Being successful at delivering personalized experiences requires more than just setting up technology and building out your capabilities. It requires digital transformation, something that can easily be hampered by non-technical considerations including funding, strategy, and shared goals.
Here are three things that can derail your ability to develop and deliver a personalization road map:
1. Budget
Budgeting can be a major constraint in the digital transformation required to enable personalized experiences. Marketers often struggle with developing a budget and gaining buy-in for the digital transformation initiatives outlined in a multi-year roadmap. Traditional approaches require budgeting to be handled at an initiative level and often require extensive documentation of ROI for the expenditure. This approach does not allow for budgeting decisions to be made for the collective initiatives outlined in a roadmap. Focusing on ROI for each initiative and not the entire personalization program causes an impediment to the pace of organizational transformation. Some organizations overcome this constraint by combining initiatives or focusing less on a financial ROI and more on a process or organization outcome.
2. Balance
A 2017 report published by Inviqa “Mind the digital gap: aligning strategy and delivery” found that 53% of digital managers surveyed believe they are failing to balance day to day operations with innovation. Not being able to strike a balance between how much time and resources are spent between strategy and tactical execution reinforces existing silos and organizational tensions. This lack of balance does not allow for agile transformation to take root. The key to ensuring balance is to ensure there is organization wide buy-in for the overall strategy. Some organizations address this by actively auditing current tactical work to identify areas of improvement including a realignment of goals to line up with personalization goals.
3. Measurement
It is vital to have a clear, company-wide understanding of what success looks like so that it can be measured, and so that existing silos can be broken. Sometimes a tiered measurement strategy that allow for business outcome KPIs as well as diagnostic and optimization KPIs is the way to go. In this scenario, everyone in the organization has a stake in the overall KPIs in delivering personalized experiences. Measurement and KPIs also need to be aligned with how people are recognized and compensated. If a group’s bonus is tied to the number of campaigns they deliver or the number of leads then the motivation to test a new experience by providing a more personalized experience will be greatly lacking.
Tiered Measurement Example:
In addition to business and experience KPIs, your organization should also establish KPIs tied to your personalization roadmap to ensure progress is being made. This requires asking some tough questions like, “Do our procedures support personalization or channels? “Do we have the right resources in place?”; and “Do we have the right people but still have a skills gap?”.
Want to learn more on digital transformation? Check out our white paper with Adobe, ‘The Case for Change: Exposing the Myths of customer-Centric Transformation’.
