The epic rise of data-rich engineering platforms has changed the way industries cater to the various needs of consumers including information, entertainment, and socialization which has drastically increased the need for personalization using past user data. Today, however, this personalization involves using human behaviour and its related segments for better contextual recommendations.
This process of personalization, even though it may seem like a byproduct of the digital age, has been around for decades with companies using methods like expert scorecards, segmentation schemes, propensity models that have helped them better understand their market.
Speaking at a recently held XperienceAI Virtual Summit by NASSCOM, Rahul Desai, Vice President at Fractal Analytics artificially broke down the journey of personalization into three stages – the pre-digital stage, the second stage where the digital signals began exploding and companies started to get a better understanding of customer needs.
“And the third stage is really the future, the point where the questions arise, ‘Is data good enough?’, ‘Is data enough to understand personas, can we incorporate elements of human behaviour into this?’,” Desai elaborates on the third stage of the process.
As we move into the future, possessing user data is not enough, what many omnichannel companies lack is the digital natives in the personalization process, so it is important for them to bridge that gap, in terms of scale.
Aminish Sharma, Director – Technology Futures at Intuit gives an insight on how his organization uses personalization to give their customers an insight into their finances, spending habits, and saving opportunities that helps them know how to handle their personal finances or small businesses. He emphasized the importance of simplicity and intuitive design that helps the customer to be in control and feel confident.
With respect to an omnichannel personalization perspective, Sharma said, “My guidance would be to look holistically. There are basically three key aspects – the first one is to focus on your customers, don’t just think personas, think behaviour and personas. Put yourself into your customers’ shoes, they no longer base their perceptions solely on price, product or convenience. Instead, their expectations will be based, as we look into the future, on speed, simplicity and context.”
“The second thing is to focus on the right technology, investing in the right set of tools, to gather enough and accurate data is absolutely a must. And thirdly, invest in the right organizational structure because companies cannot afford to look at their customers from a siloed business, the organization should structure in a way to support customer perspective,” Sharma continued.
Today, with the lines between traditional and tech-oriented companies blurring, many organizations are finding this transition difficult to deal with. Speaking about this conundrum, Kalpana Behar, Head of Digitization at Uber, gives us insight on how to deal with this change.
“The key things that will drive this change is one, hiring the right kind of talent, having progressive leadership because a lot of serious change in an organization is driven top-down. The second thing is building a data connected culture, an organization is never a siloed team working on its own, building teams that are connected with data and seamless exchange of data from one context to another and enabling all of this infrastructure is very important,” she said.
“If an organization truly wants to transform the way they want to do business, the leadership has to take specific big bets that are associated with AI and ML,” Behar’s advice to companies on the verge of this transition.
Mayur Datar, Chief Data Scientist at Flipkart, highlighted why personalization is important to an organization in this industry. While customer acquisition is important for Flipkart, it still has a long way to go to make them a loyal customer.
“That requires us to really empathize with the customer, understand the customer needs, make sure that we connect them to the right products and delight them through the whole shopping journey,” he said.
With the amount of competition in the market, it has become easy for customers to switch between companies. Datar feels that for a company such as theirs, personalization is about showing customer empathy and showcasing to them that the company understands them.
