Why we need to be all-in on Personalisation
Personalisation has become the most exciting and important driver of customer loyalty in retail. Powered by 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.
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
People are often curious about some of the technology behind the intelligent loyalty solutions that we specialise in. We work with Google, and our tech stack is built to deliver real time personalisation at scale that is continually optimised.
The Eagle Eye stack sits on top of many of Google services. Some of the main ones are
Kubernetes, bigQuery, Looker and vertex.ai. Kubernetes handles promotion execution in real time, handling about 5000 API calls per second; Google Big Query serves as a data lake for billions of weekly offers; Looker allows retailers to analyse and optimise offers and campaigns in real time; and Vertex.ai is where we execute our personalisation algorithms to tailor the promotions offered to customers.
It's this technology architecture that supports the personalisation strategies of many retailers across the globe, including Tesco in the UK Carrefour across Europe and Woolworths in Australia.
What Happens Next?
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. 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," he 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.
Eagle Eye is a leading SaaS and AI technology company enabling retail, travel and hospitality brands to earn the loyalty of their end customers by powering their real-time, omnichannel and personalised consumer marketing activities, at scale.
Eagle Eye AIR is a cloud-based platform, which provides the most flexible and scalable loyalty and promotions capability in the world. More than 850 million personalised offers are executed via the platform every week, and it currently hosts over 500 million loyalty member wallets for businesses all over the world. Eagle Eye is a certified member of the MACH Alliance and is trusted to deliver a secure service at hundreds of thousands of physical POS destinations worldwide, enabling the real-time issuance and redemption of promotional coupons, loyalty offers, gift cards, subscription benefits and more.
The Eagle Eye AIR platform is currently powering loyalty and customer engagement solutions for enterprise businesses all over the world, including Asda, Tesco, Morrisons, Waitrose and John Lewis & Partners, JD Sports, Pret a Manger, Loblaws, Southeastern Grocers, Giant Eagle, and the Woolworths Group. In January 2024, Eagle Eye launched EagleAI, a next-generation data science solution for personalisation, already being used by leading retailers worldwide including Carrefour, Auchan and Pattison Food Group. Web - www.eagleeye.com
Sarah Jarvis is the Communications and Propositions Director of Eagle Eye. With over 15 years of experience as a Retail Marketing Leader in the loyalty industry, she has worked with some of the world's largest retailers and FMCG brands to help them drive profitable growth by prioritising the customer in their decision-making processes. Her expertise spans loyalty program design, CRM, personalisation, data analytics, data commercialisation, and the technical implementation of initiatives that bring retailers and brands closer to their customers. Her know-how of what drives loyalty and effective personalisation can be seen in the 2nd edition of Omnichannel Retail: How to Build Winning Stores in a Digital World, which she co-authored with Tim Mason in 2023.
