Remember the days when you clicked on something interesting online and then a similar or even identical ad followed you around wherever you went?

In campaign management parlance, we would categorise this issue as a relevant communication/offer which did not observe any contact frequency caps.  Third party cookies or not, this masks a deeper problem even for sufficiently identified Consumers: the channel “serving the offer” is unaware of crucial information about the Customer captured elsewhere.  I used to work for a Singaporean Bank and our credo was “the Customer tells us once and we remember”.  This is so difficult to do these days but the reward is greater than ever before.

We have examples of a classic ‘abandoned cart’ reminder that does not inform any other enterprise system about consumer preferences.  You put red shoes in your cart but not pay for it and, yes, you get reminders to complete your purchase.  But does the organisation learn about your preference for red colour?  Do you get an eDM with a dress/bag combo as the next-best-offer?

Off-line to on-line and vice versa (o2o)

We think that this requires the ‘pooling’ of all information about an identified Consumer and as much as we can use about an unidentified one.  In particular:

• Access to information (CDP or APIs or a combination)
• Superior AI (in the above example, it would be impossible for a cross-sell model to offer a red bag)
• (Micro) Audiences that are constructed ‘in the moment’ (the Consumer journey is no longer linear)
• Automation (this has to be done at scale as the combination of offers to micro-Audiences can be large)

How can I tell how this affects Customer Experience?

We are always aware that Consumers do not differentiate their expectations by Channel; McKinsey found many years ago that an organisation may be ticking all the boxes in terms of Channel performance and still lagging on overall CX. [https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/marketing-and-sales/our-insights/from-touchpoints-to-journeys-seeing-the-world-as-customers-do]

Digital Alchemy advocates the fusion of digital and offline touchpoints in all operations that ‘touch’ the Consumer.  We have developed:

• An assessment process that examines the o2o maturity and preparedness of your organisation; and/or
• A POC experiment where we weave Analytics and Campaign Management with offline and online information.

 It does not always seem like a priority because organisations may have a lot of offline and a lot of online activity.  It is a decent leap that requires commitment and orchestration of a lot of different disciplines rather than individual paths to Channel success. 

Written by Yorgos Moschovis – yorgos.moschovis@digitalalchemy.com.au