Personalizing Personalization: How to Create a Killer Interactive Experience (Part 2 of 2)
This is Part 2 of a series — make sure you’ve read part 1!
What — Personalized Personalization?
Let’s face it — personalization is not the same for all people. Some customers may be focused more on a company’s social impact or footprint, while others may care more about what sort of innovation, new features or functionality your product is bringing to the table. Others still may be focused on how you can make their life easier. So how do brands decide on how best to build experiences that will have the ultimate impact for their particular customer base? With everyone racing toward personalization — how does an organization differentiate?
Shining Stars
“We’re seeing a lot of different approaches toward personalizing interactions. Our Clients’ paths are different depending on their Brand, and their organization,” says Chris Balian, an Interactive Experience Partner at IBM. “Take Starbucks, arguably one of the most successful personalized apps ever. It’s ‘Stars’ reward programs and the ease of ordering your coffee ahead of time has encouraged over 17 million users a year onto the platform.”
Over 20% of Starbucks business is now executed through the app, which should be good news for the organization, as it reduces barista prep time and increases customer stickiness. But the mobile technology is so popular that in the first quarter of the year, 1,200 of Starbucks’ busiest locations had 20 percent or more of their transactions in peak hours coming from mobile orders — and paying customers were made to wait. Increased traffic and recent security hacks have even Starbucks saying there have been some pains points on the road to personalization.
Simple and Samples
“Sephora is another great example of pioneering personalization. This year the makeup retailer introduced a “Sephora Virtual Artist”, which was developed in partnership with Augmented Reality (AR) company ModiFace. The feature ‘scans your face, figures out where your lips and eyes are, and lets you try on different looks. You can play with lip colors, eyeshadows, and even false lash styles. If you like the look, well, you can buy it. Convenient! The app also offers “virtual tutorials” that show you how to contour, apply highlighter, and create winged eyeliner. It can then overlay the tutorial on your face.’ The AR App, together with Sephora’s policy to accept any returns, is making make-up shopping really easy for customers — and they love it!
“Still other approaches toward personalization go the “Sample Me” route.” explains Krystal Pomerville, IBM IX Managing Consultant. “Companies, like make-up retailer ‘Birchbox’ , and wine discounter ‘Tasting Room’ have adopted a personalized subscription model. Each month members get a beautiful box full of samples which are increasingly customized to your likes and dislikes each time you give feedback regarding the last month’s samples. End goal? After a while, these retailers will be able to pinpoint your tastes, and offer you the best products for you personally, continually. And don’t worry about new products or changing tastes. Constant interaction and feedback should foster dynamic, iterative customization. How these approaches will actually transfer over into significant product sales, however, is still yet to be seen.”
Differentiation. Differentiation. Differentiation.
And let’s not ignore the constant allure of just being plain different. ‘Lemonade,’ an ‘Urban Insurer for City Dwellers’ is delighting customers by inviting them to ‘Forget everything you’ve ever known about insurance.’ With a super easy app, the company promises you’ll be insured within 90 seconds and paid within 3 minutes — and you are! Great prices ($5/mo. for basic apt insurance) and a commitment to return part of premiums to charities, make this personalized app a big winner with the Millennial crowd, and has plenty of new start-ups, and incumbents, sitting up to see how it’s done.
Technology is another way to differentiate personalization. Take Lancôme’s Le Teint Particulier machine, through which they can make any shade of makeup in minutes, based on your skin tone. The process? You choose which part of your face (or body) you wish to match your makeup to. The specialist takes a small computerized scanner and snaps three photos of your skin. You then indicate if you want the foundation to be sheer, medium or full coverage.
The specialist inputs your data into the computer and the machine then creates your foundation, adding 24-hour hydration and/or an additional moisturizer on an individual basis. After the machine creates your blend using its data base of 20,000 shades, it is mixed in a clean bottle. Your name is then printed on a label. The trained Lancôme specialist then hands you your foundation, with your name on it — the only one in the world. The whole process and bottle costs $80. Perfect personalization.
Stop Scraping — Start Talking
The Millennial generation is of course the perfect population on which to practice the emerging art of personalization. “In a recent workshop we did to listen to Millennial buyers’ views on personalization, they were quite clear about what they wanted — and what they were prepared to give up in exchange for it,” comments Balian. “They said to us, ‘We don’t really care about privacy. We grew up sharing our lives digitally so product and service providers knowing what we like or buy is fine with us — as long as we get better service and a better product in the end.’
Another said, ‘And I’d prefer for companies to just come out and ask me about my preferences. Stop Scraping — Start Talking. I’d like them to take it from creepy to collaborative. The more sweat equity I put into the discovery process — the more likely I am to be loyal to the product or service. Make Sense? I actually wish more companies would ask me what they can do for me — like my bank. The only question my bank ever asked me was if I wanted paperless bills!’”
Craving Connection
So the world is craving connection. Customers want personalized products and services, and companies know that the new level of customization allowed by emerging technologies is the best way to encourage organic business growth. Now it’s time to get started. 45% of marketing executives polled worldwide in February 2016 believe personalization technologies are a trend that will have the biggest impact on marketing companies by 2020.
And yet, 59% presently don’t personalize content because they don’t have the technology, bandwidth or resources. 53% cite a lack of needed data and 28% say the analytics are just too difficult. Only 7% of respondents said they were currently leveraging real-time customer analytics to deliver more positive experiences, while nearly a third admitted it was a struggle to do so. Monetate found that only 6% of senior marketers worldwide said their implementation of personalization was advanced.
Problems with Personalization
Regardless of the learning curve, the need to understand and optimize new technologies or even the necessity to re-imagine business processes and talent pools, the need for personalization isn’t going away. According to The Economist Intelligence Unit,
nearly 60% of organization are in the process of getting their personalization strategy set up, 28% are just starting out and only 10% are not doing anything at all. That still means that 90% of marketers are moving forward with personalization, in one way or another. For those that have started, 3 in 10 executives worldwide are reporting they have already seen “significant” improvements in their ability to deliver a good customer experience thanks to their use of data and analytics. Time to get a real plan for personalization.
