Digging Into Your Data: How AI Can Transform Your Customers’ Experiences

In the modern world, every customer belongs to his or her own unique marketing segment. Today’s advances in digital transformation and data modernization enable retailers to target to consumers down to the “segments of one” level and, as a result, achieve greater success.

Traditionally, retailers have adopted mass demographic-based segmentation. But retailers who are embracing the future are using data analytics for micro-segmentation so that they can deliver personalized offers and targeted communications.

According to McKinsey, real-time personalization can deliver a return of investment (ROI) of five to eight times marketing spend and increase sales by 10%. Those are big numbers for any retailer, but achieving them is easier said than done, especially with inaccurate data locked in multiple silos.

As artificial intelligence-based analytics continues to evolve, businesses have an opportunity to leverage huge amounts of data to easily create customer microsegments and, as a result, deliver unparalleled personalization. Yet, despite all of today’s modernization capabilities, many businesses are still struggling to extract value from their data.

Our recent Rackspace Technology® AI/ML Annual Research Report 2022 found that only 41% of IT leaders worldwide understand how AI and machine learning boost marketing effectiveness. However, many leaders still recognize the value of AI and machine learning for creating a more personalized customer experience — with 77% of respondents agreeing that it’s helped them with customer relationship management.

The first two steps in boosting the power of your marketing programs are understanding how to extract value from your data and how to use AI to overcome the challenges presented by micro-segmentation.

Integrate your data

Effective micro-segmentation requires accurate and complete data. One problem in achieving this goal is that retailers often have several brands, each holding siloed and disparate data.

Micro-segmentation depends on a deep understanding of your customers. But you can’t get that when you have holes in your data. Any flaws will inhibit your goal of delivering micro-segmented, personalized experiences to your customers.

The key to overcoming this problem is to consolidate all your internal and external data sources into one customer data platform. Then you need to make the data easily accessible to your marketers in a simple-to-digest format.

Deploy AI

There are clear challenges for retailers in configuring their data for personalization. However, for most companies the solution is within reach and simply requires modernizing their data storage.

How can AI help you micro-segment your target audiences? By giving you the ability to achieve these goals:

• Share data between all areas of your business so everyone has access to greater insights
• Deploy visual data transformation to make it easy for everyone to understand data without code-wrangling
• Deliver highly personalized customer experiences based on deep data
• Recommend products based on data such as consumer purchasing history, engagement on social media and current trends
• Provide product recommendations that use contextual communication, for example, “It’s a cold day outside: try our limited-edition mint flavor hot chocolate”

Personalization is the future of retail. But to get it right retailers need fast and easy access to accurate data. Data transformation and AI are leading the way. Thanks to data modernization and the ability to quickly access insights from huge amounts of data, marketers can provide highly personalized messages to consumers that potentially deliver a significant increase in sales.

Solving together

Are you ready to put your data to work? Rackspace Technology® data modernization teams apply deep technical and business process expertise at scale to design and build data new architectures — so you can accelerate innovation and realize value faster.

With DataOps, we can help you harness the power of data modernization on an advanced data platform. Our goal is to increase your business success, efficiency and customer engagement — with an up to 70% reduction in implementation time and cost.

When your data works harder for you, you can take your resources further and deliver intelligent applications and services. We combine deep technical and business expertise with leading cloud-native AI development processes and machine-learning algorithms, along with MLOps. As a result, we can help you empower your business — and work faster and smarter.

For more insight on how AI and machine learning are helping businesses grow, download our AI/ML Annual Research Report.