Skip the Personalization Hype for Real Results with Opal AI

If you’re a marketer and you’re tired, you’re not alone. For many, the rush of excitement around powerful new AI tools for personalization has become an intense, buzzword-heavy pressure to speedrun experimentation, implementation and scaling for hyper-personalization as soon as possible. The drive to scale fast can be exhausting, and it may not deliver the kind of ROI marketing teams expect.

Instead of focusing on personalization capabilities above all else, marketers need to stay focused on meeting customer experience expectations in ways that deliver your desired business outcomes. That requires acknowledging a fact that’s sometimes lost in the rush to hyper-personalization: What customers want isn’t personalization based on a single data-point. They want experiences that matter, and that happens when brands truly see them, understand their needs, and give them what they want.

What customers want more than personalization

Seventy percent of customers now choose brands because they expect a good experience, but the days of being impressed by emails that use their first name are over. Personalization without nuance and context can actually undermine customers’ confidence in a brand -- for example, if they get recommendations from a brand for the exact item they have purchased previously – but also bought the day before.

These clunky experiences happen when brands focus too much on simple segmentation and not enough on considering the nuances that can impact how we should speak to and target those customers. They also happen when data, processes, and teams are siloed, which results in fragmented experiences.

The solution is to focus on what customers actually want from brand interactions:

• Usefulness. Customers want brands to solve their needs in a moment. If you don’t do that, your customer will open a new tab or ask ChatGPT to find another way to fulfill that need.

• Empathy. Understanding the hesitations and hurdles along your common customer journeys can help you design experiences that remove those barriers. What are the little things that might get in your customers’ way, and how can you remove them or augment the experience to bring that customer peace of mind? What’s on customers’ minds as they move from one point in their journey to the next, and how can you help them?

• Continuity. Is your customer’s experience consistent across channels and time? Discrepancies can make customers feel unrecognized and unvalued, while seamless continuity builds trust and loyalty. That matters because customers with positive emotional attachment to a brand deliver higher customer lifetime value.

Focus on outcomes first, then strategy and technology

It’s easy to overlook or underplay customers’ expectations when you’re caught up in the potential of your technology. When it comes to personalization, it’s important to first clarify the outcomes you want to achieve, and then decide how to use your technology to achieve them. Personalization may be your path, but growth is your destination.

Ultimately, effective personalization is about removing friction from the customer journey, not reminding customers that you recognize them. It’s a form of “show, don’t tell” that makes a story or a customer journey engaging.

For example, you might want to convert more site visitors to buyers. Translate your desired outcomes into customer goals, and make sure you understand what your customers need and expect. Those hesitant visitors might be price sensitive or cautious about committing without more product knowledge. Understanding what’s beneath that customer hesitation gives you fuel to determine how to intervene – is this a moment to show customer testimonials, or to clearly explain a product nuance? They get an experience that’s useful and empathetic. You get more wins.

That doesn’t mean ignoring the newest tech tools. Legacy rules-based personalization systems are labor intensive, hard to adapt, hard to scale up from the pilot stage, and deliver slow, incremental wins. Today’s agentic AI tools can do much more, as long as they’re working toward outcomes and rest on the proper foundation and strategy.

Using Opal AI for Outcome-Focused Personalization

Many of today’s AI tools function like smart interns, assisting in limited ways with simple tasks and process automation. Optimizely’s agentic Opal AI works more like a partner that can orchestrate more complex end-to-end processes, from ideation to setup, analysis, and adaptation.

For example, you can give Opal AI specific problem statements, such as low engagement with critical pages on your site, and ask for recommendations. Opal can then

• Suggest different tests you can run or personalization you can provide to improve engagement.

• Help you plan experiments and personalizations.

• Create on-brand content and variants for your tests.

• Analyze test results and adapt page elements based on results.

Opal can also help you identify new potential segments from your own data you could be including in your personalization strategies.

All of these capabilities can help your brand scale up your personalization efforts, optimize journeys more effectively with less hands-on effort, and help you reach the outcomes you want. The result can be faster time to results and faster adaptation as customer expectations evolve.

Learn how to scale your personalization program effectively with Optimizely Opal

Working with a trusted partner can help your marketing team leverage agentic AI to achieve your business and CX goals. As one of just five Optimizely Premier Platinum Partners, Rightpoint can help you design processes that make the most of Opal AI across the Optimizely ecosystem. We can also help your team identify the data, technology integrations, change management and experimentation strategies that meet your need for measurable results.

Personalization buzzwords don’t move the needle, but meaningful experiences do. To learn more about how Rightpoint can help you deliver those experiences with Optimizely Opal AI, contact us.