Every Touch Point Is An Opportunity For Personalization, Says TIAA CMO

“Personalization keeps us in a constant state of re-engineering,” says Connie Weaver, who discusses what it takes to support personalized brand experiences at scale.

As marketers adopt more advanced and personalized marketing practices, the volume of content and the complexity of managing it will continue to grow—outpacing the labor-intensive content production and management systems that prevail in most organizations.

To uncover some of the secrets to profitably enabling and executing personalized content experiences that leverage customer data and insights, I will be hosting a panel discussion among CMOs—“Personalization: Fusing Creative & Analytics”—at the DMA’s invitation-only Strategic Summit on Oct. 17.

In the lead-up, I interviewed panelist Connie Weaver, CMO of financial services company TIAA, to learn more about what it takes to support personalized brand experiences at scale. Weaver recently rebranded TIAA as a “customer engagement brand” that promises to deliver simpler, more authentic, and more personalized engagement to the thousands of institutions and millions of end customers they work with.

Diorio: How are you engaging thousands of institutional clients and more than 5 million end customers across digital, social, and mobile channels? To what degree are you personalizing those interactions?

Weaver: The first step is to be very specific about defining personalization. If you ask 10 marketers what personalization means, you get 10 answers–which are too general or simply buzzwords. To be successful, you need to be very clear about the specific behavior, interaction, questions, and exploration customers want to do at any point in the journey.

There were many steps in our journey. For example, we ripped apart thousands of pages of content–which was frankly too dense, complex and product-oriented–and broke it into bite-sized elements that address what customers want to know, what they need, what they are feeling at a point in time, or where they are stuck in their planning or education process.

We then closely examined the customer conversation–using a similar mapping approach that Disney uses to reimagine the park experience. We were able to walk in our customers’ shoes; this led us to identify the exact moments where customers will engage with us, and understand at a high level of detail what they are feeling, thinking, or deciding at that very moment.

The journey never ends. Our commitment to personalization keeps us in a constant state of re-engineering. We’re constantly learning more about the customer, identifying new needs, and creating content to support it.

Diorio: Where does personalizing your interactions add value to your customers? In what ways?

Weaver: We’re moving to a new direct marketing model. It’s one that goes beyond transactional offers or direct response to an ongoing engagement model where you engage customers in a continuous conversation, and where you learn about them as they learn about you. If you design content to accomplish that, and let them explore and engage with it online and across touch points, you very quickly start to understand more about them.

For example, we treat the website as a mosaic of tiles–areas of discovery places customers can choose to go to explore and learn. We try to use all the interactive capabilities of the web, including interactive content that supports question and answer dialogues, retirement calculators, and assessments to engage clients.

Diorio: Could you offer another example?

Weaver: Another way we execute personalization is gamification. We offer our customers financial education, called Financial IQ. This is a series of financial questions that an individual would answer about their retirement planning. We set it up like a game, using elements of reinforced learning and competition to keep if fun. At the end, our customers are far more engaged and empowered to take action on their retirement plan, and we learn a lot about customers that lets us design content for groups or individuals based on where they get stuck and where they are in terms of their financial acumen and education.

The key is to look at every touch point as an opportunity. This goes beyond web interactions and includes transactional touch points, like account statements. For example, we give people reminders and suggestions on their statements in language that reflects their level of confidence or the situation they may be dealing with.

Read previous DMA Panel Preview interview: “Client Conversation The ‘Design Point’ For Personalization, Says Juniper CMO