{"id":27562,"date":"2021-11-26T00:05:30","date_gmt":"2021-11-26T00:05:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.thepicpedia.com\/blog\/adobe\/personalization-at-scale-will-top-enterprise-priorities-in-2021-experts-say\/"},"modified":"2021-11-26T00:05:30","modified_gmt":"2021-11-26T00:05:30","slug":"personalization-at-scale-will-top-enterprise-priorities-in-2021-experts-say","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thepicpedia.com\/blog\/adobe\/personalization-at-scale-will-top-enterprise-priorities-in-2021-experts-say\/","title":{"rendered":"Personalization at scale will top enterprise priorities in 2021, experts say"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Heightened customer expectations, an abundance of data, and the maturity of machine learning and AI capabilities are all prompting an even greater push towards personalization at scale in 2021.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s according to Judith Hammerman, head of growth for Adobe Experience Platform, as well as Justin Ablett, global lead for Adobe at IBM iX, who sat down with the Adobe editorial team to talk about personalization trends, challenges and opportunities in 2021.<\/p>\n

According to the experts, personalization at scale will be a big push for large enterprises in 2021, especially as companies move away from reliance on third-party cookies, making contextual targeting and identity resolution more important than ever before. In the interview below, Hammerman and Ablett discuss how organizations can reduce data silos as well as the technological and cultural changes that need to happen within an organization in order for personalization at scale to become a reality.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s prompting the push for personalization?<\/h3>\n

Ablett:<\/strong> From my POV, there are three drivers that are defining personalization in 2021. The first is customers themselves and the level of their expectations online. There\u2019s no tolerance for poor digital experiences anymore. And that\u2019s especially true when we think about the crazy year that was 2020, where our day-to-day lives dramatically changed. The engagements that we, as consumers, have with organizations have changed as well, to be more virtual and digital.<\/p>\n

The second driver of personalization is data. The key now is actually being able to turn that into value for customers and for organizations. The third driver is the maturity of machine learning and AI capabilities, paired with data. There\u2019s been lots of experimentation over the last few years and we\u2019ve now reached a tipping point where we can segment audiences based on customer wants and deliver highly personalized experiences.<\/p>\n

Hammerman:<\/strong> I think the only thing I\u2019d add is that data is indeed a big driver of personalization at scale, but most times that data sits in very distinct and separate silos. The data is not speaking to each other, and that is a big part of our challenge. Currently about 80 percent of all data coming through an organization is not usable and is not actionable. And that\u2019s because much of the data is unstructured, and it is sitting in silos and isn\u2019t speaking to each other. So, if it\u2019s not speaking, and it\u2019s in different places, then the understanding of that data and activating it into personalized experiences becomes very difficult.<\/p>\n

COVID-19 has been a huge driver of transformation this year. If you were doing personalization and offering advanced digital experiences before the pandemic, you got the push to do more. If you weren\u2019t doing it at all, you got the push to start. There\u2019s no excuse not to tailor the customer experience anymore.<\/p>\n

Forrester did some research on personalization that found that even companies whose personalization processes and approach are immature still see benefits. There\u2019s an opportunity for a 33 percent increase in customer loyalty and engagement, with companies seeing as much as 11 percent reduction in marketing costs just by having a personalization strategy. Starting on the journey towards personalization drives value: Companies can see an almost 6 percent increase in sales revenue, just by personalizing experiences, even if they aren\u2019t doing it at scale.<\/p>\n

You\u2019ve mentioned data silos as a hurdle. Is there anything else holding organizations back from starting with personalization?<\/h3>\n

Ablett:<\/strong> Organizations are struggling to know where to start. For those who have begun personalization, the challenge is that they don\u2019t know how to scale. They need the right systems. They need new ways of thinking and operating. That is a real difficulty. It\u2019s no longer about how to experiment with personalization, but how do you do it across all of your customer interactions, across your enterprise? That\u2019s the real challenge.<\/p>\n

In addition, there is a need for content velocity – having the right content, in the right format, at the right time to meet one-to-one personalization needs. So it\u2019s not just the marketing and customer experience teams that are thinking about personalization and putting the customer in the center of all you do. It\u2019s about infusing that way of thinking throughout the entire organization.<\/p>\n

Hammerman:<\/strong> In order to do personalization at scale, companies need a real-time customer profile that harvests all digital signals from an individual consumer. And building that profile, while honoring privacy is a lot easier said than done. There are very few systems out there, built with an adherence to privacy by design, that can gather all of those digital signals together in real time and do it in a way that honors privacy.<\/p>\n

The key is identifying individuals and layering their online behaviors into a living, breathing, real-time customer profile. This can only be done with edge computing (which brings data management and storage closer to the location its needed) because that\u2019s what reduces the latency of experiences delivered. No longer can enterprises rely on just cloud computing, which simply centralizes everything. Now we\u2019re talking about enabling preferences regionally and at lightning speed, because that\u2019s what today\u2019s customer experience means from a platform perspective.<\/p>\n

We talked a bit about AI, but could you expand on the role it plays in personalization at scale?<\/h3>\n

Hammerman:<\/strong> AI allows for the processing of massive amounts of data collected on the real time customer profiles that we discussed. It also helps deliver the best content to resonate with the consumer and drive a great experience. By 2024, 75 percent of companies will shift from piloting to operationalizing AI.<\/p>\n

Ablett:<\/strong> AI allows companies to meet the speed and the immediacy of customer expectations in terms of when they want these great experiences. It\u2019s not that they want it once a week or once a month. They want it every second of every moment when they\u2019re interacting with an organization. Marketers are compelled to move from traditional and manual segmentation to real-time segmentation and sophisticated personalization. And that need for real-time can only be delivered through using AI because it\u2019s not possible to process the volumes of data and create actionable insights through traditional computing approaches.<\/p>\n