“Infinite choice is paralyzing, and exhausting to the human psyche,” said Barry Schwartz in The Paradox of Choice. This concept is what drives the need to personalize content and web sites.
Perficient at Oracle OpenWorld 2015
Craig Macdonald presented this session on personalization at Oracle OpenWorld.
Personalization starts with recognition – you have to have customer insight to really recognize your customers and understand them. Disney uses their Magic Band to identify and recognize customers, which then leads to great personalization for those customers. The Magic Band is a form of digital authentication for the customer so you can then leverage any and all data you have about the customer.
The really hard part of digital authentication is that it is hard to match de-identified customers to customer data. With Facebook, for example, the audience said that 15-20% of customer’s emails matched anything in Facebook.
After recognition, you have to remember your customer’s history. This insight leads to the ability to compare a customer history to other customers’ histories, create predictive insights and ultimately personalized recommendations. A curated experience comes from tailoring your customer experience to their needs, so you need a lot of data to get these insights.
This curation requires not only data, but also changes in processes to support the data collection, analytics, segmentation and other components. The cost and capabilities of the technology has now become sophisticated enough to handle almost any scenario, but our people and processes have not caught up with the technology.
Not all experiences are created equal either. Delivering the optimal personalized experience can depend on a customer’s location, device, intent, etc. The speed of digital allows for real time testing & optimization of content, layout and site behaviors.
There is a personalization maturity model consisting of 5 stages:
- Minimal – static experience, manual processes, simplistic rules
- Selective Testing – limited A/B testing, digital content options, recommendations based on customer profile
- Digital Personalization – targeted experiences for layout, creative offer, etc.; mature processes to scale testing; identification of personalization points
- Omni Channel Personalization – centralized data & decision mgmt; integrated customer intelligence informing all channels; contextual recommendations
- Enterprise Digital Agility- centralized decision mgmt orchestrating personalization across all channels; goal setting to optimize KPIs across all digital experiences; simulation of tradeoffs to understand enterprise-wide impacts
Many organizations struggle with the culture of personalized recommendations. Issues arise from:
- the lack of centralization of decision making
- an explosion of content requirements
- refactoring measurement systems
- change in skills
- process redesign
- product marketing and creating new offers
