Personalisation emerged as the key theme of October’s panel discussion, Applying Data to Improve the Customer Experience. It has toppled segmentation as the go-to marketing model for defining audiences, and is derived from the increasing amount of consumer data available to businesses.

Personalisation is also challenging business - and agency - self-perceptions of customer centricity, exposing pitfalls in established processes and supplier relationships that constrain a truly customer-first approach.

WE EXPLORED

• The differences between segmentation and personalisation, and the influence of data in this transition

• What it truly means to be customer-centric and how to obtain meaningful insights • Established structures and beliefs that may be holding businesses and agencies back

• The role of technology

• The ethics of personalisation - the use and application of individual data

• The future of the workforce - what skills will be relevant? What should we be upskilling in now?

WITH PANELISTS

Edward Crouch, General Manager - Lavender
Nigel Dalton, Chief Inventor - REA Group
Mark Chatterton, Cofounder - inGenious AI

THE TAKEOUTS

1. Talk to people. You don’t need to use high tech methods to capture customer data – just a room and video camera or audio recorder.

2. When collecting customer data, do so with both purpose and empathy.

3. Break the culture of justifying change because someone says “I think”. Empirical evidence should drive all decisions.

4. Acquisition is no longer the focus. Customer engagement and retention is far more important.

5. Chatbots can streamline your customer service function, freeing up your customer service team members to focus on the more difficult questions.

6. Surprisingly, in some scenarios like health, customers will feel more comfortable confiding in a bot that won’t judge them, rather than a fellow human.

7. Always be honest and transparent with customers if you’re using a chatbot. Never pretend it’s a human.

8. In the Future of Work we’re going to need more Analysts to correctly identify and define problems; Data scientists and; Communicators to get buy in on new solutions from stakeholders.

9. Don’t be creepy. Just because you have the data, doesn’t mean you need to use it.

10. And remember… Customer research is a lot cheaper than software development!