Understanding the challenges & benefits of personalization across sectors

Personalisation has become an important aspect for any company functioning in today’s time. At the recently-held e4m MarTech India Conference 2022, experts collectively agreed that catering personalisation to the consumers of fintech companies is complex compared to companies in other industries.

Moderated by Anil Pandit, SVP, Publicis Media, with the other panellists being Vidya Kailasam Hangal, Consumer Digital Lead, Mondelēz International; Sachin Vashishtha, CMO, Paisabazaar.com; Ashish Aggarwal, VP Growth, BharatPe, and Sangeet Aggarwal, Head of Product and Design, Housing.com. They deliberated on the topic –"Winning with Personalization: The Success Stories". The panellists shared their success stories and how they are forming an effective way to reach their consumers while giving them a personalized experience.

While talking about personalisation for fintech companies such as Paisabazaar.com and Bharatpe, the panellists agreed on how difficult it was to provide personalised experience to consumers as it involves money and data privacy, two very important factors in today’s time.

When asked about the same, Vaishishtha said, “It's true that BFSI has a lot of restrictions that are not there in other industries because money matters are very delicate and these restrictions are critical to safeguarding the interest of consumers. So whatever data we have we try to work with that as far is personalisation is concerned obviously there are regular ones, personalising the communication, personalising content, personalizing journeys.”

Agreeing to that, Aggarwal of BharatPe said, “In the case of a fintech company, it is also governed with the rules and regulation of the regulator. Just to give you an example, fintech companies are not allowed to store their data with a server outside of India. That's an important critical piece when you select your apartments. So, personalisation becomes slightly difficult for us.”

“Another reason why it is slightly tricky for a company, is a lot of things don't happen actually inside your digital environment. So, when you transact on any merchant using the Bharat QR that transaction is actually happening offline. Hence, stitching that offline transaction to the online journey is something which needs to be done,” Aggarwal added.

With technology coming in, a lot of companies partner with fabricator companies to help them to provide consumers with personalised experiences. Vaishtha said that it doesn’t depend upon the tools, instead it depends on how well has the company practised while experimenting with it.

Sharing his experience with experimentation, Aggarwal of Housing.com said, “One interesting experiment period was using the explicit data that the user was sharing with us in addition to the implicit data as we gather it through interactions, and everything we were able to classify multiple intents.”

“A lot of people drop off from what they are searching for on Monday. By the time they come back to us on Thursday, there are a lot of things that have happened offline. What they were looking for on Monday is maybe not what they are looking for today. We started showcasing multiple searches that they can do parallelly but can change into one intent that the person is looking out for so we saw about 15 to 17% uptake into the engagement.”

Shedding some light on the CPG industry’s perspective, Vidya Kailasam Hangal of Mondelez said, “I think fundamentally all of us in the CPG industry is trying to drive penetration because most of the category that we operate in India would be vastly under-penetrated there is room to grow.

“So, our objective continues to be penetration and to that extent I think most of us are aligned to the philosophy that the book speaks about. I think personalisation is not difficult, at least in our case. We are still going to go to a very large audience and a lot of them are going to be light users or some in case non-users, what we are trying to do through personalisation is to really personalise the communication in a way that still speaks to a brand idea proposition,” she added.