Summer.ai #2 — “Hyper-Personalisation — An AI Revolution”

Make every interaction count, even the small ones. They are all relevant.

Personalisation in the global corporate world has been around for years. It’s not new to clients and in fact, most people now expect personalisation when receiving corporate facilities, emails etc. of any sort. It has become the new normal as corporate giants resort to personalisation techniques powered by AI to establish relations with customers.

A report from Epsilon revealed that 80% of customers are more likely to do business with a brand when the brand provides them with a personalised experience. Additionally, a report from Accenture showed that 91% of those polled said that they are more likely to purchase from a brand that knows them and provides them with relevant recommendations and offers.

Due to the ability of AI to process large amounts of data in real-time, brands are able to use AI to personalise content for each specific customer based on their purchase history, customer service tickets, and browsing patterns. By using this customer data, AI applications are able to provide customers with the content that would be most appealing to them, including factual information, images, videos, instructional material, or community discussion forums.

But personalisation is evolving. Like everything else today, the battle is on to optimise personalisation further and squeeze every benefit from it that is possible. Over the last couple of years, the next step in personalisation has emerged as ‘Hyper Personalisation’.

The difference between Personalisation and Hyper-Personalisation :

Personalization is the incorporation of personal and transactional information like name, title, organization, purchase history etc. into your communication. Hyper-personalization goes one step further and utilizes behavioural and real-time data to create highly contextual communication that is relevant to the user.

For example- Normally, you would personalise an email with a customer’s first name and maybe some other standard data fields like birthday or location.

Further, emails could be personalised by using real time data like browsing behaviour. What if you could send an email to a customer when they have performed a specific action on your website?

Amazon uses hyper-personalisation very effectively. If you have bought something from the site before, you will notice that the next time you log on it will show you similar items that you may be thinking about purchasing.

The Need for Hyper-Personalisation

Amidst the myriad of choices, to capture and hold the attention of a user, communication needs to stand out and be clutter-breaking. As people are researching online heavily to make more informed decisions, hyper-personalisation can affect the choices and mentality of a person in a great manner.

Starting-off

AI (Artificial Intelligence) and data-driven, real-time smart softwares are crucial to this change — but the key enabling database technology which will allow these next-generation recommendations to be drawn is graph database technology.

eBay’s AI-based ShopBot is a prime example of the type of this graph-powered hyper-personalisation that brands need to move to in action.

To accomplish this requires a combination of ML (Machine Learning), accurate predictive analytics, and a distributed, real-time storage and processing engine, with NLP (Natural Language Processing). But ideally, it also needs a graph database to process all the real-time data connections required.

That’s because, without graph software at the centre, you can’t easily offer consumers hyper-personalised hints. The traditional way of storing data is ‘store and retrieve’, but that doesn’t give you much in terms of context and connections.

A Heightened Sense of Context

One can say that context and hyper-personalization go hand-in-hand.
For example, a hyper-personalized marketing campaign will take contextual data — like whether a customer is using an Android phone or an iPhone — into account. That data matters, because the demographics for Android and iOS users are different, and these different factors, like gender and age, will affect your marketing process on even the most basic of advertising campaigns.

The Key to Future Marketing

People are much more digital and online savvy than they were 5 years ago. Just think about how many emails you receive every day and how many websites you visit. Now think, how many of those emails or websites can you remember? The likelihood is, not very many.

Hyper personalisation is a way to break through the noise. It’s a way to make your customers feel more valued, nurture new business and improve the metric we all care about- your conversion rates.