One of the first lessons taught sales and marketing professionals, essentially by rote, is the importance of ‘right message, right audience, right time’.
Just like a good slide deck and a four box diagram can take you a long way in management consulting, this 6-word paean to the importance of tailoring your messages to the audience and the context can help you bluff your way through many a meeting or cocktail party.
But on a more serious note, it’s also an enduring touch stone for marketers, reminding us that as much as marketing can be highly sophisticated and scientific and automated and data led, it is also fundamentally simple in nature, and owes as much to the ancient merchants of yesteryear as it does to CRMs and cookies and data warehouses.
Of course, the concept that brings all of this together is personalisation – often seen as the marketing holy grail. Being able to tailor your product and message to the precise nuances of your customer is what every marketer would like to do. The tricky bit lies with the scalability of a more personalised approach – the bigger your business, the more customers you have and the more products you offer, the harder personalisation becomes.
Personalisation drives loyalty and ROI uplift
The rewards of personalisation are certainly worth pursuing.
McKinsey data shows that personalisation can deliver up to 5 to 8 times the ROI on marketing spend, and lift sales by 10%.
Apply that to your own experience every day at the coffee shop. If the barista remembers your name and your order each day, chances are you are going to keep going back there. What’s more you are likely to be less sensitive to small differences in price, and be more forgiving of the odd burnt milk! (Well, maybe just a teeny bit more forgiving!).
In an analogue world, personalisation could be challenging, and expensive, and clunky. Not so long ago, the businesses that were regarded as being ‘leading edge’ were actually applying fairly basic algorithms to limited databases, which were serving up messages to call centre staff called ‘next best sale’. Businesses that offered multiple products to customers (like banks, insurers, and telcos) were early adopters of this approach, which, while personalised to an extent, was still very much about a sale rather than a great customer experience.
Fast forward to today, and the smarts and implementation around personalisation have been elevated to another stratosphere.
Today, it’s all about decisioning.
Jargon check: ‘decisioning’
Decisioning is a technique that blends data, rules, and predictive analytics to make smart decisions about what to talk to customers about, on what channel, at any given time. And here’s the thing – the next best thing to talk to them about may not be about one of your products. It may be about the weather!
The foundations of decisioning are found at the intersection of people, business, and technology. Decisioning requires a business to be genuinely agile and holistic – buzzwords we’ve all heard before, but which some of the world’s biggest brands are living in real life.
The phenomenal success of Amazon, for example, is driven by their decisioning capabilities. By looking at previous purchases, wish lists, shopping carts, reviews, and other data points – including the purchases of ‘similar’ customers – Amazon is able to recommend products. It’s a strategy which generates 35% of the company’s annual sales. Similarly, it is able to use predictive analysis to send items you are likely to buy to the nearest distribution centre, allowing for faster and cheaper delivery. Their real time price monitoring gives them the capability to change prices every 10 minutes to ensure customers are getting the best deal.
There are some local success stories too, with a growing number of Australia’s biggest companies – and biggest marketing spenders – jumping on board the real time decisioning train.
Aussie companies leading the way on decisioning
CBA, NAB, Suncorp, BUPA, Optus, and Foxtel are spending millions each year on their decisioning capabilities, with the goal being to lift revenues, loyalty, and customer lifetime value.
An excellent article by Andrew Birmingham on the Mi3 website shed more light on some of these examples.
The decisioning engine used by CBA – one of the earliest adopters in Australia – makes around 53 million decisions every day. These decisions are about the next best action for a customer. That action may or may not involve a real person talking to a customer. It may or may not involve some sort of digital communication to the customer. It may or may not involve any immediate action at all.
Even more fascinating is that next best action may not involve a CBA product at all. Their decisioning engine tells customers when a weather bomb is about to hit and helps them afterwards. According to Birmingham, this can sometimes see them contacting the customer even faster than emergency services can get hold of them.
Born out of recent weather events across Australia, you can see how powerful and appreciated by customers this would be.
Additionally, their ‘Benefits Finder’ feature has ‘hunted down and handed out a billion dollars in grants to customers’, putting an average of $710 into the pockets of those customers using the app.
That makes for a fairly awesome CX.
All of which brings me back to the start – personalisation, getting the right message to the right people at the right time – relies on having insights into your customers.
The Ensombl platform has 8,500 users
As the custodians of the Ensombl platform, we are privileged to see thousands of conversations taking place across our 8,500-member advice community. It means we can tap into deep insights about the challenges, issues, and problems financial advisors are trying to solve right now. In turn this enables us to work with corporate partners to create content which solves those problems. To the extent that content is insight driven, and effectively co-created, it tends to resonate more strongly with our members, so you could say it’s a virtuous cycle.
CX a priority topic for advisors
It was pleasing to see, in the results of some research we recently conducted, that advisors were placing CX as one of their top three priorities for content and for guidance. This reinforces what we have always believed about the client centricity of the advice profession.
If you think you can help advisors improve their own CX, or indeed can solve any of their other issues and challenges, and want to tap into the insights of 8,500 advice professionals, get in touch, we’d love to chat.
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