Need right balance between automation & personalisation: Experts

There needs to be a right balance in automation and personalisation in omnichannel marketing, was the unanimous view of the industry experts at the e4m Pitch CMO Summit Bengaluru 2023.

During a panel discussion on ‘The Power of Personalization in Omnichannel Marketing’, moderated by Gaurav Jain, Head - Emerging Business, Sharechat & Moj, experts brainstormed over ethical concerns of personalisation, emerging technologies and more.

According to Prashant Dhar, Director - Marketing, AO Smith India, one of the panelists, the line between automation and human intervention must be clearly defined.

“There should be a defined line between automation and human intervention. If a consumer comes to our website and wants to buy a product or wants to know more about it, that can be easily automated through a chatbot. But in extreme winters, when he is facing a product fault, he will kill me if my chatbot keeps interacting with him. That time you need to take him to customer care where there will be human intervention.

“So there has to be a right balance in automation and human intervention or personalisation. It is a blurred line but it has to be defined sharply so that the scalability and the personalisation or the empathy have the right balance,” said Dhar.

Sharing his view, Rahul Karthikeyan, Chief Marketing Officer, Scaler, an online transformative upskilling platform for working tech professionals, said “It is very difficult. Automation and personalisation have to play together, otherwise it can lead to disaster.”

Among the other panelists were Ankur Agarwal, General Manager - Marketing, TTK Prestige; Aparajita Biswas, Head of Marketing, The Hindu Group and Vaibhav Mehrotra, Senior Director - Marketing, Cashfree Payments.

Diving deep into the topic of personalisation in omnichannel marketing, panelists said that it is all about creating a customised experience for a consumer.

“The customised experience helps you to improve your metrices in terms of cost per engagement, cost per clicks through rates etc. It is about creating distinct consumer profiles and targeting them in terms of communication and service delivery,” Dhar said.

Talking about how an offline brand achieves personalisation, Ankur Agarwal said it is important to make a customer feel wanted.

“It is not a new term in marketing. Personalisation has been present in form or the other. Personalisation is very important because at whatever stage a consumer engages with a brand, he has to feel wanted and valued for,” Agarwal said.

However, Scaler’s Karthikeyan was of the opinion that personalisation has a flip side to it as it can be “creepy” at times.

“Most of the time personalisation is useful but sometimes it can get creepy as well. When you land on certain pages, brands follow. It is creepy in a way because there is no user consent there. Personalisation to me is where you understand at what stage a consumer is looking for a particular brand and wants to engage with it,” he said.

On leveraging the brand with power of data analytics to create personalised messaging and resonating with the brand, The Hindu’s Aparajita Biswas said data analytics is used to create look-alike segments.

“We are into the news business and we have a moral responsibility to show significant news. The entire personalisation is being done in terms of news of interest where we use data analytics to create look-alike segments and give the right content to the right audience. Everyday we develop data capabilities,” she said.

On ethical concerns about personalisation of privacy, Vaibhav Mehrotra said that his company looks into data to read signals that can help prevent frauds.

“As a payments company we craft experiences which help our businesses to offer personalisation to their customers. We look at data to read the signals which can prevent frauds,” he said.

On emerging technology or trends in personalisation which brands resonate with, AO Smith’s Dhar said that augmented reality (AR) is giving an elevated experience to his consumers.

“There is something called AR. We have created modules on our web page where a customer can go and visualise each and every product in their own space. That gives an elevated level of consumer experience,” he said.

According to Agarwal, the retail space is becoming expensive and the patience of consumers is shrinking.

“There is a thing called the endless aisle. A store need not have to keep the entire stock. A consumer can visit the store and have a virtual experience of the product and they can order the product at the store. So the cost of doing business would come down,” he said.