Senior marketers explain how they're addressing the rising significance of real-time personalised consumer interactions, since it has shot up the list of priorities and challenges during the coronavirus lockdown
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23 september 2020
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In this era of social distancing and remote working, adoption of digital products and services has accelerated at a rate most brands would never have envisaged - sending the significance of real-time interactions with brands high up marketers’ priority list.
Not only have marketers had to respond to a range of new customer profiles and behaviours, they’ve also had to use real-time data and insights to adapt customer experiences, using technology to turn interactions into valuable engagements.
Yet delivering truly innovative, trusted, real-time engagement is no easy feat, as Salesforce’s 2020 ‘State of Marketing’ report highlights. ‘Engaging customers in real time' is both a top priority and challenge for the 300 UK marketers surveyed within the global study, with ‘unifying customer data sources’ and ‘creating cohesive customer journeys across channels and devices’ rounding out the top three challenges.
Unifying and operationalising customer data to create the cohesive journeys they want is particularly daunting, the report states, projecting that by 2021, marketers will have an average of nine data sources to unify. And it’s certainly making a difference, with 72% of ‘high performers’ in the report able to analyse performance in real time, versus 49% of ‘underperformers’.
Three senior marketers, speaking with Marketing Week as part of a series of online Q&As on the topic of real-time interactions, have revealed the key shifts they’ve witnessed during this pandemic-influenced period, and how they’re using real-time data to create better personalised journeys.
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Aviva: “Customer journeys have changed”
Insurer Aviva is using personalisation to deliver the right online content to meet the new topics customers are searching for and questions they are asking. Most recently, customer journeys across Aviva channels have transitioned from being highly transactional to largely exploratory, during a period of stress and uncertainty.
“What people are searching for has changed dramatically and we have been responding to that almost in real time. Customer journeys have changed,” says Raj Kumar, Aviva’s group brand and reputation director.
Kumar gives the examples of an influx of questions at the beginning of the UK’s Covid lockdown around whether home insurance would cover home office equipment, as well as increased searches for pensions and health policies, and content related to barbecue fires during hot weather spells in the spring. Aviva has also noticed more people wanting to save and invest.
“For us the main empathy [with customers] is for providing the best experience with the best kind of content. It has had a lot of impact on our content because we want it to be relevant for the attitudes we’re seeing now, and the different kind of people who previously may not have been as interested in their finances coming through now too,” says Kumar.
“People are now more aware they need to really look at their finances. We’re seeing a lot of that activity increasing and they are definitely changes we’re responding to.”
Those responses have been powered by data clustering, matched with AI-based personalised messaging across multiple channels, served by new technology to allow an unprecedented level of integration, and a more consistent experience.
“We have segmentations where we can cluster our data according to groups of customers and understand them as a group. Devising the strategy for each cluster is through segmentation, and implementing it is through personalisation and AI,” Kumar explains.
“We have AI we’ve built that understands the cluster and the messaging, and adds the individual tags to say, ‘here you go, this is perfect for you’. This is something that has been happening over the last couple of years. We’re quite proud of that as we’ve come a long way.”
“What people are searching for has changed dramatically.”
Raj Kumar, Aviva
KPMG: Cost and trust are new primary drivers
For Samantha Burns, UK marketing director at consultancy KPMG, cost and trust have been the biggest drivers for its customers. As with Aviva, digital content has been in high demand.
“We’ve adjusted our content strategy to realign around what’s important to clients right now, around four stages of the Covid journey – reaction, resilience, recovery and new reality. We’ve pretty much paused our gated content, to add as much value and support and not have barriers,” Burns reveals.
KPMG has “doubled down” on its digital channels, she adds, taking the lockdown as an opportunity to fine tune its email, social and web strategies.
“Our newsletter open rate has gone up to 45%. That goes to thousands of clients, and has been pivotal to our contact strategy. We had to re-look at our content formats to drive more high-value actions – a reduction in PDFs, dial-up of HTML templates. On social we’ve focused on human stories,” says Burns.
“We’ve adjusted our content strategy to realign around what’s important to clients.”
Samantha Burns, KPMG
Consolidating data into actionable insights to meet changing customer needs has been “massively important” – but not without its issues, which is where accelerating the use of tech solutions has come into play.
“The challenge, of course, is we have heaps of data, and working out which bits are most relevant to get a more informed view of the client and what’s important to them has been a core focus,” Burns notes.
KPMG’s lead management system, she explains, allows teams to enter swathes of real-time data from different touchpoints, from whitepaper downloads to webinar attendance or advertising interactions. Those are collated and shared in real time for KPMG practitioners to follow up with clients. It also creates dashboards on a client-by-client basis to enable a view of individual engagement levels.
The next step, shares Burns, is to integrate third-party data, which allows KPMG to do more predictive behavioural modelling. “That is going to get exciting as it gets us into machine learning,” she enthuses.
UKTV: Appropriately powering personalisation
In the media industry, recommendations are a pillar of personalisation strategies. During lockdown, it made sense for the likes of UKTV to capitalise on this with a housebound public, who sent video-on-demand views for the company’s TV channels Dave, Yesterday and Drama up 50% during the lockdown, and Twitter engagements up 202%.
But for Kate Rossiter, UKTV’s head of marketing for digital products and commercial, making the most of new viewers meant taking a more sophisticated approach, through A/B testing and programming algorithms to drive the right level of personalisation.
“We’re trying to get the right mix of editorial and personalisation.”
Kate Rossiter, UKTV
“You have to think about what’s powering things. Recommendations are powered by data, which is powered by what you watch. But if your recommendations are powered by popularity and views, your new shows won’t have a chance to get to the surface. And if you have a brand-new customer then you don’t have any data, so how do you power your engine?” Rossiter questions.
“It’s not just about the balance of how much of your site is personalised, but the rules that are going into driving your engine. Ideally we’re releasing new shows regularly, and we want them heroed on our sites. So we’re trying to get the right mix of editorial and personalisation, but also considering the point in the customer journey. We’re doing A/B testing with that, seeing if we shift the mix, what that does.”
Unifying data – a universal goal?
Unifying data sources is something Kumar, Burns and Rossiter have all implemented to respond effectively to their lockdown-affected audiences. Salesforce EMEA senior brand marketing manager Tom Henshaw notes this is something many brands have yet to master – and must.
“Companies typically have growth objectives but none around unifying data. It’s critical to ask, ‘what are our KPIs as an organisation’, and ‘how can data help us achieve those’,” Henshaw observes.
Ultimately, it’s never been more important to understand where a user is in their consumption journey and to show you want to form a relationship with them, he emphasises.
“We want to be understood and presented with things that are interesting and relevant to us. How do brands do that when they’re interacting with hundreds, thousands and millions of people on a daily basis? It can be a key differentiator.”■
Due to the increase of innovation and prevalence of automation technology, consumers expect more personalised and human interactions at every step of their user journey. Real-time engagement is no longer just a nice-to-have feature but a necessity for brands, with 92% of marketers saying their customers and prospects expect personalised experiences, according to Evergage and Researchscape’s 2020 ‘Trends in Personalisation’ study.
Innovative, trusted real-time engagement is no easy feat, and marketers recognise that reaching their goals will be challenging. Unifying customer data to create the cohesive journeys that customers want is particularly daunting to marketers, with many technology platforms claiming to do this but not actually being compatible with one another.
A common theme we are hearing is that the shift to digital is more important than ever before. Businesses are also shifting to digital for their employees, as their entire workforce moves to working remotely. Employees need tools for sharing information and collaborating with colleagues in real time, from home.
When we talk about the customer experience, we’re referring to the sum of all interactions a person has with your brand including marketing, service, sales and product interactions. ‘Real time’ refers to your ability to listen, understand, decide and take action based on the intelligence you’ve gathered about individual customers and their stage of the customer journey.
Personalising experiences across channels – website, mobile, email, adtech, call centre, in store or branch, and more – has become a priority for marketers in nearly every industry. But in such a rapidly changing business landscape, how are companies keeping up with these expectations? Leading companies are addressing the challenge of disparate data, disjointed customer experiences, and suboptimal engagement and conversion metrics with real-time personalisation and interaction management.
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Samantha Williams, product marketing, Salesforce
23 September 2020
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