Episode 23 - Personalisation & AI

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📰 Top Story: The Bowtie of Personalisation

In retention, personalised, relevant experiences matter. 

Customers are more likely to purchase from a brand that recognises the customer's relationship with them. 

If a customer has had a long-standing or even a recent relationship with a brand, irrelevant content or communications that don’t reflect what the customer has purchased before or told the brand can be received negatively.

So, personalisation is not just about delivering highly targeted messaging or offers to drive an uplift in sales but also about reflecting what the brand knows about the customer to benefit the relationship. 

Regular readers of this newsletter and consumers of my content on LinkedIn will know I write extensively about the key to retention: optimising moments of truth (see episodes 1, 11, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 19, and 20). 

Moments of truth are moments in the relationship which lead to higher churn or higher retention. 

If you recognise that customers realise value from your service and that you don't create it, you can recognise that in moments of truth, you must be there for the customer in ways they need you. 

Personalisation and relevance are key at moments of truth. 

Last week, I had the opportunity to have a fireside chat with Ramus Houlind, a Personalisation Expert, Marketing Automation Leader, and Author, to get his perspective. 

Tom: Please give the readers an overview of your background. 

Rasmus: I'm based in Copenhagen. I am the author of three books about personalisation, including Hello $Firstname and Make it All About Me. I am also a regular speaker at Martech events and the Chief Experience Officer at Agillic. I help brands profit from personalisation.

Tom: So, can you describe personalisation? 

Rasmus: So one of the first sorts of epiphanies or conclusions that we had with my co-authors when developing Hello $Fistname was that at first, we thought we needed a standard definition of personalisation, but then we realised because definitions of personalisation are so broad, what we needed was a practitioners model for how to have nuanced discussions on the topic. This is when we created the bowtie of personalisation; the bowtie has four dimensions. The segments and audience, your insights on your customers due to behaviours, past purchases, demographics, etc., and moments of truth. A moment of truth is a moment in time when a customer or prospect is making a decision about your company or should be making a decision. Then, on the other side of the bowtie, you have messaging and content feeds. This could be product feeds or recommendations in retail or articles, shows, fitness classes or any other content that comes in feeds.

Rasmus: Great personalisation is about taking care to use all the insights and content at your disposal to consider all four corners of the bow tie to create a genuinely memorable experience that drives customer lifetime value not at every touchpoint, but at the most important moments of truth.

Ramus: The key to using this insight and data is consent. Of course, legal consent is important, but do you have emotional consent to personalise experiences? For example, a man researching his bank's website about finances if he's going to divorce perhaps might not want that reflected back at him in direct communication or advertising on a shared laptop. 

Tom: This is spot on: personalisation with appropriate emotional consent. Get this wrong, and personalisation doesn't work. Shifting tracks slightly, how do you think AI will influence the world of personalisation? 

Rasmus: In very much the same way as we have a data layer where we are collecting data and deriving insights from data, we will see a content layer emerge, which covers everything from your master content to your personalisation content and then matches that to the customer based on their profile and moment of truth, such that as a customer you feel like you are interacting directly with the founder of the company. That content layer will incorporate rules around emotional consent so that personalisation feels relevant and valuable but doesn't cross boundaries. 

Follow Ramus on LinkedIn, purchase $Hello Firstname or book Rasmus to speak.  

🤖 AI Feature: Connected Customer Experiences

I also sat down last week with Justin Peyton, author of the brand's next newsletter, to discuss AI's impact on marketing and retention and his views on the future. 

Tom: Please give the readers some details about your background. 

Justin: I help brands consider the intersection between themselves, marketing, and technology to exploit technology's opportunities and improve customer experience. 

Justin was formerly APAC Chief of Strategy & Transformation at Wunderman Thompson, Co-Chair of the IAB in South Asia, Jury President at the Cannes Lions, Lecturer at Singapore University, and is now founder of BrandNext, an AI-focused business transformation consultancy and advisor to the Web3 association. 

Tom: Many people are not taking AI seriously enough. You see the often-quoted statement on LinkedIn: “AI won’t replace you, but someone using AI will.” What's your take on where AI will take us in the next five years? 

Justin: Five years is a long time, and it is difficult to be confident with that time horizon, but due to the way AI is evolving, the statement you referred to is naive. AI will cause huge resource consolidation, and we will see big changes in how work is delivered in marketing. But it is easy to be pessimistic; every major change brings great opportunities.  

Tom: What are the most significant opportunities for brands? 

Justin: AI agents operating across all customer journey elements are connected and empowered to help deliver optimised experiences to drive customer loyalty. 

Tom: What's the best AI case study you have seen recently? 

Justin: AI agents connected to each other will enable the delivery of contextual experiences and vastly improved CX. The Agentforce demo from Salesforce at Dreamforce is an excellent example, particularly how it connects different AI agents and delivers seamless experiences. For instance, there is no hold time, the agent understands the context of the delivery issue, connects to other inventory agents and, finally the store to enable the customer who is travelling to pick up the product. 

Subscribe to Justin’s BrandNext newsletter or follow Justin on LinkedIn. 

💼 Case Study: Saks Fifth Avenue

Watch from 50mins to see the Salesforce Agentforce Saks Fifth Avenue demo. 

This newsletter is not affiliated with or sponsored by Salesforce. This case study is shared as a great example of what's coming with AI and connected customer experiences. 

Until next week,

Tom

P.P.S. I was on 3 podcasts in the last few weeks discussing moments of truth, retention hacks and customer love, links to all here.

P.P.P.S InsideCRM is a brilliant newsletter from my friend Jessica Jantzen. You can sign up here for lots of clever thoughts and content on CRM & Retention Marketing.

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