Imagine giving every customer and employee the personal touch, even at scale. By analysing behaviours and preferences, AI lets you tailor experiences for customer journeys, learning paths, or timely interventions to re-engage people.
How personal are you when dealing with your customers and employees? I don’t mean inappropriately digging into their personal lives! But are you treating each of them individually and personally?
For example, all four baristas at my local cafe know exactly what coffee I want because I’m a regular, and they don’t need to ask every time. With a few dozen regular customers or even a few hundred, they can remember the regaulrs and treat them personally.
But when you’re trying to scale that – with thousands, hundreds of thousands, or even millions of customers – that’s not possible for humans to do just by themselves.
That’s where AI comes in.
AI lets you personalise at scale.
For example, I regularly shop at Woolworths, and every week Woolies emails me my weekly specials. These are literally MY weekly specials because the email is crafted for me, based on my buying habits.
It’s very different from the old days when everybody got the same Woolies catalogue in the post because it wasn’t possible to personalise it for every single customer. But now it is, and AI enables it.
I recently delivered a keynote presentation to a large member association in Australia, who wanted me to talk about the future of member engagement. I shared some technology, trends, and innovations this association could use to improve, enhance, and deepen their engagement with their members.
We shared a number of ideas, but those that resonated the most were about personalisation. Here are three examples I shared:
- Individual memberships: Instead of having a few groups of memberships – like student member, affiliate member, and full member – what if every member could completely personalise the services they wanted? The association would then only offer those services to that member, and it would be different for everybody. It’s like knowing every member’s coffee order and only giving them that every time.
- Learning journeys: The association provides individual learning journeys for every member (and the same applies to you and your employees). After a member completes a learning module, AI reviews and assesses it, and suggests the next module for them – with the appropriate content, format, and time frame for that particular member.
- Member engagement: AI could also monitor and assess member engagement with the association’s services. If it sees engagement waning, it first reaches out to the member with additional services (again, tailored to that member’s likely preferences). And if that fails, it alerts member engagement staff to intervene.
These three examples demonstrate personalisation at scale. It was the way the corner store worked in a small town, and the way a local coffee shop works now. We lost it as population expanded and companies grew. We’re getting it back now with AI.
Personalisation at scale is just one of the ways you can use AI to enhance experience. It applies to both your external customer experience (which becomes part of your customer value proposition, or CVP) and your employee or staff engagement (which becomes a strong and powerful part of your employee value proposition, or EVP).
I’ll talk about this in my next public and free online presentation, which is all about AI in 2025 and beyond. This is a free public online presentation, so please register, and invite others as well.
