Something’s been bothering me about the term “personalisation” for a while now. I guess it boils down to the fact that (in retrospect) it seems a little misleading.

My expectations as a customer have evolved – and they continue to do so. I no longer think of a seasonal offer email with my name in the subject line as a personalised experience. I want more engaging interactions.

My favourite brands are the ones that understand me and offer me what I need, when I need it. One in particular even provides an individualised and intelligent digital assistant.

So, while technology is no longer a barrier to individualised experiences, companies are still failing to achieve these more ambitious tailored digital interactions. In fact, according to Avanade’s new survey, 43% of organisations are becoming fatigued with their digital transformation efforts.

A future-ready CX and the individualisation era
I recently hosted several digital marketing roundtables and I also chatted with a range of organisations at the Sitecore Experience conference and the Adobe Summit in London. After the events, I started to gather together the reasons why more companies haven’t moved beyond basic personalisation and embraced true individualisation yet.

In the end, I settled on four reasons. Take a look and see if these sound familiar to you…

1. Operational and data silos
Despite emerging experience management platforms helping to capture data in a frictionless (but regulation-compliant) fashion, many organisations are still struggling to bring their data together. All business units, including marketing, sales and service teams, depend on unfettered access to data to understand customers on a 1:1 level and create deep, actionable insights.

Think about your own organisation – do your marketers have easy access to your sales CRM data?

Democratising access to data across your organisation is crucial. And technology is part-problem and part-solution here. With a bunch of legacy and proprietary platforms stacked up, it’s almost impossible to avoid creating operational and data silos.

But, by designing customer-centric data integration strategies and selecting a transparent, intelligent and interoperative platform, you can prevent silos from occurring.

2. Broken experiences
Individualisation depends on the ability to understand customer expectations and emotions at every touchpoint with your brand. But it also requires employees to engage with customers effectively to deliver a better experience at each step in the journey, across all channels.

If customers must restart a conversation every time they switch from your app to a sales or service representative, you’re serving up a broken experience. So, understanding what your existing experience looks like – as well as the friction points in it – is a critical step. You’ll need an experienced CX design team to work together with business and IT teams to understand bottlenecks, limitations and frustrations.

Finding these broken elements is crucial. By building a more accurate picture of how customers are engaging (and how they want to engage) with you, you’ll be able to design experiences that will eventually allow for smoother journeys and individually tailored interactions.

3. Disparate and legacy marketing tech
If you’re languishing with dated, duplicated and disparate marketing, CRM, CMS, commerce, or analytics platforms, you’ll know that it’s hard to deliver even rudimentary personalisation – let alone achieve leading-edge individualisation. It’s easy to sleepwalk into the disparate digital marketing danger zone – the infamous Chief Marketing Technologist landscape graphic claims there are now 7,040 platforms to sift through, up from just a few hundred in 2011.

That’s why an integrated experience management platform is your hero.

With an end-to-end experience management platform, you’ll be able to weave individualised interactions into every phase of your customer journey. From initial data collection and the execution of highly tailored campaigns, through to customer acquisition and post-sale engagement via CRM.

4. Scalable delivery models
It’s crucial that any individualisation initiative has the potential to scale. So, whether it’s the partner, the platform or both – make sure whatever or whoever you work with doesn’t just have a supreme vision for the ultimate individualised experience, but also the proven capability of delivering these experiences at scale.

Implementing future-ready CX at scale requires creativity, tech delivery and operational expertise. Both your digital transformation partner and your platform must be able to move quickly and seamlessly from an MVP phase to a robust, scaled solution – with the potential for further future growth.

But it’s not just a case of scale. You also need to demand strategic pedigree alongside that implementation expertise, so you can derive learnings as your platform grows and use them to help your individualisation initiatives to evolve.

Individualisation ignition
To become future ready, you need to think about how to deliver individualisation. An integrated experience management platform that delivers comprehensive end-to-end support, rather than solely for specific phases, will help your individualisation campaign to gain momentum.

We can help you if you’re looking to get started on that journey. To learn more about our experience management solutions and talk to us today, head over to our digital marketing page.