Personalise experiences with customer analytics
Personalisation is a key driver for brands. Based on granular data such as location, search patterns, past purchases, channel preference, order history etc — tailored messages, product offers are crafted that specifically cater to customers’ needs.
To enable personalisation using customer analytics, a robust data strategy needs to be in place to understand the data that needs to be collected with the end goal in mind. Organisation wide customer data need to be integrated to build a cohesive 360-degree view of customers enabled by technology to deliver analytics at scale.
Accurate data (both quantitative and qualitative) at each touch point need to be captured and integrated to build a holistic picture of consumer experience. Baseline measures must be established to set benchmarks and trends monitored for continuous improvements.
To successfully capitalise on personalisation trend, brands need to also be careful how frequently they engage with their customers via an offer or product suggestion, it must be relevant (ie when they are ready to buy), seamlessly connecting offline and online experiences to be consistent.
All the above requires quality, trustworthy granular data about customers, their behaviours, and a lot of analysis on data to distil key insights and a culture of experimentation (test and learn mechanisms).
Are customers willing to share more ‘data’ in exchange for personalised experiences?
While customers demand personalisation, they are wary of sharing additional data. Various consumer studies and behaviours indicate that most consumers would not be willing to share additional data with brands for personalised experiences, around some only do it with brands they trust.
Recent research conducted by McKinsey also indicates that customers are more comfortable sharing their data with providers in financial services or health care. This is because significant life events like receiving personalised medical treatment, mortgage or loan approval are reliant on additional personal data and far more critical than a product or service offering. Due to the heavy regulated nature of these industries also mean there is implicit trust when doing business with them.
Transparency is key when collection additional customer data
Most other industries struggle with issues such as customer trust, data protection, secure data collection, and striking a balance between asking for personal data that is required as part of their transactions vs asking for too much information that might not be relevant.
Transparency is key when organisation put initiatives to collect additional personal data. They need to ensure there is explicit consent when capturing personal data, efforts are made to clearly communicate to the customers the purpose for collecting the data and how it would be used.
Loss of privacy, misuse of personal data diminishes the trust customer have with brands and impacts negatively on loyalty and future purchases. While personalisation is a key growth driver, not giving serious considerations for personal data privacy, protection and transparent guidelines on data collection is a huge deal breaker for customer loyalty and trust.
Leading organisations who have mastered personalisation are constantly experimenting, testing their communications, implementing transparent data collection policies, identifying potential issues, and putting actions to resolve potential problems.
If you’d like to know more about some of the strategies to help clients drive value through personalised experiences at the same time build trust through ethical data collection, do reach out to me. Or share your views in comments below.
