Hyper
personalization
and your customer
experience strategy

Personalization is good. It makes people feel good about brands that offer it. Good old-fashioned personalization typically uses data points such as name, title, purchase history, zip code and behavioral data to present relevant information.

The most common example of personalization is mass marketing emails that address each customer by name. Another is when a consumer is browsing for a brown jacket and are then shown online ads for brown jackets on other sites.

Hyper personalization takes it up a notch with artificial intelligence and near-real-time data to provide extremely relevant and timely content to customers. Using AI, customer behavior and preferences can be finely captured, and that data can be turned into specific messaging delivered at the right time and place for maximum effect.

Hyper personalization isn't the same as customer profiling. Customer profiling sorts customers into broad profiles. Hyper personalization places each customer into a category of one. In other words, customer profiling focuses on market segments. Hyper personalization focuses on each individual. It's about matching facts known about the customer with actions taken by the customer, plus near-real-time data from the context of the interaction.

Because customers are using many channels, AI-based customer personalization calls for an omnichannel strategy. Data needs to be captured throughout the customer journey across many channels.

Different companies have variable needs, requirements and constraints. But this road map can generally be adapted to suit the needs of customer experience (CX) leaders:

These can include website analytics, a data management platform, sentiment analysis platforms, social listening tools—all the tools available that can acquire and process consumer data.

Include data such as the frequency of brand interaction, how they've responded to various types of messages, what time(s) of day or days of the week they're most active with interaction. Determine their triggers, such as discounts, popularity and more. To the greatest extent possible, engage the customer in choosing what they'd like to share. In addition to what you choose to gather, offer customer personalization options that allow the customer to express themselves in what data you gather.

This could include messages with offers based on known customer preferences, sizes and locations that are delivered at a time and in a context known to elicit a positive response by each specific customer. Or it could involve other content, such as serving up custom versions of your website based on each customer's history and preferences. Get experimental and measure which types of content work on which customers using A/B testing. Use a great content management system for creating and distributing the content.

For example, send a text message when the customer is physically near an opportunity) for driving interest, engagement and sales. Tools or combinations of tools should include customer relationship management platforms, A/B testing applications, customer data platforms, predictive analytics and others can help to construct and automate the full customer journey.

Use tools that measure traffic, engagement and action. Use A/B testing, monitor customer feedback—or seek it out with surveys or quick feedback.