In a world where customer expectations are higher than ever, personalization has become a strategic necessity, and AI-driven “personalized leaders”—effectively leveraging AI and other data-driven approaches—are making personalization a strategic necessity. , companies are expected to provide highly customized customer experiences. As consumers become more difficult to satisfy, businesses must leverage AI to deliver seamless, customized experiences at every touchpoint. This change goes beyond marketing and requires an overhaul of organizational structures and the integration of customer experience, marketing, and data analytics to deliver value quickly and at scale.
Agile ways of working are essential to jump-start and succeed in personalization efforts, but your company's organizational structure will need to evolve as it scales. All functional teams must consider resource levels and talent requirements. Many activities will still need to be performed at the functional level, but others (such as marketing operations and cross-channel orchestration) will eventually find their place under one roof rather than in several different areas of the organization. will be managed by. New roles and organizational designs will emerge that better facilitate personalization at scale.
Most companies are organized by product or channel. Consider a typical bank. All spokes within a marketing hub (call centers, in-branch offices, email and direct mail operations, websites, apps) are typically run by different teams that report to different parts of the organization. Despite calls for customer centricity, most banks are still organized around products such as credit cards, mortgages, and loans. Marketing organizations may generate extensive insights about consumers, but those insights do not directly impact the efforts of the various teams involved in the customer journey. It's no wonder that many banks are struggling to implement cross-functional teams and agile ways of working. All of this explains its low ranking in the personalization index. But even top-ranked retailers are often organized around product sales teams, leaving them wondering which customer strategy to pursue and how to activate it with cross-functional teams. There are limited resources to define and prioritize.
By starting an agile pod quickly, companies can gain early wins while sorting out which changes are most important to their operating model as they scale their efforts. As organizations become more customer-centric, they can change P&L responsibilities, create new roles and functions, and consolidate existing functions.
Let's look at four specific ways personalization leaders are doing this.
Rethinking marketing as an integrated function
Successful personalization at scale requires marketing to be an integrated function that brings together all channels to coordinate customer interactions. One senior leader will oversee the execution of marketing activities across paid and owned channels, as well as top funnel (i.e. brand awareness drives) and bottom funnel (i.e. conversions) with analytical support. This configuration enables smarter budget allocation and better orchestration of push and pull conversations with customers across channels. You can also prevent pods from overlapping each other.
Additionally, organizations are adding dedicated marketing teams to improve and automate processes around channel orchestration and distribution. Without strong marketing operations capabilities, teams across channel silos will be unable to see what customers are seeing as a whole. It is also much more likely to cause execution quality control issues, such as customers receiving the wrong message or tests not measuring correctly because targeting or control holdouts were not executed properly. Masu.
Creating new customer-centric roles
Almost every organization has a consumer insights function, but the best of these groups have greater clarity in developing customer strategies that help cross-functional teams turn insights into action. It is left to Many companies are also appointing a senior owner of customer experience design, creating roles such as SVP or VP of customer experience, or passing these responsibilities onto the existing chief digital officer. If the experience is essentially a “product” that the company provides, then this leader is the “product manager” who oversees the development of the interfaces that customers engage with online and in the physical world, and who is also responsible for the company's financial performance. I will bear it. those experiences. Some companies have created a chief customer officer or chief growth officer with clear P&L responsibility for driving revenue from digital channels and digital customer relationships.
Improved data and analytics (D&A)
Companies are centralizing their teams and expanding them by adding resources or creating new senior management positions, such as chief data analytics officer. Teams that traditionally resided in separate departments within an organization are becoming increasingly integrated (in some cases with digital roles), especially in banks, healthcare providers, insurance companies, and retailers. . This reorganization of data and analytics is driving the expansion of data science (i.e., model and algorithm development), applied analytics (i.e., business intelligence), and business functions that apply analytics from marketing to digital, supply chain, operations, and finance. Cooperation between them is being strengthened. D&A leaders establish analytics teams focused on improving customer use cases, not just functional productivity. Doing so not only strengthens your ability to deliver value; They also attract world-class talent looking to learn, work with like-minded people and make an impact.
D&A leaders are also creating new tools to democratize data. This means marketing and operations teams have the tools to capture and analyze data themselves, rather than relying on data scientist gatekeepers. These companies are investing more resources in data engineering to create robust platforms and powerful dashboards and tools that can be used widely across the organization. More useful data is now available to administrators across the organization, enabling them to make better decisions and create better customer experiences. A new empowered D&A senior leader is driving data quality and data integration across the department. They have established strong data governance mechanisms (i.e., defined common standards and definitions across the enterprise). We have also established a data management process that identifies the key data needed and how it will be used.
Leverage leaders to lead personalization across the enterprise
Many organizations have had loyalty functions for many years. Today, we often see these leaders taking clear responsibility for setting personalization goals. Given that personalization requires significant investment, these leaders prioritize efforts and track progress against key P&L goals. Depending on the industry and company characteristics, this responsibility may fall within the integrated marketing, digital experience, customer strategy, or D&A departments. Regardless of organizational design, personalization impacts many teams, but it's important to have a single leader tasked with moving the company toward its overall goals. Holding senior executives accountable for P&L can increase accountability for progress. At large companies, the head of personalization has a bi-monthly 60-90 minute stand-up slot on the executive and leadership team's agenda to discuss progress and issues that require coordinated support from other leaders. Masu.
Reprinted with permission of Harvard Business Review Press. Adapted from Personalized: Customer strategy in the age of AI Written by Mark F. Abraham and David C. Edelman. Copyright 2024 The Boston Consulting Group, Inc. All rights reserved.
