White Papers      Webinars  Search

Register for our newsletter:

A further stage of personalisation involves making note of a customer’s preferences and statistics and using these automatically in any customer-facing process. The key here is to integrate all the information you have to get a full picture of the customer you are dealing with. Where earlier personalisation involved purely positive factors (the ticked box, for instance) modern methods require that all the data is used together. For example, it is all very well noting that Mr Bloggs has expressed an interest in your general insurance services, but if a salesman calls to offer him motor insurance, only to be told he has no car or driver’s license, it is not good for your reputation or your business.

Personalisation in the B2B world means personalising everything—the executive's analysis of the business, the manager's view of the production line, the partner's view of the supply chain, the supplier's view of the demand chain—as well as the customer's view of the product or service. Personalisation has to be everywhere, or e-business will just be business as usual.

The drive to personalise is sitting at the head of the CRM bandwagon and tends, among everyday consumers, to elicit two incompatible reactions simultaneously. Many people who are familiar with the term CRM say that it makes them feel uneasy – ‘Do you really want to have a ‘relationship’ with the businesses you buy products and services from?’ And even worse, if these businesses still insist on calling it a ‘relationship’, isn’t it rather sinister that the relationship is ‘managed’?

At the same time, however, these people are highly critical when businesses get their names wrong, send them junk mail suggesting they buy a product they’ve already bought, or try and tempt them with books on mountain biking when they actually prefer gardening: in short, when service isn’t properly personalised.

Businesses could argue that customers want personalisation, but that they don’t realise it. Ultimately, people buy to satisfy needs and requirements they have, and the more that companies can both know and cater to these needs, the higher the chance of their being satisfied. It is probably not surprising that the initial reaction to personalisation can be suspicious and hostile. The early crude attempts – brochures and leaflets peppered around thousands of houses – were much more of a nuisance than a help.

At any rate, such a split perspective on personalisation is rather less common within the business world, where terms like ‘holy grail’ are constantly applied. CRM systems are jumping off the shelf, with AMR analysts predicting 60% growth this year. Nor is it seen as a passing fad. IDC predict a market value of $8.7 billion worldwide by 2003 – the rush to personalise has never been more headlong.

Organisations who buy such solutions are attracted by the ability to improve customer care, to build longer-term relationships, to improve user productivity, and to synchronise sales and customer care. These systems promise detailed monitoring of customer reactions, cross-referencing of possible product offerings, and even increased sales staff effectiveness: some systems which make real-time suggestions on screen to telesales staff during sales calls have sharply increased sales made to over 60% of calls. The fundamental objective is to instil greater customer loyalty, sales, and satisfaction.

Buyers are also attracted to the seeming progress towards a genuine ‘holy grail’, the unified view of the customer. If the entirety of an organisation’s customer contact could be localised in one place then acted upon, it is assumed – quite rightly – that sales could be improved and customers better retained. This unified view, however, is quite far away.

Before any sort of holy grail can be reached, personalisation is necessary, and before that, several key factors have to be in place. For one, all data has to be correct in the first place. Established businesses at least have the option of using legacy data, gathered over years of traditional marketing by post or telephone, or perhaps even in stores. New companies will certainly have to buy data or start from scratch. This is an expensive business nowadays, as the battle for customers is fought on a company’s exploitation of the finer details of customer statistics. The sheer marketing push required to even get customers to a website, let alone have the opportunity to exploit personalised information on them, has been far too costly for all except the best-backed and most tenacious players, as the dotcom shakeout has demonstrated.

Not only does personalised data have to exist and be correct, it all has to be available and correctly updated however the customer contacts the organisation. There are two levels to this data. First, there is data about customers which can be used to sell to them, but not explicitly mentioned.

Then there is live data a customer may want to know – an airline ticket holder ringing to ask about a reservation, for example. Although companies may often not be able to make positive use of the first type in real time (during an incoming telephone enquiry, for instance), all too often they don’t even have the second type at all, the information a customer expects. Call centre operatives have to fob off customers with excuses such as ‘I’m sorry, I don’t have access to that data from here’.

What is needed as a bare minimum for personalisation is for all systems and data to be available at any time to the front-end ‘touchpoint’, regardless of whether it’s a WAP phone, call centre or website. This is currently far from the case, with AMR putting the number of company websites offering basic capabilities like real-time customer service or real-time inventory at less than 1%.

This ability to personalise all channels is being dubbed ICRM (Interactive Customer Relationship Management) by various commentators, and also includes features like accurate "smart" databases that suggest answers to frequently asked questions, tools that facilitate good response time to customer queries and the ability to interact smoothly (as though in person - e.g. voice-over-IP in addition to chat). ICRM also covers software which pre-emptively examines a web-users ‘cookies’ – information about web habits and interests – to predict personal traits and preferences.

However, the question remains: is personalisation what customers really want or need? E-business in general certainly has other problems to worry about. In Europe-wide research on 95 e-commerce sites, analysts at Jupiter Communications point out that many of the most basic elements of personalisation are missing from UK and European e-businesses. 12% of sites examined had no email contact address and 30% failed to respond to emails. If a site simply ignores a customer or prospect who makes contact, should it not be redressing this customer service disaster instead of forging ahead on the finer points?

In a similar vein, Gartner Group surveyed the top 50 consumer e-tail sites and found that not one was judged “good” or “excellent” for customer service. Twenty-three percent were given an “average” rating, the majority – 73 percent – were rated “fair” and 4 percent came out “poor”.

In some areas, personalisation has come of age. In the US, Barnes and Noble have a full-time Director of Personalization on their management team. The second annual San Francisco Personalization Summit was judged a success in November by the local media, having tripled in size during the year. The Summit President, however, struck a cautious note: “We still tend to overpromise – we’re so excited by the technology that we talk about what it could do instead of what it can do – today.”

Personalisation should be about giving customers what they want. Unfortunately, a great deal of e-commerce is influenced by ‘me-too-commerce’, instead of a drive to put in place the traditional customer-service pillars of responsiveness, robustness, customer contact and flexibility. Until e-businesses get all their systems integrated and give customers at the very least what they need, personalisation has to remain a secondary priority.

Key points

What customers do want:

•the right information straight away
•the ability to do business using whichever means they prefer no barriers when they are trying to get something done
•customer service staff who know what they need to know

What customers don’t want:

•a ‘relationship’ with most businesses they deal with
•irrelevant offers and inapplicable junk mail
•to have to give the same information twice
•to have to correct a sales or customer service person



Actional is a market leader in direct-connection integration architectures. The company’s customers include leaders in the Global 2001, across financial services, communications, utilities, manufacturing and travel. Actional products are also licensed by leading EAI vendors, platform partners and e-Business application developers. Actional is backed by NeoCarta Ventures, New Enterprise Associates, and International Capital Partners.