In the year 2011, Coca Cola ran its “Share a Coke” campaign, encouraging customers to buy personalized bottles of Coke to share with others. Bottles and cans of coke were personalised with people’s names which were submitted online or at kiosks. Launched in Australia, the campaign was promoted across multiple touch points including billboards, TV, social media and SMS, such that customer names were projected on digital signage players and used to make songs and jingles. With “Share a Coke” campaign, Coca Cola was adapting to the digital world, using a personalized experience to win customers through online engagement and offline co-creation.
As consumer purchasing power rises and consumer intelligence soars, personalization, as exemplified by Coca Cola, is becoming a non-negotiable factor in business. Organizations that go the extra mile to know their customers can effectively use the knowledge to provide personalized experiences to their customers. Lessons can be learnt from brands such as Amazon and Netflix which capture the interests and behaviour patterns of customers and use these to deliver customized services, make fitting recommendations and reward customers.
It is one thing to drive personalization through physical interaction, as can be seen in the acknowledgement, compliment or assistance of customers by front-line employees. It is another to drive personalized service delivery through digital platforms. With Artificial Intelligence and Machine learning, the challenge of scale and multi-site management in customer experience delivery is no longer an impediment. Analyzing large pools of customer data, identifying customer behaviour patterns and delivering individualized content based on the data, AI-driven customer experience management systems leverage data to deliver personalized customer experience at scale.
RightCapture, our AI-driven video analysis software presents a great opportunity for businesses and governments to obtain passive customer data from video streams. This data can be used to gather identity information such as gender and age, recognize objects such as vehicle plate numbers and aggregate data with which personalized customer engagement strategies can be built. When paired with RightPlayer, our digital signage solution, RightCapture enables contextualization of displays to suit the identities of in-store customers, making it such that products which match the traits of real-time customers are displayed on screens at points-of-sale. Not only is this a seamless marketing tactic for businesses, it also makes customers feel catered for at physical touch points.
Personalized experiences reduce the time customers take to make purchasing decisions. They deepen customer loyalty, drive upsell and improve customer retention. However, tensions about data security in the collection and aggregation of identity and behavioural data have been on the rise, and the need for personalization is being replaced by the need to be ethical in the process of personalization. To maintain balance between data privacy and personalization, businesses need to ensure strict adherence to General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), observe regulatory and compliance counseling and educate their stakeholders on trust building and guarantee of privacy.
Personalization is the hallmark of the experience economy. It is the surest way for brands to win customers who are exposed to an array of options, and for whom, excellence, convenience, and customization counts, when making purchasing decisions. If your business is still behind in the move towards personalization and data-backed customer service delivery, you could benefit from our products and professional services.
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