Every organization these days has some sort of vision or initiative around personalized guest or customer experiences. The term personalization crops up everywhere, yet it seems that most of the industry is struggling to achieve this supposed best-in-class end state. Technology seems to be available; investments are being made, but industry is not quite there yet. For the purposes of our topic today, I’ll define personalization in fairly straightforward terms: personalization in customer experience is the ability (from systems, process, content, and data) to create unique customer-level experiences across the digital and in-person marketing landscape. This includes how and when we engage with customers, as well as with what message and content – unique to the individual customer, their preferences, wants and needs.
When we think about long-term customer centricity, we think about creating a roadmap that looks at both investments in systems, processes, and certainly technology, but also fundamental changes to the way we work and the organization as a whole. Broad capabilities must be developed and synchronized across the organization. In fact, there are eight capabilities that are required: guest analytics, guest strategy, content, orchestration/next best action, activation/ channels, operations, data/tech foundation, and organizational transformation. Most importantly, these capabilities need to be organized in an integrated, automated approach, which will require an overall business process transformation (Figure 1). Organizations tend to focus on technology enablers, mostly because that’s where most of the investment is. While this is important, it is only one of the eight key capabilities outlined.
READ THE FULL ARTICLE BY MATT COCHRAN IN THE 2022 WINTER EDITION OF GAMING & LEISURE MAGAZINE.