Personal treatment. Customers crave it, but it’s hard to provide. A small brick-and-mortar business has the opportunity to get to know their customers over time — what time they usually visit, their typical purchase, their mood, and personal tastes. Even salespeople at big-box stores can intuit a lot about a customer from their style of dress and a few seconds of interaction. These physical, real-world cues make it easy to welcome repeat customers with familiarity, provide recommendations, and reward loyalty.
Creating personalized experiences in the digital world is much trickier. Digital experiences need to work at scale. Instead of dozens or hundreds of customers a day, digital brands need to interact with thousands of customers every minute. And while analytics data can provide a wealth of data about a customer’s previous online behavior, it’s often anonymized and impersonal.
“Digital marketers are typically responsible for running several campaigns, with multiple user touchpoints, all concurrently,” says Pankhri Singhai, a product manager for Adobe Campaign. “The goal is to help customers find what they need with the right message at the right time. To do that, the marketer starts with data but ends up making a lot of assumptions about the association between data, observed behavior, and what part of the life cycle the customer is in or what they might be interested in next.”
It turns out that knowing a lot about a person’s demographic details and online history is an imperfect way of really knowing who they are, how they are feeling, and what they might expect from you today.
“The risk is that personalization can end up feeling superficial, based on simple data like knowing their name or birthday, rather than their real-time behavior,” Pankhri says. “The other thing that can happen is customers end up getting off-target messages, or worse, multiple conflicting messages from a brand. Instead of feeling personalized, it just becomes overwhelming and disjointed.”
Pankhri wanted to see if it was possible to leverage the power of artificial intelligence (AI) to make better use of data at scale and optimize a personal customer journey. The result is a sneak technology called #PerfectPath, recently demonstrated at Adobe Summit.
#PerfectPath will leverage Adobe Sensei AI to analyze the vast amounts of anonymous customer data a website collects about its visitors, comparing known behaviors and desired outcomes such as engagement or conversion, and then predicts which customer journeys, paths, offers, and touchpoints are most likely to result in the desired customer outcome.
