“Help Me to Help You” – Here’s How Big Data Is Revitalizing the Return of Personalization
Once upon a time, customers went to local stores and chatted with the owners while shopping. Today, you most likely head to the closest supermarket and speak to no one while you pick up your groceries. The personalization you used to love at bakeries and bodegas is gone and has been replaced by corporate America.
The good news is, the strategy isn’t dead. Big brands are more powerful than ever because they appeal to customers’ sense of urgency. However, big data is enabling industries to once again provide the human interaction that people crave. This is how.
Source: Pexels
Data Excitement
To most people, raw data wouldn’t be exciting, but things have changed in recent years, and consumers now demand that their information is provided to them because it enhances the buying experience. The health and wellbeing sectors are prime examples as they use everything from calories burned to split lap times to make exercise more interesting.
Fitbit and Apple aren’t the only brands to understand the power of big data, though. It is happening during standard interactions thanks to the likes of Mint. Mint is a website that lets shoppers review their spending by category. As a result, there’s no need to overspend or worry about where money is going because the info is broken down into bite-size chunks and prominently broadcast.
What’s eye-opening about this personalization technique is that it centers around extrapolating the most relevant data, rather than promoting every trackable element. For customers, this means the info is on point and reliable, as well as personal.
Consumer Pain Points
Pretty much every business knows that their customer’s pain points are because they are obvious. Take eCommerce as an example. When you make an online purchase, you’re worried about the parcel turning up and the length of time it takes to arrive at your door.
This is a cliché, yet it’s one that brands have had to deal with for decades, with little success. Big data has revolutionized the way customers’ problems are dealt with as the tactic adds another layer of security to the process. Delta’s passengers, for instance, can track their bags by taking a photo of their luggage tack and uploading the image to the app via the “Track My Bag” service. This Delta can track luggage in real-time, making it easier to prevent mistakes by putting minds at ease. Almost every company big or small does this if they have an online delivery service.
It’s a small feature, one we take for granted now, but this personalization feature has transformed the customer service industry for thousands of organizations around the world.
Source: Pexels
The Customer Journey
Understanding the customer journey has been tough for brands as lots of shoppers don’t know what they want from an experience until they see it for the first time. Businesses can’t read minds, which makes their job twice as challenging. The turning point for firms is the introduction of big data and its ability to highlight the journey to its base.
This is best highlighted via the online casino industry due to its large volume of bonuses and welcome offers. There are so many that some consumers don’t know what they are getting and when which is problematic considering the deals are supposed to add value. One provider uses a smart method to bypass the issue – a life-like avatar. Casumo Casino not only designs characters based on the owner of the account, taking personalization to another level but evolves the avatar as players play real-money games, which then reveals the different kinds of available deposit bonuses. You can read the full Casumo review here and learn more about how the platform is implementing big data to modernize its brand and stand out from the crowd.
Casinos aren’t the only businesses to use this tactic because it’s a familiar sight on consoles such as the Nintendo Wii as avatars can be personalized to the point where they appear almost identical to the player.
Personalized services aren’t on the way out. As this post highlights, big data is bringing it back with a bang, so you should expect to see more of it when you shop online or in-store.
Featured article by Matthew Goodwin, Independent Technology Author
