Further into the future
While personalised Web sites, e-mails, and other marketing collateral will undoubtedly become more common, the personalisation story won't end there. Future developments will depend on rather different types of technology, though.
"One of the big future trends will be personalisation based on location," says Red Square's Redhead. Using technologies such as GPS or mobile phone tracking, customers can be sent messages and information related to their current whereabouts. Potential applications range from the useful (on-the-fly directions on your PDA while you try and find the building where your next meeting is) to the annoying (spam from the pizza restaurant you've just walked past).
"The other trend is the building of trust by giving people more access to their data," adds Redhead. That trend is likely to increase, given the rights to access content guaranteed under Australian privacy law.
While many companies want to use aggregation technologies to ensure repeated visits to their sites, the long-term trend may actually be in the other direction. "Customers will not be coming to central portals to get their content; they will be bringing the content to them on their own terms, personalised outside the control of central agents," says Macromedia's Treloar. "It will be personalisation, but not as we know it."
Whatever form it takes, few believe that the personalisation push is about to pull up short. "All the business technology we're developing today is going to end up in the home," says NSC's Neil. "The way we think about purchasing services is all going to change. It's just a matter of how fast we take things up."
Executive summary
- Personalisation is expected. Most large Web sites now offer some form of personalisation, and this is also being extended into other forms of communication. If your online presence includes an ecommerce component, you'll need personalisation for best effect.
- The technology is available, but often raw. While the basic components of personalisation are well understood, there are few packaged solutions which allow you to roll it out quickly and easily. Expect to invest a fair amount of time and money in developing and testing your service.
- Privacy is a challenge. Consumers are highly aware of their right to privacy, and may react badly to what looks like an intrusive service. Offering different levels of personalisation on an opt-in basis is generally the best solution, but will undoubtedly be more expensive. Also be aware that some customers will react badly if personal information is demanded but not acted on.
- New technologies will emerge. Location-based tracking, customer-driven information aggregation and increased use of artificial intelligence will continue to see the personalisation market evolve.
Case study: taxing times for the ATO
If you think delivering a personalised service to everyone in your customer base is difficult, imagine what it would be like when your customer base is the whole of Australia. That's one of the challenges faced by the Australian Taxation Office (ATO), which announced a goal of making all services easier, cheaper, and more personalised in 2002.
"Sometimes I get a sense that the community is not that keen to personalise the tax experience, but we're very committed to it," ATO senior assistant commissioner John Ryan notes wryly.
A key element of the ATO's personalisation strategy is offering its customers (that would be taxpayers) a choice of methods for dealing with the organisation. "We want to utilise channel choice strategically to maximise compliance," says Ryan.
Although electronic communications have become an increasingly important part of that mixture, they are still dwarfed by traditional paper communications. The ATO deals annually with 11 million phone calls and has 25 million visits to its site each year, but still needs to handle more than 65 million paper interactions.
"We're very good at paper," says Ryan. "We do need to invest in more electronic services, but we need to understand the costs of doing that and be realistic about the impact on business."
As the large number of site visits suggests, Web delivery has become an important means of communicating information for the ATO. However, Ryan believes that search technologies still need improving to maximise the value of such a system. "The community finds self-help channels really good when they know what they're looking for," he says. Registration of site users might assist in that process, by eliminating irrelevant information (business managers aren't usually concerned about the baby bonus, while city dwellers don't care about rural subsidies, for instance).
One challenge in implementing any electronic service is the heightened expectations for government bodies. "One of the things that we have to maintain is community confidence," says Ryan. "We have to pass some fairly stringent security requirements."
Of course, unlike most businesses, the ATO doesn't have to seek permission to collect a wide range of data on customer behaviour. However, that doesn't mean that it's automatically in a better position to make use of that information. "We get a hell of a lot of data, but we don't necessarily have the ability to leverage that data to deliver the right relationship at the right time," says Ryan.
In some cases, the ATO has found that personalisation isn't as important as speed of service. For instance, tax agents and accountants frequently used to ask to be put through to the same consultant when they contacted the ATO, to eliminate the need to constantly explain the same problem.
Once the ATO introduced a Genesys contact centre management solution and guaranteed that all calls would be answered in 30 seconds, however, demand for speaking to the same person dropped dramatically. As long as their calls were answered quickly and accurate records were kept, any consultant was able to handle the call, and agents were more satisfied with the end results.
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