Hyper personalization is the key

Arul Amudhan Gunalan, Director of Marketing and CX, Skellam AI, talks about creating the best experience for the customer, the move from “push” to “pull” marketing, and the optimum use of data in the AI era. Some excerpts from the video interview…

Giving the best experience at every touchpoint

Every touchpoint of the customer journey is going to be personalized for you. You’re going to get the relevant messaging that’s needed. You will be getting the relevant products that you’re going to be interested in. The idea is that they should have the best experience possible. The customer is going to be pampered.

Say taking EdTech as an example of CX: There’s a difference between a student and how they use your product versus how a teacher uses your product, how user-friendly it is, etc. So, the focus is not just on a technology that may have been available for a long time, but the experience of using it.

Post-pandemic, an even playing field

CX has become more critical because most of the tools we use are SaaS tools. With more and more digitization, more people prefer the comfort of their couch and mobiles. The pandemic has helped Digital Transformation accelerate. One thing that came out was that businesses understood the importance of a digital presence.

There is now an even playing field between a startup and a tech giant. The basic differentiator is CX. Most of the products are commoditized and people can just change products. They can just install and uninstall. Now it’s quite simple. If your CX is good, you get to keep the customer.

We have moved on from “push marketing” to “pull marketing”. We don’t force people to buy a product, but you tell them: Go try my product. You are betting on your product in that sense. Now it must work, and it has to work the first time itself. It is now product-led growth. Companies are thinking about how people are using their products.

Using data properly in the age of AI

Before your data was fragmented. People didn’t even worry about data. POS systems had different variations of your name. Data was not collected properly. People were not looking at loyalty in that sense and they were not trying to market it. But now there is an explosion of both data and marketing. So how do you stand out? Through personalization! It’s not just changing a name in an email. It’s the messaging that needs to go out. That’s where AI can predict what kind of messaging can work for what kind of person.

Before, without much data coming in, AI was useless and was harming more people rather than doing good for business. Now they are investing in AI and seeing the value in it and AI is being given time to learn. For example, now we are seeing the limits of AI chatbots. We must go beyond them. The best example of this is Netflix where they not only give different titles to different members of the family but also different images for those same titles. So, personalization is going to be the main thing. In fact, it will be hyper-personalization.

Arul Amudhan Gunalanis Director, Marketing and CX, Skellam AI

By Sunil Rajguru

sunilr@cybermedia.co.in