How Hyper-Personalization Is Transforming Personalised Services in 2024
The retail industry is undergoing a major transformation, driven by the rising expectations of customers demanding personalised services.
According to the National Retail Federation,
“The future is hyper-personalised; it has been for some time now. The challenge for 2024 is delivering hyper-personalization while respecting customer privacy, protecting data and serving up just what they had in mind — in real-time.”
Join us as we delve into the intricacies of hyper-personalization and its profound impact on retail businesses in 2024.
Hyper-Personalization: Offer personalised services to your customers with data, AI, and automation
Hyper-personalization refers to the practice of curating products, services, and experiences to the specific needs as well as desires of individual customers. It goes beyond traditional practices such as customer feedback forms or POS interactions. It leverages advanced technologies such as data analytics, AI, and automation to create a complete shopper profile for every individual customer and serve them with the ideal shopping options, offering the best chance at making a sale. As a result, retail businesses can offer personalised services and boost customer retention.
However, hyper-personalization also comes with challenges, especially in terms of customer privacy and data protection. Customers are becoming more aware and concerned about how their personal information is collected and shared by retailers. Hence, they expect transparency and consent over the use of their data. Therefore, retailers need to balance the benefits of hyper-personalization while protecting the customer’s privacy.
Simplify your promotional strategies with Veras Activate
Veras Activate provides a centralised dashboard for employees where they can manage all aspects of their promotional campaigns with ease. This includes offering the perfect promotions directly at POS, or even online to the customer. As you can imagine, getting exclusive coupons incepts an idea of privilege in the consumer, which turns into trust down the line. Businesses can also customise the Veras Activate platform to design complex rules regarding promotional offers to better suit their business model. With the advanced price simulation feature, you can also test the promotional strategies and find the outcome before actually implementing it.
Furthermore, Veras Retail will soon introduce a smart promotions engine with Veras Activate. This advanced integration will offer promotional strategies based on analysed user data to provide more accurate and impactful promotions. The data will be collected from diverse sources such as sales, customer history, demographics, and even current market trends and competitor activities.
How to protect customer privacy while delivering personalised services?
The sudden shift towards hyper-personalisation is also a relatively unique experience for customers, which also raises significant concerns from a consumer point of view. To address these concerns and meet the heightened expectations of their customers, businesses must follow a few protocols while implementing hyper-personalisation:
Ask for consent
First and foremost, retail businesses must ask customer’s permission to collect and use their data. It includes a clear explanation of what data you need and how you will use it to provide a better experience to the customer. This also gives the customer the option to opt in or opt out of the program, respecting their preferences.
Minimise data collection
Retail businesses should only collect the data that is necessary for personalization purposes. Thus, avoiding the collection of any sensitive information or PII, which is an important part of data minimization principles. Also, make sure to perform regular audits of the data collected to ensure it aligns with your business objectives as well as regulations policies such as FTC (Federal Trade Commission).
Maintain Transparency
The next step is to be completely transparent about your data practices and policies revolving around hyper-personalisation. Provide the customers with easy access to your privacy policy and data protection rights. Inform them regarding any changes to your data policies, while allowing them to review and update their preferences at any point.
Data Security
The most important protocol is to implement robust security measures to safeguard customer data against any form of unauthorised access. It includes safeguarding the collected information using industry-standard encryption, multi-factor authentication, and other security protocols.
Veras Affinity: Connect with your customers on a personal level
Veras Affinity is a one-stop solution for retail businesses when it comes to accessing customer insights and preferences. It grants business personnel access to the priorities of their customers based on their purchase history, preferences, and feedback. More importantly, Veras Affinity is a completely mobile solution that ensures instant access to customer insights from anywhere. Moreover, Veras Affinity utilises the vast potential of AI for completely automated recommendations. To make things more interesting, Veras implements a highly intuitive user experience with Veras Affinity to make the system more engaging for employees.
Conclusion
Successful integration of hyper-personalization undeniably brings extraordinary opportunities to enhance customer engagement and maintain a high customer retention rate for retail businesses. However, it is only possible by carefully addressing the potential risks regarding customer privacy. To make it possible, Veras is offering advanced AI-powered retail solutions: Veras Affinity and Veras Activate. These comprehensive tools can streamline data management, personalise promotions, and help you foster a deeper connection with customers.
Don’t miss out on the opportunity to revolutionise your retail business. Contact us now to learn more about Veras Affinity and Veras Activate.