Why personalisation is retail’s greatest opportunity

What are the hallmarks of a great customer experience online and how does personalisation fit into that?

Simple, usable and joyful. Being able to deliver a friction-free CX [customer experience] is the goal and that means not only putting the voice of the customer at the heart of everything we do, but also actively and continuously listening to it.

What types of personalisation does the customer really value?

Avoiding being prescriptive and taking away control or freedom from the user but, almost like a concierge, allowing us to offer and prompt what we think will be the best experience. An example we’ve put into practice is being able to amend the homepage or site navigation based on past visits, and we’ve seen higher a conversion rate percentage and average order value.

What does personalisation mean to you as a marketer?

Relevance and resonance. Being able to engage and excite the emotional core of the user by giving them what they want, rather than painting all users with one broad brush. Being able to have a better conversation with the user – for example, being able to identify and serve footwear creative to a user shopping for shoes means we can talk more about the product and its characteristics.

What is your end goal in terms of offering a personalised customer experience?

We want to be able to market to the individual. We’ve been able to make some headway and are delivering curated homepage experiences to the individual based on hundreds of data points. We also have years of catalogue legacy data we can leverage to make sure we’re not bombarding users with non-relevant messaging but curated offers and messages that will get the user excited.

What are the biggest challenges your personalisation strategy faces?

Hours in the day. There’s always so much going on and so much we can do with our database – the sky is the limit.

What level of alignment is needed between marketing and other departments, such as customer services, call centres, IT and ecommerce?

There needs to be alignment from the get-go to be able to understand all the different departments’ requirements, availability and priorities. That means taking the time to get it right at the start, and have that listening and sharing period.

Which department or departments have primary responsibility for driving personalisation in your business?

The CRM [customer relationship management] team for communications and CRO [conversion rate optimisation] team for the onsite experiences. However, we are also making sure we’re all rowing in the same direction and being able to support each other to provide a consistent journey.

Describe the approach to personalisation you are taking in email, on your website, in your mobile app and in other parts of your customer experience.

We start with the largest category, such as new visitors versus returning ones, then drill down with each successive step. This could be new visitors and the traffic source, together with the device type used and category searched for.

How could you advance your approach to personalisation in individual channels?

We’ve started to explore this now with artificial intelligence but automation has opened up its own wealth of possibilities, so we’re very much at the tip of the iceberg.

How do you measure the impact of personalisation?

Traditional KPIs [key performance indicators] are always important and usually the easier to communicate across the business. It is important to be mobile first with the understanding that returning customers or mobile-browsing customers will have different KPIs, and no matter what we do, they will never convert on that visit, so we look to other KPIs of engagement.

Where do you think the future of personalisation lies?

Automation will be the way forward but not without bringing everyone on board with an understanding that what we see as marketers may not be ideal for us, but will be for the individual customer. I am thinking of a carefully curated homepage that renders differently for each customer based on successfully tested algorithms.

What are the hallmarks of a great customer experience online and how does personalisation fit into that?

Consumers today have more places and ways to shop than ever. And they have increasingly shorter attention spans. So if you have an ecommerce business, and you want online shoppers to buy from you, you need to be able to quickly attract their attention – and make the shopping experience pleasant and easy.

Before any thought of personalisation, it is imperative to achieve the following:

• Make sure your site loads quickly
• Optimise for every device
• Easy navigation
• Good search technology
• Great photography
• Succinct content
• Customer reviews
• Accurate stock
• Make it easy to contact you
• Live chat
• Streamlined and easy cart process
• Free shipping and simple returns process

Based on observation and conversation with customers, brands can compile customer profiles with unique identifiers that can guide content, offers, interactions and recommendations across every department of the brand, giving each individual customer a unique journey

Each profile becomes richer from every interaction the customer has with the brand, adding as it learns each customer’s wants, needs and preferences. Optimising the customer journey will ensure that customers think of your brand for all their needs.

What types of personalisation do you think the customer really values?

Everyone likes to be recognised when they go into a store, and the same needs to apply to the web. Remembering styles viewed and purchased recently to present a new offering is the logical follow-up to this.

Our customers very much value reviews, especially within a known and trusted group such as Mumsnet. In addition to this, many of our customers chat to customer services and value a real voice, rather than text.

What does personalisation mean to you as a marketer and the business?

As a business our customers are not the millennials who are happy for every aspect of their lives to be plastered across all social media sites. Our customers would not use all of these sites and would find this intrusive. As a business we need to keep a respectful distance and not get too personal, while ensuring we do exploit this personalisation in a manner our customers find useful, and which keeps them coming back to us.

As a marketer it’s easy to get excited about all the new software, and to want to be at the forefront of this explosion, but the approach needs to be appropriate to the brand.

What is the end goal for your company in terms of offering a truly personalised customer experience?

We want to target our ranges to our customer requirements, which will increase sales but also customer satisfaction. We want the experience of shopping with us to feel personal, so our store staff coupled with customer services must all offer the same level of information, delivered in a consistent and friendly way. We will not go so far as to be “creepy”.

At what stage of this are you ?

We are in our infancy in terms of personalisation on the web. However, we are very advanced with our store staff and customer service team. The web technology now needs to catch up – which we are working on.

What are the biggest challenges your personalisation strategy faces?

Making the personalisation appropriate to the customer, and remembering the customers likes and dislikes. Marketing should follow the same approach, and be targeted to individuals rather than blanket offers and campaigns, as has been the method in the past.

To deliver a truly personalised customer experience what level of alignment is needed between marketing and other departments, such as customer service/call centre, IT and ecommerce?

All need to be aligned or the customer journey becomes fractured.
A customer should not be able to tell any difference in service level or tone of voice.

Which department or departments have primary responsibility for driving personalisation in your business and why?

Marketing, because they speak directly to the customers via loyalty programmes and offers, ecommerce for customer satisfaction on the web, and customer services, who are the physical voice together with store staff.

How are you personalising content on your website?

Only just starting. We do reviews and chat via customer services. We will be creating personalised views and offers, as well as greetings, and special days, for example. We will build looks to send to customers and use their reviews to help our product selection process.

How joined up is your personalisation across channels?

Data is gathered in store and online but it’s not currently very easy to access, so we are investing in a CRM tool to help us analyse and also to use for “clientelling” in stores.

Describe the approach to personalisation you are taking in email, on your website, in your mobile app, and in other parts of your customer experience (i.e. support) – what data is used in each channel? What specific methodologies are used?

We currently segmenting at a high level based upon customer purchase history, demographic profile and spend levels.

How do you differentiate between segmentation and personalisation? In what channels or applications does your approach to personalisation get to the individual level?

This is mostly segmentation with the exception of product recommendations based upon browsing and buying behaviour supported with tactical CRO [conversion rate optimisation] techniques.

How could you advance your approach to personalisation in individual channels?

There are many things we can do that draw the channels together. Customers could select styles to try on in store, the store could book an appointment and styles can be ready for when she gets there. Once in store, she is greeted by name, and the staff have history of her previous purchases and can build appropriate looks based on these preferences to offer to the customer. Again, we will be appropriate and not use every piece of software available.

How do you measure the impact of personalisation in marketing and across the business?

Every new initiative has a KPI set against it and is then measured against these targets – for instance, increasing conversion will be a major target.

Do your digital teams have the required skills to implement a personalisation strategy across the business?

Yes, they are well placed to execute, but historically they did not have the tools to enable execution. Operationally and strategically this is being rolled out, and will be fully in place within the next 12 months.

How do you see your personalisation strategy evolving over the next 18 months?

As a brand we are moving from a generic message and broadcast position isolated within channel and media with little personalisation to an integrated approach across all channel touchpoints and media. This will enable East to better serve and delight our customers in an aligned fashion to optimise their experience, and answer their distinct needs. Whether they be in store, using digital channels or customer service, their experience will be seamless. This will take the form of leveraging channel and media strengths to deliver more appropriate and timely communications, product assortment and overall brand experience tailored towards the individual customer.

Where do you think the future of personalisation lies?

In short, data, localisation and artificial intelligence.

Pav Purewal, digital lead customer experience manager, River Island

What are the hallmarks of a great customer experience online and where does personalisation fit into that?

A great online customer experience will leave you with a feeling of excitement – you can’t wait to get the product you’ve just ordered. It’s a balance of being familiar, reliable and trustworthy, while remaining innovative and inspirational. Personalisation helps us reach that balance: a trustworthy retailer inspiring customers in an innovative way.

What types of personalisation do you think the customer really values?

The customer values relevancy, whether that’s in the form of personalised recommendations or a hassle-free checkout process. We see a great response from our loyal customer base when we email products or topics we think they may be interested in.

What does personalisation mean to you as a marketer and how does that differ from or overlap with what personalisation means for your company as a whole?

Personalisation means enabling and empowering our teams to provide a more meaningful message. For some teams that will mean ensuring we are able to consolidate and enrich the data from multiple touchpoints. For other teams the focus is more geared towards understanding the trends in that data and identifying how to target customers in the most meaningful way.

What is the end goal for your company in terms of offering a truly personalised customer experience? What role does marketing play in this?

To be able to proactively meet our customer’s needs. Marketing, which sits in our customer division is the driving this goal business wide.

At what stage in this are you?

Our personalisation strategy is currently in flight. Our primary point of focus is direct performance marketing and PPC [pay-per-click], where we are seeing the biggest benefit.

What are the biggest challenges your personalisation strategy faces?

Pulling data from multiple platforms and identifying how this data can fit in with our wider systems to be used in the most effective way.

To deliver a personalised customer experience, what level of alignment is needed between marketing and other departments, such as customer service/call centre, IT and ecommerce?

Whether an interaction is online, in store or on the phone, as far as the customer is concerned, they are connecting to the brand. As brand we must join these connections together to deliver a truly personalised customer experience. These departments have to work as one, just as a customer would see them.

Which department has primary responsibility for driving personalisation in your business?

The customer department. This department joins together all of the customer’s touchpoints. So driving personalisation and setting the direction sits with this division. However, responsibility for seeing that through is companywide.

Are emerging tactics such as personalisation enabling stronger alignment across your organisation or exposing gaps?

A mix of both: there are gaps that may not have had a clear owner in the past. Personalisation is bringing these to the forefront and creating focus. By doing this we’ve strengthened the alignment across the organisation.

How are you personalising content on your website?

Currently, our personalisation is focused around email marketing, and retargeting. We are now working on bringing some of that intelligence on to the site so we are able to offer a more targeted and personalised journey on the website too.

How well joined up is your personalisation across channels?

Core functionality such as wish list, basket and checkout is shared across all our digital platforms. A wish list created online can be viewed and managed on an app. It’s important we identify and cater to the role of each channel in the customer’s journey while remaining consistent with our proposition.

Describe the approach to personalisation you are taking.

We’re focusing on data such as frequency and level of spend, and tailoring messages accordingly.

In what channels or applications does your approach to personalisation get to the individual level?

This is something we are actively working on at the moment, starting with the call centre through to other touchpoints.

How well joined up is your personalisation across channels for individuals?

We are currently working through personalisation for segments and will take our learnings into consideration when taking on the next challenge of personalisation for individuals. With regards to channels, we will take the approach we take with all new developments and think cross-functionally: identifying the role each channel plays with regards to personalisation and tailoring accordingly.

To what degree do you feel that you could advance your approach to personalisation in individual channels?

I think it would be heavily limited – personalisation has to be channel agnostic.

Do your digital teams have the required skills to implement a personalisation strategy across the business?

Yes. As the industry moves on our teams and skills adapt accordingly. It’s a constant learn-and-adapt cycle.

How do you see your personalisation strategy evolving over the next 18 months?

We should start to learn some valuable lessons from some of the groundwork we have put in place. Through constant testing and learning, we will continue to develop our strategy
and start to understand relevancy.

Where do you think the future of personalisation lies?

Wardrobes that replenish themselves with a mind of their own.

What are the hallmarks of a great customer experience online and where does personalisation fit into that?

It’s important to understand what your customer is looking for when they visit your site. Some come on with the intention of purchasing, while others are browsing for inspiration, reading information about your products or finding out where their nearest store is.

It should be easy for customers to navigate your site and find what they’re looking for in a couple of clicks. A website that’s easy to navigate and satisfies the need of the customer quickly will be remembered, and visited often, for the right reasons.

When we talk about personalising the customer journey, it’s about recognising who the customer is, what they are looking for and what will make them convert. To get to that stage we’re using browsing and buying behaviour, and tailoring the content as much as possible to fit the customer’s device, location and purchase history.

What types of personalisation do you think the customer really values and how are you seeing this?

Using customer data to analyse past purchases, and present them with products and offers that we feel they are more likely to engage with has been a successful strategy for many years.

Loyalty programmes are a great example of how retailers collect customer data to personalise a customer’s experience. The rewards on offer are transparent and attainable for customers, so they’re more likely to hand over their loyalty card in store or input their card number online every time they purchase. The data that our loyalty card collects enables us to tailor future communication to our customers based on past and predicted behaviour.

We personalise numerous communications to customers: event invites, catalogues and email campaigns feature differing offers, products and creative based on customer segment. The response rate on tailored campaigns is generally better, so there’s real value in gathering customer data and making informed choices based on this.

What does personalisation mean to you as a marketer?

Personalisation is a popular buzzword at the moment, so it is important not to do it just for the sake of ticking a box and saying you’re offering a personalised experience. What does that look like to your customer and does it fulfil a customer need or want?

You have to think about what a personalised experience means from a customer perspective, and usually that’s about a lot more than showing them that you know their name or that they once purchased an item from two years ago.

What is the end goal for your company in terms of offering a truly personalised customer experience? What role does marketing play in this?

Our personalisation strategy involves speaking to the customer as an individual and satisfying that individual customer’s wants and needs. Understanding their choices and reacting positively to them is key to engaging or reengaging a customer with us.

Attracting new customers, retaining existing customers and reactivating lapsed customers are all important objectives of our online and offline marketing strategy.

Defining who we’re speaking to – and what the message is – enables us to deliver customer communication that converts.

At what stage of this are you ?

We have done a lot of research via focus groups and surveys into who our customer is, allowing us to segment our target and existing customers into clearly defined groups.

Each segment has a personality with attributes that define who the customer is, what they like and what they want when they shop with us.

This insight is shared with our internal teams, from shop floor to head office. That way we all know who our customers are and have them in mind when we make decisions.

What are the biggest challenges your personalisation strategy faces?

The biggest challenge is transforming our customer data into accurate and accessible information that can be used by all the relevant areas of the business.

We are collecting data from multiple sources, which is uploaded to a single platform, and there is a challenge to ensure sure the data is accurate and up to date to give us a true single view of our customer.

To deliver a truly personalised customer experience what level of alignment is needed between marketing and other departments?

There is no one area of the business that can deliver a true personalised experience on its own, so we have striven to all come together, drawing on the individual areas of expertise, to meet the objectives of the strategy.

Which departments have primary responsibility for driving personalisation in your business?

The “customer-facing” departments – such as ecommerce, marketing and loyalty – drive personalisation because they understand the communication strategy and how to best deliver it along with the brand’s voice.

The information systems department then need to deliver the solutions and technology required to achieve this strategy.

Are emerging tactics such as personalisation enabling stronger alignment across your organisation or exposing gaps?

Working towards one clearly defined objective will always result in greater alignment across a brand but, as new technology develops and requirements change, gaps in skillsets and resources inevitably appear.

Prioritising objectives and workload helps us as a business to identify and plug these gaps before they become barriers to achieving our aims.

How are you personalising content on your website?

Online customers receive a personalised experience based on their location, device and behaviour.

Using a responsive site, we are able to recognise the device a customer is browsing on and serve up appropriate content based on this.

We also have a fully translated checkout for international customers, with prices shown in the currency specific to location and shipping information tailored to the destination location.

Some of our customers’ browsing and buying data is fed into our ecommerce platform, so we use this to target customer groups with personalised content and product recommendations. As we start to feed more of our data into our platform, this is an area we will expand on with the aim of personalising every aspect of a customer’s online journey.

How well joined up is your personalisation across channels?

Over the last few years we have become a lot more proficient at personalising the entire customer journey, whether they are shopping online or in store, but there is still plenty of opportunity for enhancement in the future

Tackling our data challenge and better understanding the future of personalisation is vital to will help us to prioritise where and on what we should focus our efforts for the future.

What are the hallmarks of a great customer experience online and where does personalisation fit into that?

From a Joules perspective it is around simple transaction, convenient delivery and a clean process. From a personalisation point of view, I think it is giving people relevant content during that experience, whether that happens to be offer, content or something like check-out.

What types of personalisation do you think the customer really values?

Customers don’t really know what they value because all they recognise is an experience that is relevant and timely. That inevitably gives them customer satisfaction.

What does personalisation mean to you as a marketer and how does that fit with what it means for your company as a whole?

For me, ultimately, it is getting to a utopian goal where you are establishing a one-to-one relationship with the customer through a digital experience – much the same as if you walked into a store and met a sales assistant.

I don’t think as a company we have really addressed personalisation on a broader channel and customer level. We are thinking about it, but haven’t addressed it. So if I interact with a store environment, a call centre environment or a mobile app – we haven’t thought about consistency, which would be the broader vision.

What is the end goal for your company in terms of offering a truly personalised customer experience?

The
end goal is that you can provide a consistent value-add experience for your customer, providing personalised content in exchange for better customer engagement, which means your lifetime value in customer loyalty grows as a result.

At what stage of this are you ?

Simplistically we are at the digital stage in terms of technology and tools. We are not in a world yet of having technology that works across different channels.

What are the biggest challenges your personalisation strategy faces?

Simplistically joining up technology and customer data to serve better experiences. Where you have different silos of data in a business, you want to consolidate the data and serve them up again so they are consistent across channels.

To deliver a personalised customer experience what level of alignment is needed between marketing and other departments, such as customer service/call centre, IT and ecommerce?

At a broader level across the company it needs to be closely aligned. At a digital level it can be fairly encapsulated within ecommerce. The minute you want to broaden that out into direct mail or what the call centre says, or how a customer in a store might be greeted, then clearly the systems, as well as the culture, need to be aligned around that.

Which department has primary responsibility for driving personalisation in your business?

It currently sits within ecommerce but it will become a broader part of our customer function over time. We are overtly driving that change so that it doesn’t become a digital-only experience. I think where the board will gravitate is: where do you currently have capability that exists within the business that you can use as your “test and learn” programme?

Are emerging tactics such as personalisation enabling stronger alignment across your organisation or exposing gaps?

Neither, but there is not a deep level of understanding across the business about what personalisation is, and how it can provide better customer experiences. As ever, with the world of digital, it can appear outside of the world a bit of a black box.

How are you personalising content on your website?

We use a third-party application, and we are joining up our personalisation approach across all of our digital channels – that is from our media strategy, social, email and online. We are actively testing and learning around how we can use consistent data across all of those channels.

How do you differentiate between segmentation and personalisation?

Segmentation to me is clearly taking customer groups based on aggregation of data and serving them up relevant content. Personalisation is ultimately – whether you do it through algorithms or other methods of science – getting to a one-to-one relationship with customers, such as the Amazon approach, based broadly on transactional behaviour.

To what degree do you feel that you could advance your approach to personalisation in individual channels and as it relates to delivering a unique experience for individuals as they move from channel to channel?

We could advance our approach massively in terms of having the data fed in store that also supports other channels. So your data ranges from basic information about a customer to behavioural insight, to net worth – and all that data, if used sensitively, could be very valuable across different channels because the more you know about a customer, the more you can tailor an experience.

How do you measure the impact of personalisation?

Broadly, because we do most of our personalisation in an A/B environment – ie there is a control group of 15%, for example, and we measure it predominantly on a sales conversion basis.

Do your digital teams have the required skills to implement a personalisation strategy across the business?

No. You have specialist skillsets in digital predominantly based around digital technologies, digital tools, and levels of specialisms and expertise. When you want to talk about CRM or personalisation at a broader business level, it needs to be more customer led with people who have a broader understanding of technology and systems, and how it translates to offline worlds.

Where do you think the future of personalisation lies?

I think it has to be scalable, so it has to become algorithmic, build on machine learning into the world of artificial intelligence. I think it will be industry led in terms of what capability we can develop outside industry benchmark tools.

What are the hallmarks of a great customer experience online and where does personalisation fit into that?

A great customer experience online means the customer is able to easily find what they like and easily check out, while also feeling rewarded for their purchase – all in the same experience. A personalised journey helps with the experience by putting the right merchandise, message or promotion in front of the right customer at the right time, based on their personal shopping behaviour. A great experience online should always leave the customer saying: “That brand just gets me.”

What types of personalisation do you think the customer really values?

Of the personalisation tactics that the customer may be aware of, I believe they really value being served product specifically for their taste and for the price they are looking for.

What does personalisation mean to you as a marketer and how does that differ from or overlap with what personalisation means for your company as a whole?

I believe that personalisation is a one-to-one relationship and ongoing dialogue with your customer: knowing what they like, what they don’t, how they choose to shop on your site, and where they live etc. Personalisation is a key cornerstone of TechStyle and my definition is in line with that of the company. We want to recreate the in-person boutique clientele experience in which the shop owner knows the needs of each individual who walks through the doors, greeting the frequent shoppers by name, while welcoming and getting to know new visitors.

What is the end goal for your company in terms of offering a truly personalised customer experience? What role does marketing play in this?

The end goal for personalisation is to increase customer satisfaction, retention and overall lifetime value. Marketing plays a key role in identifying the manner in which we approach the different areas and aspects of our site experience.

At what stage of this are you currently?

At TechStyle we have gained a lot of learnings primarily through email and are currently testing expanding our onsite personalisation experience. We are excited about pushing our personalisation effort further this year.

What are the biggest challenges your personalisation strategy faces?

Personalisation has different meanings for different teams. Internal alignment to approach and solutions has been an area we have collaborate on and continue to collaborate on as we work towards achieving our goals with this initiative.

To deliver a truly personalised customer experience what level of alignment is needed between marketing and other departments, such as customer service/call centre, IT and ecommerce?

It requires a high level of alignment across marketing, product, business analytics, business intelligence and our member services teams to define business objectives, goals and timing.

Which departments have primary responsibility for driving personalisation in your business and why?

At TechStyle, our personalisation strategy is highly collaborative between marketing and product teams. Marketing owns the strategy and product owns the solutions.

How are you personalising content on your website?

We have an algorithm-based personalised boutique experience in which shoe, clothing and accessory recommendations are made based on user style preferences. While our “North Star” is a true one-to-one experience, we are currently in the “walking before we run” phase, and customise onsite content based on where our user is in their customer journey, how long it’s been since purchase, and loyalty tier, for example. We are able to create a cohesive personalised experience through our audiences created in Sailthru, which feeds into our proprietary technology systems.

We have tested personalised product recommendations on our “add to bag” and also product description pages using Sailthru’s site personalisation manager (SPM). We are looking forward to testing SPM more in our boutique and shopping category pages this quarter.

How well joined up is your personalisation across channels?

Currently, we are a bit more buttoned up on personalisation within our email channel and I’m eager to expand on our learnings from email and implement them fully onsite. In addition to onsite, we are also testing our personalisation
efforts within retargeting, and also programmatic direct mail.

Describe the approach to personalisation you are taking in email, on your website, in your mobile app, and in other parts of your customer experience (such as support).

We want to create an omnichannel personalised experience across all of our channels. While we are working to get there, it is important that all of the data feeding into our systems comes directly from our enterprise data warehouse. We have around 100 custom variables feeding into Sailthru and use them to feed into our personalisation efforts within email and onsite.

How do you differentiate between segmentation and personalisation? How are you working towards the individual level, where each and every consumer receives a different experience based on the data that you have on them?

Creating a true one-to-one experience onsite will require an army of graphic designers, so I think that segmentation will be tied to personalisation until we find a solution. We are able to achieve personalised emails by clustering members within any audience based on tag interest scores generated by Sailthru, which decide the best image content to show and also layer in corresponding personalised product recommendations.

To what degree do you feel that you could advance your approach to personalisation in individual channels?

We have plenty of great ideas that could really move the needle within our personalisation efforts. It is a key initiative to advance our personalisation reach onsite and then transfer into other channels.

How do you measure the impact of personalisation in marketing?

We will measure immediate impact by looking at our engagement and conversion metrics, but also look to personalisation to deliver higher LTV and retention.

Do your digital teams have the required skills to implement a personalisation strategy across the business?

Implementation for product recommendations and personalised content does require some knowledge of Zephyr coding in order to execute. However, Sailthru provided thorough training and support. My team is able to create personalised templates and we are pretty much self-service outside of more complex executions.

How do you see your personalisation strategy evolving over the next 18 months?

I see personalisation evolving to truly drive the customer experience both onsite and through the channels the customer prefers to interact with our company. I think there is potential to expand on personalisation in real time by layering predictive elements to the customer experience.

Where do you think the future of personalisation lies?

I think that goes back to my personal definition of personalisation, which is a true one-to-one relationship and dialogue with our customers at every touchpoint we hold and will hold in the future.

What are the hallmarks of a great customer experience online and where does personalisation fit into that?

Great customer experience is a seamless, frictionless journey that makes shopping simple and fun. Our customer loves their smartphone but they’re impatient. We need to grab their attention in seconds. That’s why mobile-first personalisation is vital – only relevance will stop their thumbs from swiping on.

What types of personalisation do you think the customer really values?

Personalisation is most powerful for customers when it makes something easier or more inspirational, whether that’s what they see before, during or after they’ve visited our online department stores. That means the advertising that brings them in, the tailored site they see when they visit, and the various ways we keep in touch after they’ve shopped can all be personalised. We try to predict what customers want and when they’ll want it – or, even better, what they want before they realise they want it.

What is the end goal for your company in terms of offering a truly personalised customer experience?

Given how fast technology is evolving, we don’t obsess about where things will end. In fact, this journey probably never ends. We focus on what’s next. We are utterly committed to creating the most personalised ecommerce experience anywhere online – and we focus our energies on tailoring the experience where it matters most to our customers.

One of the most exciting new areas we’re working on is artificial intelligence (AI) – using machine learning to build ever better personalised experiences for each and every customer.

AI is already fuelling parts of our customer experience, but our industry has only just scratched the surface in terms of the potential of this technology. Our first AI-fuelled chatbot will launch later this year and will enable us to provide even better customer service.

Our AI aim is for every customer to have their own expert personal shopper and service assistant that knows them better every time they interact. We want to become better and better, until we’re suggesting items our customer hasn’t even thought to ask for.

Which departments have primary responsibility for driving personalisation in your business?

We’re constantly working out new ways to help all our colleagues in every part of our business contribute ideas and be part of what we’re doing on personalisation. We often involve our wider colleagues as we develop something new and, probably more importantly, everybody who owns or works on part of our customer experience is asked to work out the role personalisation can play in their area.

It’s a team effort and, underpinning that wider effort, we’ve built a world-class group of technical experts in the areas that most fuel our personalisation efforts, including data scientists, creatives, CRM professionals, IT engineers, UX experts, marketers, customer service specialists and more.

And we’re increasingly working in an agile way. Cross-functional teams set two-week timeframes for individual projects, and spend 15 minutes each day updating on progress and identifying ways they can help each other. It means we succeed – and fail – faster, iterating and improving in a way that quickly makes things better for the customer.

How are you personalising content on your website?

Things are personalised even before customers get to our website. For example, we spot new customers on Facebook by identifying characteristics that match those of our existing customers – look-a-like models. So, if you match the profile of a customer who’s bought furniture, you might see an ad for a sofa in your newsfeed.

Once customers land on the website, they experience a shop that’s tailor made for them and gets more relevant the longer customers shop with us. Our homepage content, sort orders, top navigation menus and product recommendations deeper within the shopping journey are all personalised. Specifically, better homepages for non-customers serve up the most relevant banners, and style advice via Dressipi offers personalised style recommendations and size advice as customers shop.

After they’ve shopped, we communicate in a way that’s tailored. We send customers offers or information that we think will be of specific interest given their unique profile. For example, if you’re a new customer, we’ll spend a bit more time talking about the various products we offer and explaining the various ways to pay – something existing customers may already know, so will be less eager to hear about. If you’ve shopped with us for a while but the regularity of your visits change, we may start to serve up some new ideas and offers tailored to you.