Can your company be better in personalization than your favourite “Tukang Bubur”?

I have listened to all of the 15 books in the “Dresden Files” series through Audible, an audiobook store owned by Amazon. Last August, I was surprised to learn that the 16th book had been released on 14 July 2020. Audible sent a lot of promotional emails to me, but none of the emails had recommendations on that latest book. Amazon is known for its accurate and highly sophisticated personalized recommendations. But if even Amazon can’t get it right all the time, what hope do the rest of us have in realizing “1 on 1 relationship” with our customers?

Thinking about “1 on 1 relationship” reminds me of a Tukang Bubur (porridge hawker) who frequented my old client office at Blok M. He had an almost superhuman ability to remember all of the different ways his customers like their porridge (e.g. no fried onions, no emping, no peanuts, little bit of chilli). Can companies really recreate that kinds of intimate relationship at scale with thousands or even millions of customers?

A typical Tukang Bubur cart (source)

I don’t think they can. Several things that make this near impossible to achieve:

1. There are things affecting customer’s decision making that’s really hard to be tracked by data, like emotion, mood, or feeling.
2. Access to customers behaviours data are limited to only the companies’ owned platforms. The clues of what the customers want next may lie in other companies databases. With privacy law getting more stringent all over the world, data sharing will be getting more difficult if not impossible.
3. Data tracking in the companies’ owned system remains a challenge. It is difficult to quantify the values that personalization can bring to the bottom line. And without the values, it is difficult to justify the level of investment in people and money required to build personalization capabilities.

Personalization is a complex problem. It will be interesting to see a real experience from brands that have embarked on this journey. Although I tend to be skeptical about testimonies usually found on tech solution vendors who promise personalization to brands with “a click of a button”.

Despite all of these, I still think there are still ways for companies to make the communication to their customers more personalized at certain levels. Perhaps not as personal as “1 on 1”, but better than the same message or offer to all customers. Maybe I will explore further on this in the later posts.

Being iterative is important, because it is unrealistic to expect highly personalized offerings from the get go. Which is why I believe it is not a good idea to use the approach of having a one-year long project and only see the personalization in action after the project is completed. The problem is with most vendors in this space, the investment upfront can be substantial. Some even require multi-years commitment!

I think the best way is to start small using in-house engineers. Of course not all companies can’t afford to do this. Which is why if your companies can afford this, personalization can be one of your competitive edge.