THE HIGHLIGHTS
Mining for gold: How to make personalisation work for your customers
Festival of Marketing delegates debated how to personalise efficiently while building customer trust, with suggestions ranging from new roles for ‘gold nugget miners’ to simply paying attention to customers’ experiences
One of the great tensions today’s brands face is in personalising interactions with customers at scale, while simultaneously maintaining relationships of trust with those same people.
At the Festival of Marketing, Salesforce Marketing Cloud’s EMEA product marketing director Jonathan Beeston expressed the challenge as: “How can we wow our customers – and do that in a way that's personalised, and helps us build this trusting relationship over time – but also do it efficiently?”
Achieving the right balance can demonstrably improve returns on marketing investments, but the difficulty of the task is only growing, as the marketing and data landscape goes through a long period of extensive change.
It's not just the economic climate that’s shaking up brands’ understanding of consumer preferences and behaviour. Within the context of an internet revolution that has been under way for more than 20 years, the past two years have seen huge migration of consumers onto digital channels due to the pandemic, followed by a degree of rebalancing. On top of these big shifts have come industry moves to limit tracking of user behaviour online, meaning “it's harder to stitch things together with cookies”, Beeston noted. “Data is something that's a massive challenge for us. And it's fractured.”
Sponsored by salesforce
Salesforce's Jonathan Beeston on the 'customer success gap'
This, he added, is causing marketers to “readdress” how they apply the data they have, how they make use of artificial intelligence and machine learning to do it more efficiently, and how they direct their employees’ efforts into the areas that add most value.
Marketers have been grappling with these issues for some time already, but it appears most have a great deal of work to do. Beeston pointed to the “customer success gap” uncovered by Capgemini research, which found 75% of surveyed companies thought they were customer-centric, whereas only 30% of customers in the study agreed.
Against this backdrop, Festival of Marketing delegates were set the task of discussing the biggest challenges and opportunities in this area in several breakout groups. Their focus was on four key areas: personalisation, insights, collaboration and efficiency.
These discussions, held under the Chatham House rule, naturally threw up as many questions as answers, but among the takeaways were several useful pieces of actionable advice. Perhaps most notable was one group’s conclusion that brands need more “gold nugget miners” – people who are equipped to bridge the gap between marketers and analysts, able both to understand the depth and breadth of data available and to use it to find insights that have real-world applications.
But, even without creating outlandish new job titles, another marketer noted that collaboration can be encouraged by simple objective-setting, thereby yielding the kind of insights that allow more effective, more customer-centric personalisation.
“If each team has five objectives and three of those are aligned, then by design those teams will have to work together as they have a common goal,” he said. This minimises the likelihood that requests for assistance between teams are deprioritised because they are seen as distractions.
A distinction was drawn between what one group called “real” and “vanity” personalisation – the former being defined as something “meaningful” that “actually helps” a customer. And similarly, another group warned that brands need to be careful when approaching “mass personalisation” – using insights in an automated way to make messaging more relevant at scale.
Without proper care, this can turn into “hyper-targeted”, “ultra-personalised” marketing that bombards consumers across media channels and “freaks them out”. There’s a balance to strike between this and the kind of personalisation that makes customers feel special because their preferences have been accurately understood and acted upon.
Indeed, brands always need to retain a human touch and acknowledge technology needs to be deployed in order to help, not hinder, customers. As one participant pointed out: “There's so much tech and automation but, instead of giving us that efficiency that we’re seeking, we’re actually becoming more inefficient.”
In particular, she highlighted the example of customer journeys on telephone helplines, where customers are directed through a series of automated steps to find the right company department, but can sometimes be cut off without being given the option to talk to an agent.
There is no reason mistakes such as these should prevail, however, if marketers constantly keep in mind the real-world experiences their customers are having with their brands, and how data and personalisation efforts are influencing them. To achieve the right outcomes for customers, marketers and machines must work in harmony. ◆
"Capgemini research found 75% of surveyed companies thought they were customer-centric, whereas only 30% of customers in the study agreed."