Real-Time Personalization

Marketers and user experience professionals can take advantage of real-time personalization in numerous ways. For example:

• Offering clienteling in-store
• Serving up dynamic advertising and promotions
• Providing preferred delivery options, such as BOPIS
• Using website personalization, including dynamic landing pages

Yes. Not only does “real time” mean different things to different companies, it also means different things in each channel. For instance, a real-time offer deployed through a website or call center needs to be executed at a different speed (often faster) than a similar offer deployed through SMS or direct mail.

Real-time personalization comprises several key elements. These include real-time data updates, real-time analytics, and real-time orchestration. Additionally, you’ll need a 360-degree view of each customer—often called a golden record.

“Marketers who want to optimize real-time personalization to deliver the most contextually relevant experience need to draw on first-, second-, and third-party data from internal and external systems and channels. These include:

• Call center transcripts
• CRM systems
• Email
• Preference center
• POS systems
• Social media
• Website behavior data, including shopping cart data

These sources of data may be batch or streaming sources, and both can be used to support real-time use cases depending on your definition of real time. This connected customer view bridges silos and enables you to create a holistic view of each customer. “

Many companies define a 360-degree view of an individual customer as that customer’s golden record, because of the robustness and depth of the data. Having a continuously cleansed, correlated, merged, and up-to-date view of the customer based on data from across systems and channels—a golden record—is a must for accurately predicting customers’ preference and actions and for delivering relevant messaging and experiences.

The ability to respond with relevance at the moment of interaction with an individual customer takes speed and agility. Without it, you might miss the opportunity to connect with that customers when it matters to them and when they’re ready to take action. You also need to be agile enough to react quickly; for example, using what you’ve just learned about a customer in one channel to respond to that customer in another channel. Additionally, you need to strike a balance between timing and context to deliver a relevant customer interaction that drives engagement and action.

Responding to customers in real time with relevant messaging requires contextual data. This means not only understanding customers behaviors across channels, but also having the ability to use customers’ actions in one channel to inform your interactions with them in other channels.

Personalizing the customer experience with the level of context necessary for real relevance requires robust data; this includes having a 360-degree view of each customer—often called a golden record. Data-driven personalization entails streamlining and organizing on- and offline data to create the golden record and then leveraging analytics to automate segmentation and messaging.

One company may define 50 milliseconds as a real-time response, while another many think of real time as responding within 15 minutes. To get to the right “real time” for your organization, base the parameters of a real-time response on your business’s specific operations and needs and your individual customers’ expectation. Consider how quickly your customers expect you to react in each channel and your capabilities to meet that expectation as you think about what your definition of real time will be.