The Big Disconnect Between Data and Customer Experience
Data is power - everybody tells you. And Big Data promise better experiences adapted to individual behavior and preferences. However, historically, these promises have fallen short of reality. So why does it seem that so many struggle with the most basic levels of personalization of the customer experience?
In previous posts I argued that the lack of personalization across the web is mostly a people thing. Lack of people who knows how to build personalized content and experience flows.
72% agree they ‘understand
importance of personalization,
but don’t know how to do it’
Source: Econsultancy
However research also suggest that many organizations see IT roadblocks and legacy technology as the two largest barriers for progress.
Data is power - everybody tells you. And Big Data promise better experiences adapted to individual behavior and preferences. However, historically, these promises have fallen short of reality. Investments in technology such as data warehouses, Data Management Platforms, Customer Relationship Management and Marketing Automation software have allowed businesses to capture and store rich customer data. However organizations hasn’t been successful in translating this data to better customer experiences. The ability for businesses to leverage their customer data to deliver individual experiences is broadly recognized as an massive opportunity and the essential step in realizing the value from personalization - but in most organizations it simply doesn't work.
So why does it seem that so many struggle with the most basic levels of personalization of the customer experience?
Delivering a real time personalized experience
Customers tell us, ‘We have all this data – we just haven’t been able to use it for anything'”. Businesses can pull all this data together in a place that’s accessible for optimizing experiences - but that is only a fraction of the challenge. Getting this information back to the applications that trigger and execute the personalized experiences is the real challenge.
Doing this in real time and in scale is a really really hard. In fact - when a visitor arrives at your website - you have to be able to get the full updated visitor profile, re-calculate segments, evaluate potential experiences with different variations of static or dynamic content - pull content templates, render the content and return it to your visitor in less than 25 ms. If you cannot do that - you are not capable of acting in real time and the experience will suck.
This is one of the core reason that many businesses are still struggling with the experience part of the journey - they are stuck in technical challenges. If your organization have opted for a traditional Data Warehouse or a DMP solution - it is highly unlikely that you will be able to deliver real time personalization without a huge investment in engineering - by people with a skill set not likely to be found in the average corporate IT organization.
Every organization will require a way to store their customer information from all of its sources - consolidate the view of the individual customer across channels to get the big picture - and use small data on individual level to render personalized content in real time - that's is pretty clear. But building the platform that does this and is capable of delivering a real time cross channel experience to visitors or customers are limited to the very few.
Becoming a real time organization
Being able to deliver a personalized experience is only part of the equation of being a real time organization. When customer information flow to the organization in real time - the organization also needs to be able to act in real time. While all the typical applications that is running the enterprise do include open APIs - they all sit and wait to be notified that something happened before they can do anything. That is why you need a framework that enable organizations to trigger any internal application based on actual customer behavior - again in real time.
So when a customers behavior reaches predefined behavioral thresholds it will trigger a call to your CRM or marketing automation platform with information required to initiate the appropriate internal workflow. Typically it would be a task for the sales department or it could be a churn team that is initiated for a onsite chat session, email or phone call follow up. Another use case would be entering the customer into a predefined flow in your marketing automation platform - like churn prevention, cross sell or triggering a series of emails that is centered around the customer's latest signal of interest.
In any circumstances - this is the stuff that future real time business is made of and the kind of proactive behavior you can expect in the years to come. For organizations this is a journey that includes engaging with a new kind of employees - people with insight into personalization technology, personalized content, dialog flow design and machine learning. For most it also includes investments in the technology, that connect the customer profile information with a personalized content experience - but the tech required is the simplest and cheapest part of the challenge - the major barrier is still the people with the right skills. They are in dire demand.
Kresten Bergsøe
Monoloop