Data analytics and personalisation technology utilises detailed customer insight to make suggestions or highlight certain items and content based on the individual's interests.

Organisations such as ASOS, Google and Amazon are already highly skilled at personalised marketing and have built a following of loyal customers as a result. But personalisation is not just a possibility for large B2C companies – smaller companies without the in-house technical resource to build their own solutions can access the same capabilities as provided by Google and Apple for their own products. And increasingly B2B marketers are turning to personalisation to provide content that is specifically geared towards individual buyers, largely segmented by industry, department, function or role.

For most organisations the barriers to deploying effective personalisation tools include finding and procuring the right technology, a lack of in-house knowledge and skills to support the technology, and the expectation that they are expensive to deploy under long term contracts.

Technology

In the world of single-sign on, permissions and online product licensing there are many vendors of off-the-shelf solutions and it is often difficult to make sense of the various offerings. Off the shelf products are often restrictive and designed with a very particular business case in mind. However, it is your business case and not the business case of the particular product that needs to be forefront of mind during procurement. A solution should be able to support your business case, integrate with existing systems, and be standard-based, extensible and scalable.

Skills

While identity and access management (IAM) technology is complex and the technical skill to create such technology is very specialised, deploying these solutions need not be. There are an increasing number of Identity-as-a-Service or Entitlement-as-a-Service services available to companies to deploy which are delivered on typical SaaS terms. Such solutions are provided with standard interfaces and require only modest technical skills to integrate and deploy. Organisations do not need to have the technical resources of a Google in order to implement a service similar to Google ID.

Start small and scale

Personalisation solutions should give organisations the ability to start small and then scale up as you learn how they work and begin to see the clear benefits they deliver for the business. Personalisation may sit at the heart of the business but this does not necessarily mean long implementation timeframes and eye-watering license fees. As modern personalisation solutions are available on a SaaS basis, they provide flexibility and scalability both in technical terms and also payment terms. You pay only for what you use, as you use it and thereby avoid large, upfront licensing costs, allowing businesses to test-drive personalisation services and make sure they work for their particular use case.

Getting access to the technology that helps deliver and unlock an effective personalisation strategy may seem intimidating but it needn’t be. Easy to integrate, test and deploy, there are identity and access management solutions available in the market on a pay as you go basis.

Identity and Access Management

Simply purchasing analytics software is likely to be ineffective without having the tools to help identity and understand who your customers are in the first place. These tools start with having a strong IAM capability. As a term, IAM has been around for a while and is traditionally associated with security. Now however, identity and access management software is a critical pillar for effective personalisation. Understanding who your customer is and ensuring that they have access to the right content and services underpins any personalisation strategy.

The ability to identify your customer each time they access your services and ensure that they have access to the content and services that they are entitled to is crucial. Attempts at personalisation will fail if this data is not accurate from the start.

Looking forward, more than nine in ten marketers said they plan to use personalisation to enhance customer experience over the next year according to Business Reporter 2015. But getting the right building blocks in place before embarking on this strategy is crucial to ensure attempts at personalisation are a success.

 

By Neil Fenton, Chairman of 10Duke.

PrivSec Conferences will bring together leading speakers and experts from privacy and security to deliver compelling content via solo presentations, panel discussions, debates, roundtables and workshops.
For more information on upcoming events, visit the website.

comments powered by Disqus