Driving Customer Engagement With Hyper-Personalization and Automation

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In today’s digital landscape, businesses are constantly striving to connect with their customers on a deeper level. While hyper-personalization and automation have emerged as powerful tools for achieving this goal, most brands still struggle to master the art of customer engagement.

In this blog, we delve into the intricacies of acing hyper-personalization and automation, drawing key takeaways from a panel discussion at our #GROWTH Summit in NYC, featuring Deepak Thakral (VP of Consumer E-commerce at McAfee), Adam Bell (CMO at Customers Bank), Ryan Lee (Director of Product at Misfits Market), and Patrick Dalessandro (Digital Business Transformation Executive), and moderated by Zachary Konopka (Head of Partnerships at Kaleyra). 

4 Key Takeaways of the Session

Takeaway #1. Investing in the Right MarTech Stack is Crucial for Successful Personalization 

When asked about what strategies can help align customer data with hyper-personalization, Ryan mentioned that unclean data leads to ineffective personalization because “garbage in, garbage out.” Therefore, investing in tools that ensure data hygiene and provide room for experimentation is critical.

You should invest in tooling to allow for one, high data hygiene and two, some form of experimentation where you can define what journey or experience you want to create or you think will provide a delightful customer experience and then see how that rolls out. 
– Ryan Lee, Director of Product at Misfits Market

Takeaway #2. Customers Listen When You Tell a Compelling Story With Data

During the panel discussion, Adam highlighted that combining empathy with data to understand customers and their pain points will help you tell a great story and enable you to “catch them at a moment that is relevant for them.”

Empathy is about trying to understand your customers and building trust with them so that you deliver the right message because you’ve looked at the data of who your customers are and what value you can bring to them. This is almost like writing a Disney story that begins with tragedy, wherein you build empathy while seeing what the protagonist is going through and help them come out of their predicament.
– Adam Bell, CMO at Customers Bank

Takeaway #3. Selecting the Right Performance Metrics 

While talking about the key performance metrics marketers should focus on when dealing with customer engagement, Patrick highlighted the following: 

• Net Promoter Score (NPS): To measure customer loyalty 
• Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT): To measure the quality of individual customer interactions
• Customer Effort Score (CES): To measure the level of effort your customers put in when interacting with your brand 

When you’re thinking about planning and organizing your customer journeys, you want to not only define the segments and the journey before you put your hands on the keyboard but the key performance indicators as well. And then you need to map those back to the benchmarks that you found, in a combination of NPS, CSAT, and CES, to set the groundwork.
– Patrick Dalessandro, Digital Business Transformation Executive

Takeaway #4. The Future of Hyper-Personalization and Customer Engagement

Some of the key emerging technologies and methodologies in the customer engagement space that were mentioned in the panel discussion include:

• Artificial Intelligence: Using conversation AI to power customer interactions based on each use case.
• Contextualization: Learning all the signals that are happening inside the app/website to customize customer interactions in real-time while providing personalized offers. 
• Digitization: Innovation and digitization of various offline customer touchpoints, such as events.
• Actionable Data: Innovation around data supply chains that enable marketers to auto-transfer data from their data lakes and large spreadsheets into automation tools to get a 360-degree view of their customers. 

The customer engagement space is ever-evolving. Brands looking to re-evaluate or improve their personalization/automation strategies must look at their data closely and be intentional about the customer uses, journeys, and technologies they select. 

That’s all from the panel session on hyper-personalization and automation. We hope you were able to take away some learnings.  

Here are some recaps and recordings of other insightful sessions that we had at #GROWTHSummit NYC 🚀:

• Customer Journey to Nowhere: The Funny Side of Customer Engagement with Marketoonist

• Building the Modern MarTech Stack: The Ins & Outs and Role AI Will Play

• Delivering Immersive Experiences through Storytelling, Insights, and Data

• The Digital Evolution of Publishers Clearing House

• The #GROWTH Story of Poshmark