Definition:

Personalization means delivering an intrinsically relevant experience addressing what a given customer expects from a brand. Personalization at Scale is being able to do that for every customer while achieving an organization's business objectives. 

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Personalization at Scale critical capabilities:

In today's world, there hasn't been a time when customer expectations for receiving delightful experiences are so high. At the same time, brands and organizations face unprecedented challenges in delivering on these expectations. From ever-evolving customer behavior and data proliferation to maturely using AI/ML, I would recommend focusing on the following five critical capabilities to achieve Personalization at Scale:

1. Customer Data: Data is at the heart of every successful Personalization at Scale strategy. As it comes in different shapes, forms, and velocities, I recommend you put in place processes, skills, and technologies to unify your data, structure it, and make it easier to draw insights and activate it to fuel personalized experiences.   
2. Privacy and Security: Trust between customers and brands is earned and broken with every experience, and Data governance should be a core component of your Personalization at Scale strategy. With massive amounts of Data and continuously evolving regulations, organizations must adequately manage data privacy and security.  
3. Content Velocity: Personalization requires relevant content. Personalization at Scale requires organizational resources, processes, and technologies to make sure your content is in the correct format, processed at a critical time, and delivered through the right channel if you need to sustain millions of customer interactions simultaneously.
4. Cross-Channel Orchestration: The best customer experience happens when a memorable after-taste transcends the channels through which that experience occurred (... I know... this is deep!). To achieve this goal, all steps during an experience should feel connected. I recommend you create event-driven journeys as much as possible, personalize their content based on customers' real-time behaviors, and use the right channel depending on each context.  
5.  Always be Optimizing: Creating personalized content and journeys is one thing. Achieving Personalization at Scale is another. It is essential to leave adequate space for experimentation and optimization and constantly measure their effect on the overall customer experience. Optimization can occur at multiple levels: content, channel, time, action, and the desired business outcome.

Personalization at Scale drives business results:

Using personalization drives performance and better customer outcomes. Companies that grow faster drive more revenue from personalization than their slower-growing counterparts. Based on an Incisiv/Adobe joint study, companies that are scaling 1:1 personalization have seen a 10x improvement in conversion rate, an 8x improvement in revenue per visitor, and a 9x improvement in average order when moving from basic to 1:1 personalization.

Online resources to learn even more about Personalization at Scale:

• • Failure to Scale: The State of Personalization in Retail and Travel Q3, 2021‍
• • Personalization at Scale has never been more crucial for your business - Blog Post‍
• • Campaign Management vs Customer Journey Management - Blog Post‍
• • Digital Experience Platform (DXP)  - Blog Post
  

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