Migration – Offering Personalised Experiences

When migrating to a composable platform, organisations are provided with a tremendous opportunity to offer truly personalised experiences to their customers, but only if they are capable of utilising carefully handled data and cross-company thinking to drive personalisation.

Composable platforms offer best of breed as a genericised benefit which is often labelled as the source of success for a brand’s successful personalisation efforts. This is true to an extent, without best-of-breed technology enabling each part of an experience, it can be difficult to take that experience to the next level. however simply having the capability does not guarantee your customer a better experience. without a robust approach to data and firm understanding of what personalisation means to your organisation across the entire business it’s still very easy to provide your customer a broken journey.

But why worry about personalisation in the first place? Well, customers are far fickler than they were five or even two years ago. Covid greatly impacted every kind of retail and the opportunities presented to a customer to go away and buy from someone else are significant. So, without your messaging to a customer being very attractive by being very personalised it’s unlikely you’ll be able to drive them to engage.

Understanding Your Data 

When you consider shifting to composable as part of a re-platforming journey, perhaps one of the most impactful things to consider is which systems you want to use in that composable architecture you are building and what those platforms give you not just in terms of capabilities but also ease of use in order to support your business strategies such as personalisation. Businesses need to look at the capability of the tools they select, and what data they need to provide it to best utilise those capabilities, as without this data, the new tools provide nothing more than the old tools.

Organisations have to consider where their data is coming from, or rather, is going to come from. Best of breed composable systems have advanced capabilities but in order to make best use to those capabilities you have to consider how are you best utilise those systems and where the right data to fuel them comes from.  A good example is event and behaviour data, is that going to come from the commerce engine and then flow out into outlying systems? and if so, then how is it going to feed out? Can the eCommerce platform you’re looking at easily connect to those outlying systems in order to be able to provide that data? Or are you going to place that data into a central location which then pushes data out to those systems like a CDP. More on CDPs and data centralisation here

In order to consider the above effectively you also need to understand how much data you are bringing over during your migration. If you pick a specific time period, such as 12 months’ worth of data, then it’s likely some customers will be left out or be unable to view some past orders. That data you decide to migrate also has to be worthwhile for the new systems to ingest, and so some degree of data cleaning and quality checking is worthwhile. It’s not just a consideration of what you capture going forward but also what data you choose to bring with you or leave behind.

Lastly, it’s crucial to centralize your product data. To ensure the experience a customer has online matches the one they’d have in store, on the app, using a standalone kiosk, talking to Alexa, or any other way your brand may be interacting with your customers, each of those touchpoints need to connect to a central data hub.