There are a number of factors driving the need for retail businesses to support fully enabled omnichannel customer experiences. Personalisation not only provides an authentic experience for customers, but also the ability for retailers to be at the forefront of customer expectations. When enabled correctly, personalisation reduces friction, cost of acquisition, and increases profitability. 

But what is personalisation? 

Most retailers will associate personalisation with collecting large amounts of customer data and using a machine-learning model to use this data to drive increased sales and higher customer engagement. However, there are many ways to personalise your offerings while your business establishes an AI-supported personalisation. What personalisation really requires is a set of features within your customer experience (CX) that enables an individual to have an experience that is formatted specifically to their requirements.  

For example, an online store might show you items that you have purchased previously or which you have frequently bought together. There are also more sophisticated models which try to anticipate your actions based on your behaviour and the behaviour of others and proactively present items which meet the system’s understanding of you as a consumer.  

Personalisation can provide many benefits to retailers and consumers alike, however, it does require the retail business to have a mature innovation capability. This can be achieved using one of the various cloud-based services upon which a Personalisation capability can be built. An essential requirement is having access to clean, well-structured data. 

For some businesses, owning the IP in the models that enable personalisation is important and therefore having that capability in-house is a requirement. A fashion retailer would be an example of where the store’s offering is tied to selling fashion items that go together to constitute a “fashionable outfit”. 

So far, we have talked about personalisation which needs to be considered and well planned before execution begins but there is also another type of personalisation: the set of features that your business can add to cater to a broader set of customer requirements but which when used by the customer has the feeling of a personalised experience. An example would be giving customers the ability to nominate their second choice in the cases where their first choice is not available. 

Personalisation is a strategy to enable consumers to take control of their shopping experience. Consumers want the experience to be smooth and easy; they want technology to be as invisible as possible and to assist them in reaching their goal as opposed to just allowing them to “buy stuff”. For example, someone cooking a special meal or buying an outfit presents a significant commercial opportunity to retailers who are able to connect the level of intent and interest and therefore offer additional products or services.

Personalisation is not a ‘nice-to-have’ anymore. It is a core competency that is required by retailers to remain competitive, but it does not mean you must-have machine learning running tomorrow. The more your business runs tests and incrementally innovates, the better your innovation capability will become over time and the more successful you will be when you do enable personalisation and future innovation technologies. If your business would like to understand the benefits of either type of personalisation – and how a personalisation capability could be added to your customer experience interfaces, please contact Anthony Mittelmark at Fujitsu Australia & New Zealand.

• Anthony Mittelmark is retail consulting practice leader at Fujitsu.