Engage Your Customer With a Relevant Experience

(or How I Met a Bollywood Star!)

By Mohan Kumar, Chief Architect, Retail & CPG industries, Infosys

For quite some time, “mark as spam” has been my habitual response to any promotional email hitting my inbox; fairly indicating the value I find in these annoying digital interruptions. Had I followed form that Sunday on a “Special Invitation” email without pausing to read it, I would have missed the chance to meet Deepika Padukone, my favorite Bollywood actress and model, who cut short her sports career in badminton to work in films. I have always been a great fan of the sheer range of her roles- from a simple romantic girl to the ruthless city girl, this Denmark-born actress has done complete justice to Bollywood’s portrayal of Indian women in love. She was in town for the formal launch of a new brand of coffee makers. 
 
That indeed was a very special invite for me. I had never dreamt that having ‘liked’ anything and everything about her on a Facebook campaign for a coffee brand would give me an opportunity to shake hands with her in real life! 
 
The pleasant surprise soon turned to awe at the event. There was signage around the venue prompting us to ‘check in’ to the launch event. I promptly checked in using my smart phone and instantly an offer popped up with a code to redeem a gift right there – a newly launched kids health drink, which both my daughters can use. While I did not waste much time thinking about how I would have felt if I did not have kids at right age for that health drink, it certainly made sense for me. All of a sudden, I felt that I was being treated as a special consumer and that this company cares about who I am.
 
Ability to Listen to Everything, from Everywhere (hint: it’s not just about the technology!) – At any point in time a CPG’s Marketing organization is running various kinds of consumer engagement programs. Sampling campaigns via print media, Facebook contests, Internet QR code raffles are all common today. The key is to listen to the consumers thoughts that are reflected in these interactions like “digital fingerprints” we leave behind. It could be in terms of page views, family composition, price segment affinity, likes, mobile number, geographic location, etc. All this information should be harmonized into a single consumer data repository. This repository should also have demographic attributes, and capture unstructured data too, such as preferences about products, devices and communication practices, location preferences, connections with other consumers, current life stage, life milestones and so on.  By doing so the consumer’s digital genome is captured so that ultimately their interests, wants and needs can actually be measured; not simply modeled.
 
In order to be able to do this, one of the primary requisites is to establish a single identity for a consumer across all the touch points. This can be achieved by creating a set of components, which help to stitch together different attributes that define a consumer. A good example would be the ability to connect a registered consumer to his Facebook identity or Twitter profile – which in turn could help to link to her/his phone number. This requires technology capabilities and process discipline by the CMO’s organization. Usually, technology is the least significant barrier. More often it is the difficulty of enforcing the use of a common platform to assimilate and correlate consumer information that prevents CPG enterprises from doing this.
 
Being relevant – In April, 2013 Infosys conducted a survey of 5,000 digital-savvy consumers across the globe, on their preferences & concerns of being engaged digitally. 72 percent of these consumers felt online promotions and emails they receive do not speak to their interests or needs (“mark as spam” anyone?). Yet 78 percent would purchase from a retailer again if they received offers that target their interests, wants or needs.¹ This is the power of relevance and the peril if you are not.
 
Every time a CPG enterprise has the opportunity to present any form of digital content (product information, usage information, ratings and reviews, offers) to a consumer, it has to be the most appropriate content, presented through the most appropriate communication channel at the best possible time.
 
Translating this to practical life, e.g. emailing me (instead of a SMS or a wall post) on a Sunday afternoon (instead of a Monday morning which would have been six days before I go through general emails) about Deepika’s visit to my local mall was certainly relevant. The gift that was offered for checking in was also relevant to me (actually to my kids, which is even more important to me!), even though information about my family was provided by me when registering with a different brand.
 
Two basic sets of actions need to be performed to get a handle on the relevancy aspect: 

• First, build a relationship network between products/brands or experiences offered by a CPG company.
• Second, build a similar network between consumers for CPG enterprises.

Once we have the ability to relate one consumer to another as well one product/brand to another, it is not very complex to establish the relevancy of a given product or experience to a specific consumer, even in a quantified manner. Combined with the effect of location, communication channel and time, we have a reasonably strong model to increase relevancy.
 
Constant Improvement – Data analysis to predict the relevancy of a specific content to a specific consumer is important, and more important and challenging is measuring the accuracy of the prediction and then, use that to improve relevancy in the next iteration. Unless we have a framework which can listen for feedback on the content that has been presented to a consumer, it will not be possible to improve on the efficiency of the system. Usually if a consumer responds by taking explicit action on a piece of content presented, that is considered as successful content presentation.
 
As an example, if the system has been using SMS as the most preferred channel for communication with me and I have never responded to an SMS, efficacy of that channel should be marked as low and other modes of communication like email should be suggested. Similarly, if I have been responding to every suggestion about location specific services, then it should be used to communicate with me at any available opportunity. 
 
Use what you already know – Listening to everything, being relevant and constantly improving. It sounds difficult to create consistently positive experiences for your customers. But getting started on this journey may be easier than you think. Start with what you know. There are many things that a CPG business knows much better than anyone else; certainly better than Retailers or individual consumers. Examples are seasonal changes to product preferences and usage, the impact of a large event on a certain brand etc. It is very important to ensure that such knowledge is also used in deciding the content to be highlighted to a specific user. While we can learn quite a lot by analyzing consumer behavior, business knowledge that already exists in the enterprise should not be ignored. It should be possible to enhance existing business knowledge with knowledge gained on consumer behavior, to decide the most appropriate next step.
 
With these simple thoughts on what it takes, my experience of meeting Deepika in-person seems a little less dramatic, doesn’t it? Now, if I could only score front-row tickets to the premiere of her next blockbuster……