Building customer experiences through mass personalization

Rise of mass personalization

Digital has changed a lot of things.Traditionally identities were set up by society based on their occupations. In the digital age, identity is based on the decisions we make on a daily basis.In this age we are known by the preferences we make. Offering something based on their preferences is what personalization focuses on.Personalization is resonating with customers because customers expect a better experience.Customers have trust in those organizations that they are associated with, that offers an abundant choice in products and services along with providing a personal experience that differentiates them to their customers.

• Hence personalization offers businesses a way to deliver experiences as individual expects from its brand promises.Personalization can forge close association between a company and its customers by increasing the customer’s affinity towards the brand offering.
• This cannot be achieved without the right technology and right ways of working behind it.

Personalization in media industry

• Personalization is more prominent in media industry as companies like Netflix and Disney are providing consumers endless choices on what to watch, listen and in which device to watch it at what time.Individuals are able to construct their own worlds through on demand digital offerings. Hence companies are tailoring their offerings and business models to revolve around personal preferences, leveraging data and usage patterns to pitch their products not at audience of billions but at billions of individuals.
• Technology is playing a vital role towards active individualized consumption. With roll out of 5G, there will be increase of a exponentially improved functionality and faster speeds.
• Consumers are able to create their own personal space of content which they prefer. These choices are shaped by AI and algorithms that recommend new content to them.

Are firms successful with personalization?

• Personalization is not just confined to media industry.It exist in every industry from health to travel services.Online shopping like Amazon has pioneered personalization by recommending tailed offers for customers.
• Personalization works very well for mass volume of items like choosing online libraries and consumer goods as customer have choices to choose from. In case the customers cannot easily find the right choice from the options provided, the brand risks alienating them.Many customers still might feel that the recommendations provided to them does not reflect their true preferences.

Selecting right recommendations

• Delivering good personalization engine is therefore necessary to deliver personalized experiences. To achieve this at scale, the firm needs to understand their customers – what they need, want and how they behave. This requires volumes of data followed by segmenting the customer data that can scale from macro oversight of the market down to the level of the individual customer.
• In order to get the personal experiences right, magic moments should be carefully selected and validated via behavior response through test and learn experimentation and control groups.A wrong message in the wrong format will be seen as a bad customer experience.
• A right combination of tools is needed to create an unified personalized experience.A single source of customer truth will enable the machine learning algorithms to make accurate predictions. In order to achieve this, teams should adopt an agile methodology and have cross functional team members to ensure the customer experience is synchronized.

Know your customer

• The personalization wave fueled by technology will further intensify due to increased investments in technology by companies and high competition. The personalization approach that is geared towards understanding every customer using their data will result in exploration of new business models.
• This requires building new capabilities, having right skillsets and requires new ways of working like following agile practices and using cross functional teams.

Final Takeaway

Personalization is resonating with customers because customers expect a better experience. Brands that are customer centric in true sense by providing delightful customer interactions will be able to build trust, loyalty and bottomline.