Top 3 trends in personalization

Personalization has come a long way over the years and retailers have made steady strides with delivering Best in Class One to One customer experiences. More recently, we’ve seen retailer shift their focus from single channel experiences to omni channel innovations.

In order to determine what trends are going to be prominent in personalization in 2016. I spent some time reviewing the RFPs we received over the course of last year. The RFPs I reviewed were comprised of retailers that make up over $75 billion in aggregated revenue, and were largely comprised of retailers within the IR 100 in North America. After reviewing these RFPs three trends were prominent throughout.

So first trend is the idea of completing personalization. So bringing together all different data feeds in order to create more intelligent product recommendations, personalized experiences and assortments of products that customers will view in store. Imagine if you could bring together your offline data, your online data, your geolocation, your inventory, all to create more personalized product recommendations across your channels so that your customer is given a more seamless omni channel experience. How things are merchandise in your stores are different than how their merchandise online and being able to leverage all of this these different data points to influence personalization is extremely important when it comes to influence Adding sales and loyalty.

The second trend is enabling smarter associates this transform nicely of the first. So it’s bringing together all of your different data points and enabling your associates to have a real time view into what’s happening so that they’re able to see what your shoppers are doing online, what they’re doing on their mobile devices, what they purchase what they like. It gives them insight into who their shopper is, so that right from the beginning of a conversation, whether it be in store, your contact center via chat via email, they know who your shopper is, and they’re able to give them the appropriate and relevant advice that they need.

The third trend, it’s creating really cool, technologically savvy stores. One place that we’re gonna see retailers bringing technology that it previously wasn’t present is within the fitting room. So creating an intelligent fitting room that will be able to recognize the items you brought into your fitting room with you, and offer product recommendations that can be sent directly to the associate that’s helping you and they can bring you the size just with the click of a button without you ever having to interact with them.

2016 personalization trends is really all about putting the customer at the center of the experience, so that they really truly feel that they’re receiving a seamless omni channel experience where all of the channels are one, you don’t want to have different channels, customers don’t think about different channels, they think about one customer experience, one interaction with your store. And in 2016, we’re going to see retailers really trying to bring together all of their different channels so that their customers have an experience that is zero friction and focused on them.