Read the full transcript of personalization pioneer Mark Abraham’s talk titled “The Power of Personalization in the Age of AI” at TED@BCG on September 12, 2024.
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
A Personal Experience
MARK ABRAHAM: It was a bright sunny day, and I was out for a run when the large dog escaped from behind his fence, attacked me, and bit me right in the leg. I fell, sprained my wrist, and to make matters worse, I found out he’s not up to date on his rabies shot. Okay. Off to the local urgent care I go. I’ve been there a bunch of times before, so I figured they’d have my information on file and quickly admit me.
Instead, I got this: the same form that I filled out so many times before. And now I had to do so with a busted wrist. And then I sat there waiting and waiting. And nothing beats waiting in a waiting room, then thinking, did I just get rabies?
The Problem with Impersonal Customer Experiences
This is the opposite of a personalized customer experience. You see it all around you, don’t you? And it makes you want to go, “Ugh.” There’s the hurtful: my friend Sanjeev, his dog died six months ago, and his online marketplace is still sending him email recommendations for his dog’s favorite treats.
Then there’s the inaccurate: I bought my uncle a cane online, and now I’m getting trolled with ads for hearing aids and senior citizen discounts all over the Internet. I’m not that old. And then there’s the “I don’t want another one of that. I just want one that works.”
I bought a dishwasher and it arrived after nine months damaged. So I was waiting and waiting. And the same company sent me an email and then another and another with recommendations for more dishwashers.
It’s infuriating. And it doesn’t have to be this way.
Introducing True Personalization
I lead a team of over a thousand people around the world dedicated to helping brands build better customer experiences, what we call true personalization. I’ve been geeking out about this for years, so much so that I even wrote a book on it. Check it out. And I want to share with you what I learned because I think we need to be demanding better experiences from the brands we interact with, especially now in this day and age when companies should be competing on the scale of insights they have about us at a speed enabled by AI and technology. Okay.
But let’s start with what true personalization even is. Unlike customization, which is about tailoring products, say a custom fabric for a sofa, personalization is about tailoring experiences. True personalization is when a brand takes what it learned about you in one interaction and makes your very next interaction better, faster, cheaper, or more convenient. Sounds simple on paper. But in all my work, I found there’s not really a great way to measure personalization.
And it’s really hard to improve what you can’t measure. This is why my team and I built the personalization index. It’s a simple score, zero to a hundred, and it tells you exactly where a brand stands. You can score any company on it in any industry, and it’s really a first measure of its kind. We did exactly this for hundreds of companies around the world, and the findings kind of shocked us.
What may not surprise you is some of the companies at the top of the personalization index scoreboard. Of course, we have Netflix, and we all know they provide great feeds of movies that you love to watch, and they match your preferences. Then you have Starbucks. When you open their app, they provide personalized offers for your favorite drinks. But there are other lesser-known companies at the top of the personalization index.
Take Thundermind. They’re a mental health app, and they actually score you on twelve different brain functions. And then they might match you up with your perfect therapist, or they would just give you helpful everyday advice. Now some of the companies at the bottom of the personalization index also won’t surprise you. They hail from industries like financial services, insurance, B2B distribution, and, yes, US healthcare, including my local urgent care.
The Impact of Personalization
But what did surprise us is the extent to which personalization can boost growth. My research shows that personalization leaders grow ten points faster than laggards. Ten points. And they’re building competitive moats. They’re achieving the highest customer satisfaction scores.
In fact, combined, personalization leaders will capture a two trillion dollar prize in incremental growth over the next five years. Yes. That’s trillion with a t. Okay. So with all this potential upside, you might ask, what’s the secret sauce to making customer experiences truly personalized?
The Secret to True Personalization
Here’s the secret. And this was the most counterintuitive finding from our research. With true personalization, less is more. Less is more. Fewer ads, fewer offers, fewer messages, less spam.
Because when a brand truly respects you and knows you, it’s only going to show you what’s relevant for you. With this less is more approach, a brand can build trust. Okay. So let’s look at how companies actually put less is more into action. A brand that’s perhaps less talked about in this regard is Fidelity.
Case Study: Fidelity’s Approach to Personalization
And for those of you watching outside of the US, they’re a financial services company, and they do two things really well to live up to the less is more mantra. Number one, Fidelity really gets to know you. They don’t just send you email and blast you and then make decisions off of open rates. No. They actually want to get to know the investment goals of each and every client.
They might do this with a one-on-one meeting with an advisor or by sending you an online survey. Now this survey is really interesting because the companies designed it with their future outreach efforts in mind. So they’re really thinking about your next experiences from your very first interaction. They even have this cool thing called the gratitude question where they ask, “What are you grateful for in your life?” And then they personalize your investment goals accordingly.
Imagine what my experience would have been like in that local urgent care had they been thinking about my future experiences from the first time I walked in. Second, Fidelity, once they get to know you, uses personalization to delight you. Teams look at your investment goals along with data from your every next interaction to decide what to do next. Say you had a baby and you updated the beneficiaries on your life insurance. They would take this data and educate you on the benefits of opening a college savings account.
They would even choose how to educate you. Say you were new to investing, they might show you a brief video. Or if you were really a savvy investor wanting to dig into the details, they’ll send you an in-depth article. Next, and this is key, they would decide what not to do. For example, they might suppress that previously scheduled email about the newly launched Bitcoin fund.
In this way, Fidelity massively reduced the scheduled outreach and shifted to a much more triggered and personalized approach. The result? Engagement and opt-in rates shot up. Okay. So customers are happier.
But what if I’m the guy at Fidelity in charge of brokerage transactions? What about me? If I can’t spam my customers, I won’t be able to meet my monthly goals. Right? Wrong.
Fidelity actually saw transactions increase with this new approach. But, unfortunately, Fidelity is in the minority. The status part of our personalization index results is that only ten percent of companies qualify as personalization leaders. As a result, we live in a world of spam. Three hundred and sixty billion emails are sent every day, yet conversion rates and open rates are down.
We downloaded two hundred and fifty billion apps last year, but uninstalled half of them within thirty days. And I’m afraid this is about to get much, much worse. Why, you ask? Because with Gen AI, companies can deliver an order of magnitude more content at a fraction of the cost in a fraction of the time. We’re at the precipice of a content explosion, and the jury’s still out on how this is going to go.
So as business leaders, we need to stop myopically focusing on selling stuff. These people don’t want more dishwashers. And build trust with personalization. My research is clear. When you personalize customers’ experiences, they will give you their data much more willingly.
In fact, the percentage rates go up from thirty to ninety percent. With this data in hand, companies can build a virtuous cycle. So if you’re that email marketer out there still spamming customers, stop for a second. Look at your unsubscribe rates and think about how you feel getting all that irrelevant content. And as consumers, now is the time to make our voices heard.
You can feel it when a brand isn’t doing right by your attention, your dollar, your data. Can’t you? So break off that relationship. Or at a minimum, give them a thumbs down in that survey after you had a bad experience. Companies are paying much more attention to this aspect of their digital relationship, so it’s worth the two seconds to send that signal.
Conclusion: The Importance of Feeling Heard
I want to leave you with something that I think a lot about as I do this work. Have you noticed people are a little bit angry? Actually, they’re a lot angry. They’re angry about big government and big corporations, about flying. They’re angry about how everyone else is angry.
Look, I’m not going to stand here as the personalization guy and tell you I have the answer to all the world’s problems. But I do have to think underlying a lot of this simmering anger is a sense of not being heard. Of being a cog in an unresponsive, impersonal world. I get it. For much of human history, the world was personal.
We knew our butcher, baker, and candlestick maker. And they knew us. It’s only been in the last century or so with the rise of mass commerce and digital advertising that businesses got impersonal. The fact is we have taken personalization out of our lives. It’s time for businesses and us as consumers to work together to put it back in.
To make us feel seen and heard once again. Thank you.
