Ever since Amazon pioneered personalisation – using data to recommend products to consumers – numerous retailers have followed suit. 

In recent months, Waitrose revealed it had used personalisation to achieve a 24% rise in online orders from new and early stage shoppers, while JD Williams generated an uplift of 18% in new visitor conversion within just two weeks of personalising its mobile and tablet experiences.

Personalisation now spans experiences, products and delivery options as consumers grow more sophisticated and demanding in their requirements. But how can retailers structure themselves to ensure personalisation is managed optimally?

“Most brands typically have personalisation sat either in the ecommerce or marketing teams. However, the critical factor is that the business is bought into personalisation at a high level,” says Monetate vice president EMEA Mike Harris, who provides multichannel personalisation to brands.

Mike Harris, vice president EMEA, Monetate

Mike Harris, vice president EMEA, Monetate

Mike Harris, vice president EMEA, Monetate, discussed how of personalisation works with brands

“Regardless of which department owns personalisation, we see that the most successful clients are those where the teams operate cross-functionally and that all areas of the business take a customer-centric approach, aligning metrics and achieving goals from various parts of the company.”

Essential teamwork

It is an approach that works well for Shop Direct. Last year, the retailer launched a truly personalised home page for its flagship brand, Very.co.uk, using customers’s preferences and browsing history to display highly relevant products on its home page.

The company also uses segmentation and one-to-one personalisation to tailor its communications.

“Data scientists, creatives, CRM professionals, IT engineers, UX experts and marketers all came together to work towards innovations in personalisation”

Jennifer Day, Shop Direct

“To kick off our approach to personalisation, we set-up a cross-functional acceleration team made up of people from right across our business,” says Shop Direct customer management director, Jennifer Day.

“Data scientists, creatives, CRM professionals, IT engineers, UX experts and marketers all came together to work towards innovations in personalisation”, she says.

The team agreed key principles at the start – principles that Day says “came from the team and were agreed by the team, for the team.” It echoes a point made by Harris about the importance of agreeing strategy, direction and tactics as part of a cross-functional team, giving everyone a vested interest in the work being carried out.

Harris adds that training departments to encourage such engagement is also advisable. UK sales director at Omnichannel personalisation specialists RichRelevance Perdeep Kanda takes the same view.

He believes the most effective users of personalisation technology will have a focused cross-functional team working across the site, rather than just in relation to one product category.

He observes that having a single view of the customer across all sales channels is key, something that has prompted widespread organisational change among a number of retailers.

Over the last couple of years we’ve seen a lot of our enterprise retail customers introduce roles such as head of customer experience and head of omnichannel or omnichannel director as a way to bring all sales channels together rather than operate in silos,” says Kanda.

“Ideally, personalisation projects that drive sales and incentivise operational attitudes towards customers will have engagement from multiple strands of the business.

Retailers need internal buy-in around customers or omnichannel initiatives, rather than around specific single channel incentives.”

JD Williams looks at all of its customer touchpoints, thanks to a dedicated team that works closely with its ecommerce development and brand trading teams.

“This means we get a holistic view of the customer and the customer’s journey on a product, site and experience level,” says JD Williams group ecommerce conversion rate optimisation manager, Finn Christo.

“We’re not siloed in our own world of personalisation and testing, we’re part of the customer experience from the get-go.”

Digital departments

Customer insight underpins any personalisation, but as director of business design and transformation at digital innovation consultancy Futurice Cathy Wang says, this presents a challenge for many traditional retail companies because the customer insights department often sits within marketing, alongside market research.

“This creates a gap in the feedback loop between the customer insight and product development team, which can result in a product that is not a good fit with its market or that faces difficulties in retaining customers,” she says.

Jennifer Day on potential challenges of personalisation

Jennifer Day

Jennifer Day explained the possible challenges of personalisation

Wang advises retailers with a more traditional corporate structure to adopt a digital first, user-centric approach.

“In our view, every department should be a digital department, that prioritises customer needs. “To enable this type of organisation, retailers need to be culture-led.

One of our key recommendations is to encourage traditional retailers to create an agile culture that allows for that rapid feedback loop.”

It is a belief echoed by Day, who says that culture has played a big part in Shop Direct’s approach: “We’d always say ‘we’ll find a way’ rather than ‘we can’t because…’, and we’d explore every idea.” She adds that Shop Direct work in an agile way.

“We set short timeframes for individual projects and spent 15 minutes each day updating on progress and identifying ways we could help each other.

It meant we were iterating and moving really quickly, which meant faster progress.”

Shop Direct’s initial team has since evolved into wider groups, sharing the approach so that each department works together to deliver personalisation, but Day says the flat team structure it adopted was paramount to ensuring everyone’s contribution was valuable. “This empowered individuals and ultimately helped us to innovate faster.”

A refreshing change

This cohesive way of working helps to engage employees and encourage them to embrace personalisation. As Christo acknowledges, JD Williams has to remain agile and constantly evolve its way of working in line with changing customer behaviour, and its lack of silos means everyone can conceive exciting ideas and challenge themselves.

“Implementing employee incentives online and within email but not in-store doesn’t have a positive effect”

Perdeep Kanda, RichRelevance

Kanda reinforces that view, adding that the best way for retailers to empower and engage employees to buy into personalisation is to have incentives across every channel. “For example, implementing employee incentives online and within email but not in-store doesn’t have a positive effect.

“Instead, retailers can incentivise staff based around the location of purchases, rather than sales channel. So if an online visitor doesn’t convert online but goes into their local store to buy a product, the online team will be credited as well as in-store, and vice versa.”

Harris believes that unlocking business data to empower employees has been instrumental for those companies who have seen personalisation really deliver results.

He advises retailers to “enable teams to access data to determine where the priorities lie, and use available data to enable the experience to be personalised.”

Equipping in-store employees with online customer data, such as most popular outfit combinations or previous purchases, can promote employee engagement.

“This will also allow them the benefits of using data to personalise experiences, making them better at their jobs and ultimately helping them to sell more,” says Kanda.

But while personalisation is a powerful and proven tool, retailers need to keep their eyes on the ball.

As Christo warns, “Personalisation isn’t a blanket approach or answer-all. We need to keep mindful that we’re working smart and creating personalised experiences that are meaningful and engaging, rather than getting caught up in the testing and creating.”