We’ve recently been involved with a project for a large customer om the financial sector who wants to improve the customer satisfaction and loyalty by utilizing personalization as part of their customer self service. Here are some of our key takeaways from participating in the requirement phase for such a project.
Personalization is challenging
Not many people in the professional world of web has completed successful personalization projects. On your journey to find the people who know what they’re on about you’ll encounter anything from e-marketers to CRM people and vendors who claim they know how it’s done.
Be critical – as a domain that combines both business and technology within an area with fairly low maturity, personalization requires a visionary and idealistic mindset with an organization willing to buy in and back it up. Go for thought leadership and proven results when choosing who to work with and what technology to go for.
Spend enough time on model design, scenarios and requirements
Be thorough when producing the requirement specifications and use a customer centric approach to ensure customer needs is the qualifying factor. Design the business processes according to the different personalization scenarios, and tailor the scenarios to your personas to make sure you reach the right user with the right content.
Personalization requires a certain maturity level
Utilizing personalization as a way of recognizing user needs and supplying tailored content and functionality will add a layer of technical and practical maintenance on top of what you already have.
Your technical staff will have more functionality to monitor, your developers will have different scenarios to cover when developing new functionality and your editors will be producing content to suit different situations across the different personalizations segments.
If your site is still in “development mode” more than “optimization mode”, personalization could mean a level of complexity you’re not ready to handle.
Personalization is not CRM
While CRM can produce profiles and segmentations you can use to tailor and deliver good content with, your CRM system can’t provide the functionality features you need in order to actually present the personalized content and functionality to the end user.
CRM does have its place though, both as a repository for profiling data which will increase the value and relevancy of personalized content, but also for receving data back from users exposed for personalized content which you then can use in conjunction with other channels.
Personalization rulesets will depend on your infrastructure and data flow
Where a CRM system may well be the heart of your personalization system, a business rules engine will be the brain of it.
Make sure you separate logic from code so that you can redesign business processes without depending on IT resources to make simple changes.
Other natural integration points would be your content management system, your ERP system, your datawarehouse solutions and your web applications server.
When choosing a vendor, don’t opt in for solutions that only cover parts of the puzzle or you’ll end up with an integration job which will demand time and resources way beyond the original scope.