Accelerating customer personalisation with Predictive and Gen AI

By Sarah Jarvis (pictured), Propositions Director, Eagle Eye Solutions

Personalisation has become the most exciting and important driver of customer loyalty in retail. Powered by Artificial Intelligence (AI), personalisation is becoming more than just the engine behind modern loyalty programs, but a major engine for business profitability as well.

At Eagle Eye, we love personalisation because we believe it to be the future of retail. Already engaging millions of customers effectively, it harnesses retailers’ vast first-party data to enhance customer experiences. As data volumes grow, technology advances, and use cases expand, these personalised experiences will improve exponentially.

At a recent retailer focused conference, CEO of Eagle Eye Tim Mason and I spoke about why we’re all-in on personalisation, how we structure our tech stack to manage this complex and growing field, and what will come next in the personalisation space.

Back to Basics

Firstly, we believe in true personalisation because it is already happening. The world of business to consumer is becoming truly personalised on a 1:1 scale. As consumers, the interfaces we are served on the screens of our phones, computers and televisions are increasingly generated just for us, from videos to products and promotions.

We now live in a world where – whether online or in-store – customers expect the businesses that they park their valuable cash in to make the experience all about them.

In a book we published recently, Omnichannel Retail, we talk a lot about omnichannel and personalisation. Our belief is that omnichannel and personalisation are two sides of the same coin. Omnichannel is what the business does, it should be the organisational goal, while personalisation is how the customer should experience the business’ efforts in creating a united front to serve them as an individual.

Personalisation has always been good for customers. All the way back to traditional loyalty schemes, the benefits have been clear: customers become more loyal and sales go up. What’s new to the discussion with modern personalisation, which is being recognised by Boston Consulting Group (BCG), McKinsey and many others, is that personalisation drives profitability.

Last year, BCG Group predicted that “Over the next five years, $2 trillion in revenue will shift to companies that know how to create personalised experiences and personalised communications.”.

However, you have to be in it to win it. Good businesses going forward will be those businesses that personalise experiences for individual consumers. By doing so they stand to sell more and at a higher margin.

Technology in Practice

There is no doubt that predictive and generative AI are going to continue to accelerate the delivery of personalisation at a massive scale. As part of Eagle Eye, we have a product called Eagle AI, the algorithms within which are already processing 2.8 billion customer interactions every single minute.

This number is constantly growing, which improves how retailers connect with their customers at a 1:1 level.

Beyond promotions, we also believe that personalisation will soon apply to more and more attributes to touch the customer journey. These might include personalised cooking programs, health and wellbeing tracking, and more. It is also expected that retailers or businesses will be able to share more data back with the consumer about their habits in ways that are helpful to them.

Another key piece of the future of personalisation, we believe, is challenges. As an example, major UK grocery chain Tesco is running challenge offers driven by 1:1 personalisation, and for the second reporting period in a row, Tesco CEO Ken Murphy has made mention of their work in personalisation.

“We introduced a little bit of personalisation and a little bit of gamification through Clubcard challenges to over 10 million customers, and that had a great effect. There was a really, really strong response to that,” Murphy said.

Personalisation and challenges are generating high levels of engagement from Tesco’s customers. This is extremely powerful in a modern company growth strategy. By increasing digital engagement and delivering more products and services personally and digitally, businesses are creating and adding more value.

Retailers are in a fantastic position to do this. They have a considerable amount of first-party data which enables them to create significantly more valuable products and services.