What Are The Challenges With Personalisation?
Personalisation seems simple, it is all about combining your data to hone messaging. Yet companies of all sizes are struggling to initiate successful campaigns. We have seen the four following themes pop up time and time again as major challenges for organisations to address…
Data Silos
In many organisations, information is scattered across various systems – from CRM tools and backend databases to e-commerce platforms like Shopify. The consequence of such dispersion is a fragmented view of data, resulting in a knowledge gap where numbers differ and a comprehensive understanding remains elusive.This disjointed approach not only impedes data activation but also undermines the potential for a holistic understanding of customer behaviour. It could be for instance that you are activating all the data captured in your marketing CRM but not in your ERP, selling people what they are browsing and not realising they have already purchased.
Unclear Strategy
Organisations often grapple with questions about what to do with the abundance of customer data at their disposal. Without a well-defined strategy, efforts towards personalisation tend to focus on upselling rather than understanding the fundamental reasons behind customer interactions. Companies must scrutinise which pieces of information truly matter in tailoring customer interactions. For example, we were talking to an eCommerce brand that sells football shirts. While they saw themselves as being fashion-led, but most of their customers would purchase products based around the team they supported or their nationality. Boom! By adding in two questions into their order process, they can personalise their communications with ease.
Skills Gap
The effective execution of personalisation relies heavily on skilled professionals, particularly data scientists working on a robust infrastructure crafted by data engineering and analysis teams. Unfortunately, there is a growing shortage of data skills, with demand consistently outpacing supply since 2016. This scarcity not only drives up wages but also leaves companies struggling to assemble a proficient in-house team. Even those with existing teams often find themselves yearning for more resources to meet the demands of data activation and personalisation.
Technology Gap
Last but not least, organisations encounter challenges related to the tools and technology employed for data activation/personalisation. This could be due to legacy systems that do not communicate with each other hindering seamless integration of data, or tools which claim to provide a single source of truth but end up displaying multiple sets of data side by side, creating confusion rather than clarity. Even in well-structured data visualisation tools, a gap between insight and action persists when data resides in a separate application. Activating data becomes a cumbersome and often manual task, defeating the purpose of having sophisticated tools in the first place.
So How Can You Tackle These Challenges?
If you want to robust personalisation, you need robust data, modelled in your data warehouse and then fed into your different tools with reverse ETL. To find out how you get there, be sure to get in touch with the friendly team here at 173tech.