all touchpoints. This is made possible by centering the customer in strategic planning and integrating technology people and processes. And I really want to focus for a moment on the idea of centering the customer in in many customer engagement. And what we’re seeing when we’re really talking to to our customers is that when we’re looking at strategic planning, a lot of that is still rightfully so, organized around value to the business and organized around how to prioritize capabilities or metrics that teams are being held accountable to internally, which of course is a crucial part of maintaining, maintaining digital. But when you’re working towards hyper personalization, it’s really a shift in the way your organization needs to come together, needs to work towards a common goal in centering the customer and all of those conversations. So when you’re thinking about investments, when you’re thinking about prioritization of new technology, centering your customer in that conversation by what experience they are going to have, engaging with your company and then focusing on integrating and removing blockers and technology people and process. I’m going to introduce next our model, a maturity model for hyper personalization. I’m going to spend quite a bit of time on this because it’s a it’s a hefty slide and we hope to see a lot of words here. And I think it’s really important to understand just how far things have shifted in the past few years and what customers and individuals and companies are really expecting. In almost every engagement that I’ve been part of, every customer I’ve talked to in the past few years, personalization has been a main goal and a lot of times we see customers that are coming in and say, Well, we’re already doing some personalization, we’re running some target tests and AB test, and that is a great start. That’s a great way to start really understanding what your customer wants and how to make small changes to make their experience better. But the capabilities and level of expectation is really exceeding that in the market and that would still place you kind of in this basic phase where you’re prioritizing your internal initiatives based around internal metrics and internal value, and you still have a pretty limited ability to impact the customer experience because you’re not really able to understand their voice. You can’t get that direct feedback. And there’s also a really big risk if your internal teams are held accountable to different metrics, which is something we see really often. Of course, teams should be working on the metrics that they own. They should be very focused on those. But it does become difficult to, if perhaps those are in conflict, conflict in some way when you are kind of living within this basic phase in your organization, your priority sizing, your use cases, your capabilities based on feasibility. So can you do it with your with your current stack desirability? How many teams want to do this and speed to market, how fast you can get it to your customers as you start moving into the segment level of personalization? Is it still similar to basic, but you’re looking more towards specific segments that are really crucial to your business. You’re still prioritizing based on primarily internal metrics and value, but you’re looking at certain customer segments, certain personas, perhaps really high value ones, or, you know, customers that you see spending the most. You still have a somewhat limited ability to impact customer experience when you’re approaching it this way. And there’s still that risk of internal groups use different metrics. You’re still prioritizing based on feasibility and speed to market, but you’re also starting to really think about those high value customers when you move into micro segment. This is where things really are quite different. This is where you’re starting to combine the online and offline data. You’re still looking at the segments, you’re still looking at maybe personas that you’re basing things on, but you’re also starting to look at things you understand about that customer based on their behavior and your priorities. I think based on customer experience, priorities, segments, and you really focus on that value for the customer rather than only internal metrics. You’re creating value, you’re creating impact for your customer. But there’s still a risk in losing customers as they grow or change within that customer journey. So if they take a sharp left turn, then that journey that you weren’t expecting and you don’t have mechanisms in place to update, to update those segments to kind of rethink where that customer falls, there’s a risk in losing them. But this is where you’re you are going to be able to impact high value customers. You’re going to expand your segment and expand your share of wallet. Then we move into hyper personalization, which is where all of us are kind of working towards going right now is where you’re prioritizing customer experience, whether unique customer journey is focused on value for that individual customer based on where they are, You’re creating a full customer experience. There’s consistency across all of the touchpoints, even as they change their mind or as they grow. This is obviously good for your high value customers. This is where you get into customer loyalty and lifetime value and looking at share of market. The why is this so important is the study that was done by Adobe last year looking at the effects on conversion revenue per visitor and average order value, moving through that maturity model from basic segment to micro segment type of personalization, these are really kind of extraordinary numbers. And honestly, when you’re when you’re really looking at the value of creating super hyper personalized custom customer experience, I think these kind of speak for themselves about how important it is to be working towards this. So how do we get there when we’re thinking about the kind of main attributes of hyper personalized zation? What do we need to keep in mind as we’re beginning to build this out within our organization? The first this won’t be a surprise because I think I’ve already said this term 30 times in the last 20 minutes. But being customer centric campaigns capabilities use cases should be prioritized is based on the experience that it’s providing to a customer rather than those internal business metrics to be truly hyper personalized. I do want to pause here. It’s still going to be important to have those internal metrics that you can’t completely forget. Those things like operational efficiency are still going are cost cutting measures in general. Obviously, those are still going to be very important, but it’s separate than some of this work towards hyper personalization. We’re not saying to not ever look at those things. It’s still operational. Efficiency is still going to be really important, especially when you’re looking at creating content to fuel hyper personalized experiences. But when you’re thinking about campaigns and capabilities, making sure that some of those customer centric ideas and metrics and models are incorporated into strategic planning in a cross-functional and cross hierarchical way, it also needs to be scalable. We are seeing a lot of customers who right now come in and say, you know, we’ve historically had six attributes per customer, but our goal is to have 400 attributes or these really lofty goals of how much more information you’re going to have about your customer and the ways that you’re going to gather that. And that’s great. It’s great that you’re going to have an understanding of your customer, but having a plan to scale that across the organization is going to be really important to that success as well as those the number of attributes grows and shrinks over time, making sure that you know what you’re doing with that data. You have a plan for how to act on it, how to ingest it and turn it into more specific micro segments, but also that you have a plan for creating content to actually fuel those experiences as well, whether through automation, whether through changes to design, process processes or authoring processes, making sure that you’re able to actually fuel that. Otherwise you are going to be sitting on a whole bunch of attributes and not necessarily have a way to actually get information and experiences that the customer would be interested in to them, this is the brand, the connection really of the content and data. The last thing on hyper personalization and its attributes, it needs to be contextual. So not just looking at traditional demographic data but relevant motivational and action data as well on each customer and delivering that contextual experience. So moving outside of personas, outside of the ways that you’re kind of getting started on campaigns and content and thinking about what is motivating them, what actions have they taken, and what actions do you want them to take? This introduces the idea that we’re calling personas. Plus, personas are a great way to start, but traditional personas aren’t going to get you to hyper personalization. There’s a point where you have to start relying on other data. You have to start really leaning in towards a more specific view of an individual in order to move through that maturity model. So a traditional persona, it’s going to be centered around demographic information of the ideal customer type. So it’s typically created in marketing, although we do see, you know, product having personas or specific digital groups having different personas is, but it’s going to have traditional information like income, gender, geographic location, occupation, things that a customer might be interested in. And again, there’s still applies within B2B. It just might be things like industry or size of company. It’s just going to look a little bit different. And what we’re suggesting is personas plus working towards that 1 to 1 view of a customer where you can still start with those personas and segments, but starting to incorporate that contextual motivation and behavior data to create a more holistic view of that customer, Make sure that you’re incorporating things like purchase data and behavior and motivation is the thing that’s really important about this is a lot of this information is only coming to people who are reviewing the tools at the end of a campaign or the end of an initiative. And a lot of times data like this doesn’t actually make it back to the original marketing teams or creative teams that worked on these personas. So the reason this is so important is because it’s where you’re combining online and offline data to where you are really reporting back to the beginning of the lifecycle each time that content is created and each time you are gathering more information around a customer and to make sure that it’s becoming more specific over time and it’s inclusive of all all customer touchpoints. So the path to hyper personalization, we’re going to get a little more specific now with some examples. First thing to think about what are the pillars? What are the things that we really need to take a look at with personalization? The first, of course, being customer experience. So actually mapping, thinking, putting yourself in the shoes of that customer, the second being architecture. Where are integrations missing and how does that map to what a customer is actually seeing on the other end and then looking internally at your people and process as well? Are there tools that are missing or their skill sets that are missing? Are there ways to make processes more efficient, to work towards hyper personalization? And this is what we are calling the path. This is a way to prioritize how to move up on that maturity curve. So this is a way to kind of take stock and align across your organization of what needs to happen so that you can move forward. So the first is going to be to assess. So gathering those appropriate parties, reviewing that personalization model and giving an honest assessment of where your organization lies right now and where you want to be in the future. And then it’s around aligning on the shared vision for that customer experience and for what needs to happen within your organization. This is going to be considerate of business goals, investment level and capability. There are some places where it might not be worth the investment to go all the way to hyper personalization, but aligning on what that investment looks like, where you need to be within six months to a year to be working towards that is going to be really important. So you have to make sure you have the right people in the room to make it, to have that conversation and then making sure that you write that down, hold yourselves accountable, create some governance around it so that it can be reflected on. And then it’s really reviewing the different pillars. So looking at your customer experience, taking note of what is and is not connected and creating a map that I mean, to show you example, an example in a few minutes of that doing the same thing for your architecture, really taking a critical eye to your stack, reviewing where integrations may be missing, where things might not be working from the lens, not just internal, but what impact it’s having on your customer, and think through what experiences are compromised. And then looking at process. This one is really where we’re looking much more internally to review the process of getting new experiences to market. So when a new experience, a new initiative, a new anything is have been prioritized and people are working on it, what does that process look like? What teams are involved? Where are their blockers, where are their skill? That’s where are there opportunities for automation and what are the consequences of that? On the customer experience? So you bring up this maturity model again to talk about that step one where we’re assessing and aligning on where your organization is to do this effectively, you need to make sure that you have the right teams in the room, because it’s very likely that across your organization people have slightly different opinions on this because things might be working differently. And that is also something really important and I think really insightful to uncover. Maybe, you know, your data analysis team is already looking at micro segments. They’re already, you know, able to review more individual customer journeys, but that information might not be making it back to marketing or vice versa. So coming together and seeing, you know, where you are, but also why people across the org feel like that’s where you are is going to be a really enlightening conversation and then aligning on a shared vision. So once you know that aligning on where you actually want to be having that vision statement for what type personalization and customer experiences you’re trying to unlock, I am an advocate until the end of time of models like this because I think it’s really important to make sure that teams are in a working in a shared direction and working towards a common goal. So taking the time to line out that vision and then line out strategic pillars. So what are the crucial pieces of your business that are supporting that vision? Some organizations choose to make those strategic pillars, maybe departments in their business, things like content or data. I think there’s lots of models that can work there, but making sure that you’re thinking strategically about the different things that need to be working in Congress together to accomplish that vision and then breaking that into more specific objectives and having those three pieces together will make it much easier for you to actually map out the line and prioritize use cases that actually impact customer experiences. Something we see often is when you’re not really doing that assessment piece and you’re not stepping together to do this alignment piece and you suddenly get, you know, marketing and I.T. and security and creative, you get everybody in a room and try to define personalization, use cases. It can be really challenging because they might be held to different metrics. They might have a different idea of who their customer really is or what they’re trying to do. People might be looking internally about feasibility and capability versus customer experience, but aligning on these things together and understanding that you’re centering the customer. Every use case should have some metric around. What it’s going to do for the customers is going to make that process a lot easier. We have a lot of customer conversations where we’re asked to help align on use cases, which is obviously a very fun exercise. But the place where it gets challenging or the place we see people get stuck is because they’re not working towards the same vision. So they get very strong opinions, maybe in separate directions. And then when you have those use cases aligned and prioritized based on customer experience, it’s making sure that you align on KPIs and how you’re actually going to measure if they’ve been successful. The next thing that we recommend to do is this is just an example. None of this is real data of how to map your customer experience truly by centering the customer thinking about what their experience really would be and where things might not be connected. So if they call into a call center, is that connected to the corporate email? Are they going to get corporate emails that aren’t aligned with the information they got in the call center aren’t inclusive of what they’re asking questions about now, call center and social media? Maybe that isn’t super important. We don’t need to prioritize that at the moment, but I think mapping it out like this and looking at where things are inconsistent or where they might be marketed to as if they’re in a different piece of the customer journey really helps people to make progress. Things like app and in-store and making sure that those are connected, making sure that an app is updated with the most recent in-store purchases. And this has been really enlightening for a lot of customers because different groups think that an integration exists that doesn’t or think that something is happening that isn’t. So it becomes really clear when you put yourself in the customer’s shoes what this really looks like and making sure that that cross-channel behavior is comprehensive and unified. And you have you’re working towards a truly hyper personalized model of the customer. The flipside of this is to look at it from again, this is a complete example, architecture example, but mapping what all of the solutions are to the way that the customer is engaging and seeing where their integrations and where they’re not identifying if an integration isn’t being used, identifying the ones that are in place or are currently in progress, and then using that to align on what’s what’s going to be possible when this is completed, what’s possible here if that integration is corrected and understanding what impact that’s really having on customer, this model is really great. If you’re attempting to get different parts of an organization aligned is to show this customer example from the previous slide in this architecture example side by side, because it comes very clear where things need to be corrected within the stack or integrated or set up in order to unlock that hyper personalized experience where you are sharing data from all the different parts of your organization that end up in front of the customer. The last one is step five. Here is a process example, and this is where you’re looking primarily at internal processes. So as you’re creating new content or an experience or a campaign or anything that you’re trying to get in front of a customer looking at the phases from plan, build and deliver and measure what those phases are, taking a look at what activities really happen within each of those phases, what teams are involved. And these are just examples of challenges that we see at times. One that we see very often is the time like review time for different campaigns when things have to be routed through legal and accessibility teams. It causes delays and creates a real gap of getting content to market quickly enough for hyper personalized experiences to really react to a customer’s behavior quickly. So one that’s very common and kind of breaking it down like this with the right people in the room and understanding those individual tool users Pain points is also really helpful so that you can kind of prioritize what needs to happen on the back end to get content to those personalized experiences a little bit more quickly. There’s also a very common challenge we see here is again on the reporting back on measurement and optimization, back to the planning phase for the next campaign, for the next initiative that it kind of end when it ends, it’s treated as an individual piece and creating it to be a more cyclical process really helps on optimizing content that you’re putting in front of your customers. So why why are we focused on all of this? Why is this so important? The first one, of course, is to optimize customer experiences, optimizing customer experiences is a revenue generating cost. And while it might seem like a big undertaking, it might seem like a technology investment, we can see also that optimized customer experiences are kind of table stakes for competing in today’s market. It’s going to create measurable business value. And then on the back end, I know I talked so much about your customers today, but it also really help for team performance. When you have kind of a shared vision, you understand what you’re working towards and your metrics across teams are aligned. You’re not in competition with other teams are not in conflict across other teams. It also really helps on performance and working together towards a common vision that is the content for today. I am going to stop cheering. I would encourage you to drop any questions in the chat or Q&A and I will take a look at them. I think Tony also has a pull for everybody. You can take a look at. Thank you, Oscar. Looks like we have a question from Damon about seeing some focused on an org. They can hyper personalize the individual their insight around personalizing based on our org as well. I’m trying to understand the question. I’ll answer it a couple different ways in case I’m not understanding it correctly. This is where I wish you guys the company insights around personalizing based on our org as well. I’m not sure if you mean an org within your company or personalized to a type of organization as a b to B realm. I think you probably mean louder around to a specific type of organization. I think a lot of the things where in this I’m using language around the customer, you can replace that with organization. I think a lot of the concepts remain the same. It doesn’t have to be an individual. I think it actually becomes a little bit more complicated with B to B because you’re going to have different types of customers within the type of organization, different personas within that. But I still think there’s lots of ways to do that, specifically with automation, understanding who the real buyer is and who is interacting with your content on different types of channels. Hopefully that answers your question. If not, feel free to clarify. Okay. Okay, great. Are there any other questions, thoughts, feedback? Another minute. Just in case any other questions get dropped in? I don’t see any just okay. And this will be shared with everybody. Everyone doesn’t mind filling out that pull really quickly for us. That would be great. Is there anything else you want to share? Oh, I see another question coming in on Slide 20. That’s the architecture slide, I believe, or the great question, Michael. I think what you’re telling me is that my slide isn’t clear enough. So thank you for the feedback. The connected versus mini missing integration was the significance of those lines. So again, this is fake data. It’s not real, but the red lines would signal where things are. Data is not being shared between those two platforms or business units, and the white line would be where they are should we interpret that? We should focus on single experience and not all? I think I understand your question there. So this is around priorities. So getting all of these lines in where there are not integrations, where the data is not being shared and then prioritizing which ones would have a measurable impact on your customer. So app two in store is one I would think would be very, very important. Maybe call center to social not not as important. This is this is just an example that you could do of what is connected within your organization and what is missing within your organization. It’s not meant to imply priority for you. Priority would come by listing out where those red lines are and seeing what would be impactful to your business. Thank you for the question. I reading the rest of your question, that’s great. What do we do about the dotted lines? I think that’s where you’re going to see what’s preventing those experiences from being connected. So what this means is where there are red lines is where it’s not possible per it’s not possible currently to personalize those areas. So you can’t this customer, this fake person is not going to feel like her experience is being personalized. If your app and in-store experiences aren’t sharing data, if there is some sort of integration that is not set up right here, you aren’t able to personalize that. So the idea here is to look at these red lines and say, okay, could we provide a better, more personalized experience to this girl if this red line became a white line and then comparing it to this architecture diagram here and saying, okay, the reason that those two experiences right now are not connected is maybe because this integration isn’t set up yet. So it’s a way to get people on the same page about what the customer really looks like. A lot of times this is just very enlightening because people don’t realize that information isn’t being shared and the customer might not be having a fully cohesive experience across different touchpoints. Thank you for asking that. So we can clarify, right? There are no other questions. Okay. Yeah, I think I don’t see any other questions in the chat or Q way. So with that. Thank you all again for your attendance today. We hope that we have your company again here in the future. And, and thanks again every day. Thanks a lot.