Let's start with the buzzwords: With Omni-Channel Customer Engagement, 1:1 (hyper) personalization is possible in real time across all channels, which improves the cultivation of the customer relationship beyond pure transactions, increases customer loyalty, optimizes marketing ROI's and increases the customer live time value.

What does a visit to a restaurant have to do with personalization?

So far and heard it too often? Alright, let's get a little more specific. Yesterday I was in a restaurant again after a long time. When ordering, the waiter asked me if I wanted to order the tomato soup again like last time. I liked it so much. That flattered me twice over:

a) He remembered me

and

b)he also knew what I had ordered.

I was very happy about it and said to myself that I wanted to visit this restaurant more often.

The idea is to extend this personal 1:1 service, which customers experience in the catering trade or in stationary retail, to all other channels. This then leads to the Gretchen question for companies: How well do you really know your customers? And the following “plausibility check questions” derived from this: Do you know when these customers last bought your products? Which product? Through which channel? Were you satisfied with the purchase? What are your preferred communication channels?

Why do companies have such a hard time when it comes to personalization?

I'm pretty sure most companies can answer most of the questions above. When I ask for such information in workshops, I often get the answer: "No problem, we'll have it together in a week. The communication channels take a little longer.” And this is exactly where the crux lies. Relevant information about your customers is available in many different data silos. If in doubt, colleagues from IT must be approached, on whose list such tasks are not necessarily number 1. I have seen cases where the same customer is stored twice in the CRM, each with different customer numbers (both from the e-commerce system and the retail system). An assignment solely between these two channels turns out to be correspondingly difficult.

What does personalization actually do for companies?

Suppose the hurdle of data consolidation has been cleared and a 360 view of the customer already exists. How to deal with this? Write a separate email for each customer or display an individual banner photo on the website? This is definitely a start. Any form of customer contact should of course follow a specific goal. What do I want to achieve? Encourage first-time buyers to make a second purchase? Encourage non-buyers to buy? Do Bargain Hunters offer my Clearance products? Convert Silver Members to Gold Members?

Behind each of these tactics are concrete success factors that can be used to quantitatively document the respective measures. In a classic iterative optimization cycle, each measure can then be individually adapted to the needs.

Why don't all companies do it when it's so easy?

Here, too, an analogy from my personal experience: I wanted to install a new room door, but the bottom side had to be shortened. With the angle grinder I used (cutting depth 3 cm, door thickness 5 cm), it took 30 minutes to shorten. With a circular saw, I would have completed the same task 10% of the time.

Applied to the challenges for companies, this means that employees in marketing or e-commerce usually know exactly what needs to be done. They also have a very concrete idea of ​​how they would want to do it. Ultimately, it often fails due to systemic or organizational barriers. Information resides in various data silos such as ERP, e-commerce, analytics, retail, social media and so on. Putting in several days of effort every two to three weeks for each individual campaign discourages many companies from taking this important step. After the campaign has been implemented, anyone who takes the trouble is faced with the no less difficult task of processing the success in Excel or Access. At the latest when it comes to optimizing the follow-up campaign, taking into account changed variables, many then give up annoyed.

Customer engagement platforms as a tool set for successfully addressing customers

In addition to the large number of different data sources, the amount of information to be processed is also growing every day. Decentralized management using individual solutions will quickly reach its limits. A central and robust customer engagement platform optimizes every point of contact between a customer and the brand, even after a purchase, and accompanies them throughout their entire life cycle. Not only is information from the web shop, retail, etc. consumed, but also cross-channel interactions are initiated ("Thank you for your online purchase. Get a 10% discount on your next purchase in our branch!").

Solutions such as Emarsys or Dynamic Yield aim to consolidate and process the existing (transactional) data volumes and automatically prepare them for campaigns across all customer-relevant touchpoints using predefined algorithms. The focus is no longer just on large companies. Intuitive user guidance also specifically addresses small and medium-sized companies. Thanks to prepared scenarios and dynamic analysis metrics, successes can be seen quickly even with limited personnel capacities.

Curious about how your start in the field of customer engagement could look like? Do not hesitate to contact me!Weitere Informationen

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