Technology offers a personal touch

Ecom­merce retail­ers dis­play thou­sands of prod­ucts and ser­vices on their web­sites each day, but from this del­uge, most con­sumers engage with only 20 to 25 prod­ucts dur­ing a site vis­it. The onus on sell­ers, now more than ever, is to ensure the right 20 to 25 prod­ucts are greet­ing every indi­vid­ual.

This notion of per­son­al­i­sa­tion is key, espe­cial­ly among fash­ion and fast-mov­ing con­sumer goods retail­ers, accord­ing to Murat Soysal, co-founder and UK chief exec­u­tive of Seg­men­ti­fy, a com­pa­ny that has tak­en the ini­tia­tive on behalf of ecom­merce oper­a­tors to bridge the gap between digital’s advan­ta­geous effi­cien­cy and scope, and its restrict­ing lack of per­son­abil­i­ty.

“Cus­tomers come and go so quick­ly, mak­ing imme­di­ate deci­sions on whether to explore a prod­uct they are faced with more deeply or not,” he says. “Ecom­merce retail­ers need to be even quick­er, using an ever-improv­ing data pool to get ahead of the game and make sure the right prod­ucts are greet­ing each indi­vid­ual to improve the chance of improved engage­ment and uptake.”

In the future prod­uct rec­om­men­da­tions will be so effec­tive they will sug­gest prod­ucts that will fit indi­vid­u­als with­out doubt

Segmentify’s role as an ecom­merce per­son­al­i­sa­tion plat­form address­es and cham­pi­ons each customer’s indi­vid­u­al­i­ty, begin­ning at a company’s web­site and branch­ing out across all mar­ket­ing meth­ods and pro­mo­tion­al mate­r­i­al.

“It’s all about cre­at­ing a con­sis­tent and per­son­al cus­tomer jour­ney for every vis­i­tor,” says Mr Soysal. “The move from tra­di­tion­al com­merce to online and omnichan­nel brings so much oppor­tu­ni­ty and flex­i­bil­i­ty, but also so many poten­tial pit­falls.

“There are com­pa­nies out there that are greet­ing cus­tomers online with the pro­mo­tion of size nine run­ning shoes, when they’re actu­al­ly out of stock in that size, or rec­om­mend­ing wash­ing machines to peo­ple who only bought one a month pre­vi­ous­ly. It’s one thing to gen­er­ate data on indi­vid­u­als, but con­vert­ing that data into an accu­rate per­son­alised jour­ney for each is a bot­tle­neck.”

When Seg­men­ti­fy incept­ed in 2015, its aim was to turn all its own cus­tomers into Net­flix­es and Ama­zons. Both glob­al heavy weights have thrived from their arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence or AI-dri­ven approach to the cus­tomer expe­ri­ence, ensur­ing each view­er or buy­er is greet­ed with a per­son­alised set of options as opposed to a ran­dom sam­ple of shows or prod­ucts.

“Of course, these com­pa­nies have huge AI and machine-learn­ing bud­gets, but you don’t need that lev­el of invest­ment to achieve the same results,” Mr Soysal explains.

Across an ecom­merce operator’s web­site, email blasts, SMS chan­nels, push noti­fi­ca­tions and even brochures, the empha­sis needs to be on pro­vid­ing a per­son­alised array of options akin to these giants. For those that do so effec­tive­ly, Mr Soysal affirms that the ben­e­fits can be both exten­sive and almost imme­di­ate.

“What we do to a client’s web­site is quite trans­par­ent­ly track­able and return on invest­ment is easy to eval­u­ate,” he says.

“If con­sumers are pre­sent­ed with four prod­ucts on a web­site via a spe­cial wid­get, they click on one option, add it to a bas­ket and buy it, you can deduct that per­son­al­i­sa­tion has had a direct link to that sale.”

Seg­men­ti­fy has helped retail­ers achieve, on aver­age, 10 per cent rev­enue con­tri­bu­tion from such wid­gets and this extent of improve­ment is now a min­i­mum expec­ta­tion from a con­cert­ed per­son­al­i­sa­tion strat­e­gy using AI tools.

“This can be achieved by just adding one line of code to their web­site and the ben­e­fits are seen with­in two weeks,” says Mr Soysal.

He believes per­son­al­i­sa­tion will con­tin­ue to prove itself as the main dif­fer­en­tia­tor from a cus­tomer expe­ri­ence per­spec­tive, espe­cial­ly giv­en the machine-learn­ing tools it’s lever­ag­ing.

As more and more cus­tomer data is gath­ered, the tools at hand will become smarter, the propo­si­tions to cus­tomers will improve fur­ther and return on invest­ment will make for more enjoy­able read­ing.

“It will improve not just what is rec­om­mend­ed, but how it is rec­om­mend­ed too,” says Mr Soysal. “In the future prod­uct rec­om­men­da­tions will be so effec­tive they will sug­gest prod­ucts that will fit indi­vid­u­als with­out doubt. Pow­ered by aug­ment­ed or vir­tu­al real­i­ty, retail­ers will be able to pro­vide rec­om­men­da­tions that suit a per­son bet­ter than they could even browse them­selves, based on pre­vi­ous choic­es.

“The more we learn about each indi­vid­ual cus­tomer, the bet­ter the per­son­al­i­sa­tion jour­ney will be for end-con­sumers as the notion of cus­tomer expe­ri­ence enters this next era of dig­i­tal dis­rup­tion.”

For more infor­ma­tion please vis­it www.segmentify.com