Total CX

Privacy and the Future of Personalization

By Sue Aldrich

Person Focus
The first steps in personalizing an interaction are often based on segmentation, then progress to true personalization. This evolution is underway now, and it will gain speed. By 2016, we’ll expect personalized experiences to be as common as “most popular” lists are today.

Our preferences will be collected even more diligently because they are more useful than ever before. Technologies will automate the collection, analysis, and application of preferences and other personal data to make marketers more effective and to make our customer experiences better. If more effective marketing seems creepy, remember that effective marketing delivers only offers and suggestions that are attractive. Ineffective marketing delivers offers and suggestions that distract, annoy, or even disgust you.

Privacy Lost (Again)
And personalization will be accomplished not just with profile data and current activity, but also with a broad range of data that we have explicitly published about ourselves. Despite privacy regulations, our ratings, reviews, likes, and comments will be part of the personalization equation. And the ratings, reviews, likes and comments of our friends will be included as well. Creepy as this may seem, I am looking forward to the day that Netflix tells me that my circle of close friends have watched these three movies. I gave up my privacy years ago. I am tracked online and off, via my cookie, my credit card, my social security number, my street address, and my driver’s license. (Yes, it’s creepy. So is my cellar. I try to focus on happier thoughts.)

Privacy Regained
Marketers are aware of the creepiness factor and are alert to changes in privacy regulations. New mechanisms will emerge to enable people to control their information and its use in a more granular and also more global way. For example, one will be able to allow tracking of shopping activity for use in improving shopping experiences across the web, not just a specific site, or allow tracking of shopping, research, and reading on music, but not other topics. Or allow tracking of everything, but control which companies can use the information.

Cross Touchpoint
Technologies will make it easier for designers and marketers to automatically collect relevant information and personalize every aspect of interactions across the customer life cycle, across touchpoints and devices. As customer experience is increasingly personalized, this becomes increasingly important. If the pages I see are personalized based on my web activity, I need to see the same content from my mobile. Otherwise, the experience could be very frustrating. How do I find that interesting thing that was front and center on my desktop now that I’m sitting on the train with my iPad?

Roadmap for Your Personalization Strategy

By Sue Aldrich

We define personalization as the delivery of the most relevant and engaging content (such as products, images, or articles) for the visitor’s current task. There are different approaches to adapting customer interactions to the audience, including targeting, tailoring, customizing, segmenting, and personalizing. Personalization is the only approach that requires identifying and responding to a person. This identification might be anonymous or by name and might be performed via cookie or by log in.

Which Customer Scenarios? In order to personalize your customer experience, you need to consider the most important customer experiences your business supports. We find it useful to think in terms of specific customer scenarios. A customer scenario comprises a customer, a customer goal, and the ideal path to achieving that goal. For example, a new mother wants to feel confident that her child will get the education he deserves. She wants to quell her anxiety about the child’s future. From the business’s point of view, this is a person who should sign up for an education savings and investment product. Mother and business have congruent but different goals. Understanding the parent’s situation and perceptions will enable the business to be more successful in both marketing to her and serving her.

Do You Have the Data You Need? Do you have access to the data required to support the personalization you want? Data supporting personalization is wide ranging and frequently big. It includes environment data, such as time zone, device, country, and browser type; site behavior data, such as past visit patterns, purchases, and campaign exposure; referrer data such as domain, campaign, social graph, and affiliate; transitory data such as time, weekday, and recency of visits; and data from other sites and systems, such as call center and third-party data.

How much will it cost to get and use the data? How difficult will it be to be granted access to the data? What customer data will be useful, and where is it? What product data will be needed? What information about content will be useful, and, if we don’t have that information, how will we create it? Data accessibility will determine what personalization approaches are possible. The value of achieving various personalization features will determine how much the data is worth to your business and encourage initiatives to acquire and improve data.

These and many other issues are raised in our Roadmap to Personalization.

Socialized, Mobilized, and Personalized: Bakers Shoes

By Sue Aldrich

Bakers Shoes is a chain of retail stores with extensive online properties for engaging its customers. Importantly for Bakers Shoes’ future, it has established successful mechanisms to increase intimacy with customers – and collects masses of data about those customers. Using Facebook and its own Shoeternity site and blog, Bakers Shoes collects implicit data about customer preferences.

Bakers Shoes’ strategy for its online and mobile resources is based on analysis of interaction data and unceasing testing of designs, paths, and offers. For example, traffic analysis revealed that customers were using its mobile site to read reviews and check inventory before going to a store. This analysis convinced Bakers Shoes to abandon the mobile app tactic and invest in ongoing improvement of its mobile site. Bakers Shoes personalizes product recommendations automatically, leading to an increase in average order value of 40 percent for orders where the customer has clicked on one of these recommendations. Tactics for recommendations and offers are constantly tested and optimized to continually improve sales results.

Bakers Shoes’ Facebook page presents style suggestions, collects likes and customer comments, and, of course, clickthroughs to the commerce site. Shoeternity takes friendship further: this is the site where customers post photos of their “looks” and post comments and likes about the posts of others. Posts are extensively tagged with words describing the shoes, the effect, and the environment for wearing the look. I can search these tags to find out if animal prints (tiger, zebra, etc.) are out of fashion. Only five posts use the words “animal print,” and none this year. OK, forget the giraffe-print booties; they are so last year.

Bakers Shoes can use this trove of data in automatically select products to recommend to shoppers, in making stocking decisions, in choosing images for banners and other ads, and in choosing topics for Facebook and Shoeternity blog posts.

Bakers Shoes Mobile Pages

(Click on image to enlarge.)

© 2012 Patricia Seybold Group Inc. and Bakers Footwear Group.

Bakers Shoes has created a mobile site that is consistent with the web site, but with simplified navigation and displays. The shoes selected in response to a navigation choice are those most likely to interest the customer. In a click, the customer can like it, order it, or find a store that carries it.

~ Sue