Personalization at scale (PAS): PwC

Jon Glick

Principal, Customer Transformation and Loyalty, PwC US

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Phil Regnault

Principal, Adobe Alliance Leader, PwC US

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Dirk Maloney

Senior Manager, Customer and Product Strategy, PwC US

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Mark Baker

Customer Transformation and Loyalty Director, PwC US

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The role of personalization in business

Personalization is a rich tapestry of intricate threads, each representing a different facet of the business. Overall program effectiveness depends on weaving those threads together, which amounts to developing an entirely new enterprise within the company — one that is carefully planned, meticulously orchestrated, and continually optimized to reflect changing preferences and needs.

Like a handwritten letter in the digital age, personalization gives businesses a highly coveted human touch that keeps customers coming back. Investments in personalized experiences range from product recommendations to remembering user preferences, and beyond.¹ As revealed in our Customer Loyalty Survey, consumers are most interested in gaining special access to the things they like, easy or fast access to products or services, loyalty programs with flexible rewards, and discounts or rebates on products they regularly use.

With 82% of consumers willing to share their personal data in exchange for a more personalized experience, activating these strategies can generate the deeper kind of engagement that drives increased loyalty and steady growth.² According to Adobe, companies that create personalized experiences grow year-over-year incremental revenue by 1.7x, and more than double the lifetime value of their customers.³ So, it’s not surprising that 97% of executives rank personalizing the customer experience as a high or medium priority.

While 89% of CMOs say that their focus on customer personalization is effective, 39% of Gen Z consumers say they are more likely to try a new brand.^4,2 Despite CMO confidence, loyalty still hangs in the balance. The promise of personalization must be about more than rewards or the allure of new technology — it requires a coordinated and extensive shift within and across the business.

A robust personalization at scale (PAS) framework involves unlocking a new business capability

Delivering personalization at scale will improve customer loyalty, marketing effectiveness, and revenue growth. What’s lesser known is the degree of change needed within an organization to transform a new technology platform into a cornerstone of the business. Organizational priorities and culture need to evolve to take launching and testing new experiences as seriously as securing a new sale. Put another way, an effective personalization journey depends on the deployment of cutting-edge technology — but must also extend beyond it.

For example, during the pandemic, a large fast-food company experienced a major shift to online ordering and designed its business strategy to capture additional digital growth. Amid an industry-wide push to drive business outcomes with personalized insights from consumer data, their team knew that providing enhanced digital experiences could help deepen connections with its audience. Having developed a world-class mobile app for digital ordering, loyalty rewards, and restaurant automations, personalization was a natural next step in the company’s digital journey. To create personalized experiences that would drive customer attraction and retention, the company needed to build a strategy to harness its consumer data in an effective, timely, and responsible way.⁵ The first goal was to begin leveraging what they already knew about their customers and translate those insights into experiences that make them feel “heard.” These experiences ranged from content featured on the home page to upsell offers at checkout.

In another example, a large professional services firm wanted to evolve the way it engages with its B2B clients as well as gain valuable insights on client preferences and behavior. The firm wanted to employ the best of B2C marketing and apply it in a B2B environment, moving beyond traditional account based marketing to a more focused and personalized experience. They needed to not only understand what the individual client was interested in but more deeply, how they wanted to engage with content and in what form. This evolution led them to revolutionize their technology platform with a customer data platform (CDP), but also think beyond and reimagine their entire go-to-market strategy that now orients around the needs and wants of a a particular set of client personas and also has the ability to generate key insights for their sales team.

To help facilitate a successful PAS journey, businesses should:

1. Start by defining the strategic business goals

Align your goals for personalization with your business strategy. Too often, organizations focus on vanity metrics that merely monitor incremental increases in the customer experience instead of orienting goals around business metrics that move the revenue needle (e.g., revenue or average order value). Think big and set high goals for your team. The sense of urgency your team adopts starts with how high the bar is set.

2. Choose use cases that reflect the strategy and specific audience needs

Aggregate customer data from second and third parties to create real-time profiles for attracting new customers. Select and hone use cases that address these specific audience profiles, then develop a personalization platform that can deliver relevant digital experience to those individual customers. Matching individualized profiles with strategically relevant use cases drives the right digital experience to the right people at the right time.

3. Focus on experimentation velocity and value realization

As PAS capabilities are stood up, leaders often misjudge the focus that’s required to realize the full value of the business case. It’s critical to consistently activate new digital experiences and gain a transparent view of your digital experience performance to measure the true ROI of your personalization strategy. Initial value drivers are straightforward, but realizing that value, measuring it adequately, and expanding the reach and velocity of PAS is both critical and often overlooked. Understanding the financial implications of each tailored customer experience allows businesses to make smarter, faster business decisions, and drive confidently toward desired business outcomes.

The PAS playbook

For outcome obsessed businesses that are looking to activate the full potential of personalization, the key is to combine service, measurement, and organizational governance on top of the rigor of your technology implementation. An overarching PAS playbook covers each of these components, and applies the same rigor and strategic framework used to develop a new comprehensive business capability:

Discovery and planning involves collecting and analyzing information to document the current state and defining the personalization journey and implementation.
Capabilities and gap assessment is required to enable capability use cases and assesses the current state maturity of each sub-capability to determine which cross-functional gaps to address.
Measurement defines the approach and tools to monitor value realization and the customer experience at all touchpoints across the customer lifecycle in alignment with how the business measures itself.
Agile product management is a combination of iterative and incremental launching of functionality to feed the test and learn cycle. Your technology investment should start with and follow only what directly improves your customer experience — and avoid investing in technology for its own sake.
Operating model defines the teaming, roles, responsibilities, partners, processes, and training/upskilling required to enable a capability and allow us to expand, enhance, and accelerate operations, grow the top line, and empower customers.
Content at scale strategy and implementation defines the need and development of content required to drive dynamic personalized engagement — including the use of Gen AI.
Regulatory and compliance is critical to be considered up front, particularly for global organizations where data crosses international lines, including appropriate data governance (e.g., DULE framework) to manage data appropriately and legally
Go-to-market plan and execution defines the strategic multi-channel marketing plan to engage with customers across geographies, markets, and product lines.
Change management drives the internal and external transformation of people, culture, and processes needed to enable personalization, including developing a communications and training strategy for identified stakeholders.

The PAS playbook is not a one-and-done proposition. Perpetual adaptation is the only way to meet the dynamism of the market and the evolving needs of customers. A successful PAS program involves an ongoing dialogue between consumer trends and business strategies to ensure each enhancement adds a layer of value as rich and complex as the audience it aims to engage.

The bottom line

The promise of personalization lies in the continuous endeavor to seamlessly blend service, measurement, and organizational governance. Fail to integrate any of these pillars, and the investment in customer engagement and personalization technology will only deliver a fraction of its potential value. By taking a broad-based, business-centric approach to personalization at scale, brands can revolutionize the customer experience and cultivate relationships that last a lifetime.