Personalisation and the Tailored Sales Process

 Personalisation enables online channels to serve dynamically (and invisibly) tailored content to individual users, based on their profile (implicit or explicit), and essentially, an anticipation of their needs. This increase in the efficiency and effectiveness of the interaction between the channel and the user can mean increased conversion rates, raised satisfaction and a fulfiled customer.

Personalisation is frequently referred to under many alternative guises including content optimisation, content targeting, dynamic delivery adaptation, collaborative filtering, tailored sales process and customisation.

The Tailored Sales Process (TSP)

The Tailored Sales Process is the dynamic adaptation of a website or online application's content, behaviour and flow process to best-fit the anticipated needs of an individual user and thereby increase their propensity to purchase. TSP or the Intelligent Sales Process as it is sometimes known is seen by many as a holy grail; a perfect scenario but mostly unachievable. Whilst this may have been the case a few years ago, the development of personalisation technology and thinking has resulted in numerous real-world examples of its successful implementation.

 Types of Personalisation

Within personalisation, we have ‘implicit’ and ‘explicit’ user profiles – the definitions of these allow us to differentiate between two types of personalisation:

Implicit

Implicit user profiles are created dynamically from user behaviour, and from user information that can be automatically ascertained (e.g. IP address, browser information).  The most common form of implicit personalisation is ‘click stream’, which uses the history of a users clicks (i.e. pages they viewed) to personalise future content.  For example, if a user on a music site views more ‘reggae’ pages than ‘pop’, then in-site advertising could be personalised towards ‘reggae’.

Explicit

Explicit user profiles are created when a user registers with a site.  The details that the user enters during registration will then be used to personalise content on a site.  For example, if a user on an educational site registers as a ‘librarian’, then search results could be prioritised to bring back content that is more relevant for librarians.

What can be personalised?

Within Amaxus, there are different ‘layers’ at which the personalisation system can take effect:

Navigational areas/Categories

Individual site categories can have personalisation options applied to them, thereby restricting certain sections of the site to certain users (e.g. a ‘members only’ section).

Blocks

Individual blocks, within a page, can have personalisation options applied to them, thereby restricting certain blocks of content to certain users (e.g. only show a ‘stock news’ block on the front page to registered share holders).

Content items

Individual items of content can have personalisation options applied to them, thereby restricting certain items of content to certain users (e.g. only show a news item about a new procurement system to existing suppliers).

In what ways can content be personalised?

There are many ways in which personalisation can take effect:

Restrictions

Restrict information based on user profile, e.g. restricted sections (through login, etc.) or hidden content.

Prioritisation

Prioritise/re-order information based on user profile (i.e. weight certain documents higher in search results or content listings).

Modification

Alter the contents of the information, based on user profile (e.g. word a document slightly differently based on age group of user).