Gone are the days where segmentation was the only method used to improve customer experience and engagement on E-commerce sites. There is something much bigger than Segmentation which is used to facilitate better customer experience and engagement, and that is Intelligent Personalization! Retailers will get to have a better understanding of their customers. Retailers now will not just be able to segment customers according to their profiles but understand them on an advanced deep level! This deep understanding is made possible by connecting all of the data sources and gathering lots of data. The more data you have on a customer, the better the personalization and customer experience will be.

The Need for Intelligent Personalization

Customer experience and customer engagement can be good only when each individual is appreciated for their uniqueness and when they are not segmented. When uniqueness is appreciated, the customer experience/engagement will be at its best. This uniqueness is understood only through intelligent personalization, which will help building a good relationship with all your customers. A true 1-to-1 experience is achieved through Artificial Intelligence, where a customer’s buying pattern, likes and dislikes can be discovered. AI provides the ability to develop a unified customer view and deep understanding of each customer at an individual level.

Thus, with algorithms and other programming tools, machines analyze data for patterns. And from these patterns, AI-enhanced solutions can learn how to respond, engage or process many standard tasks — responding to customer service queries, delivering personalized customer experiences or improving business processes. Thus, there is a need for Intelligent Personalization where 44% of consumers say they are more likely to buy a product if their experience is personalized.

Three ways how AI Enhanced Intelligent Personalization

The intelligence quotient for intelligent personalization lies in AI. Without AI, one cannot analyze and create unique customer profiles. And thus, the three ways how AI enhanced Intelligent Personalization is by analyzing critical customer variables, eliminating data paralysis, creating unique customer profiles and providing relevant experiences.

  • Analyzing Critical Variables: Knowledge on a customer must be more than just age, gender, location and expenditure. These data will give retailers only a limited picture. Therefore with AI, retailers can vastly expand the data used to get individual personalization right, including critical customer variables like real-time location, context, behavior and values. These variables make the difference in what you offer and when you offer! We are all social creatures, our context and behavior change constantly. Thus, AI does the trick and analyzes the critical variables that are needed to get the personalization right!

According to research by McKinsey, when brands get personalization right, marketing spend can deliver five to eight times the ROI and lift sales by 10% or more.

  • Eliminating Data Paralysis: One of the most important rules for marketers is to not get drowned in too much data. They must know to focus on the right data and eliminate the unwanted data. The desire to acquire more data in pursuit of perfection delays starting, delays valuable feedback on the effectiveness and the ability for an AI-enhanced personalization to continuously learn. Marketers must approach acquiring critical customer data with the mindset that it will grow, adapt and evolve as they become more sophisticated in understanding what variables and data have the greatest impact.
  • Creating Unique Customer Profiles: With AI, each customer persona is a continually evolving profile, updating as interactions, context, behavior and location changes, empowering marketers to target and tailor promotions that reflect customers and their evolution. At the end of the day all customers want to be treated uniquely.

With enhancements like this, marketers are at the forefront of reaping a lot of potential benefits with AI

When Intelligent Personalization meets Phygital

2018 is the year of “Phygital” experiences. The barriers between physical and digital are being broken to give birth to the best customer experience. It is all about building a bridge between the in-store experience and the off-store experience, so customers can indulge in a connected Omni-channel experience without missing out on anything. Phygital begins right from beacons capturing information about the customer in the store to AI capturing the customer’s behavior while they are surfing on-line. And now, it is all about personalizing this Phygital experience to enhance customer experience to build a good relationship with the customers. Tools like Episerver and Sitecore help personalize your E-commerce to bring increased customer satisfaction for improved sales and to provide a win-win for your organization and your customers!

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