Is Your “Real Life” Personalized?

We normally think about personalization as it relates to digital advertising, and digital assistants in our phone and around our homes.? What a great conversation starter: “is personalization helpful or icky?”? Don’t we all have stories about ickiness?!? Well, it can be icky when you know it’s happening, but it can be helpful when it’s invisible and brings you value.

I’d like to present some conceptual examples of how personalization can apply in our real lives. I hope this will serve to illustrate the benefits, and steer the personalization conversation away from, “Facebook just showed me an advertisement for the item I was researching 2 minutes ago!” and “I think my digital assistant is spying on me!”

Enter: Carol.??

“Take 1”.

Carol has returned home from a rough day at work. Back-to-back-to-back meetings, sudden changes in requirements, and bad news in the quarterly results led to a long, stressful day for Carol and her team.? She walks into her house 30 minutes later than usual, with her hair a bit frazzled. She drops her briefcase in the entryway [clunk] and strides to the living room, where she plops down on the sofa with a deep sigh.

Ten seconds don’t pass before Carol is presented with a chorus of needy household members.??

“Mom, what’s for dinner?”

“Mom - I need help with my homework!”

“Mom, what’s the Hulu password?”

And whining from a hungry dog.

Carol covers her face with her hands and tries to tune out the noise for at least a minute…

Now,… Enter: Carol.??

“Take 2”.

Carol has returned home from a rough day at work. Back-to-back-to-back meetings, sudden changes in requirements, and bad news in the quarterly results, led to a long, stressful day for Carol and her team.? She walks into her house 30 minutes later than usual, with her hair a bit frazzled. She drops her briefcase in the entryway [clunk] and strides to the living room, where she is met by Child # 1, who hugs her mom before scurrying away.? Surprised and brightening up, Carol find Child # 2 entering the room to say, “Mom, it looks like you’ve had a tough day, why don’t you just sit down and relax in your favorite chair?” before leaving mom to the quiet room.

Curious about what she’ll find next, Carol calls out to Child # 3.? “This is very nice - what’s going on here?”? To which Child # 3 replies, “We just wanted you to be able to relax after a long day. Dad’s in the kitchen making pancakes for dinner; Little Brother is in a virtual study group; Little Sister fed the dog and is bringing you a glass of lemonade.? Just relax, we won’t bother you for a while.”??

Zoom-in on Carol, pinching herself to see if she’s dreaming, a smile on her face, while thoughts about her rough day at the office have disappeared from her mind.

<---- cut scene ---->

Now, what happened there?? We saw that Carol had a much better experience in her “return home from work” journey in Take 2.? But it easily could have been otherwise (see Take 1), so what triggered these unexpected acts of kindness?

Well, first of all, Carol’s family picked up on certain cues:

• Carol was returning home from work late; that rarely happens, but when it does, it’s usually not good.
• Carol looked and acted weary when she got home.

Second of all, behind the scenes, what we didn’t see was Carol’s family members orchestrating the “VIP experience.”? They huddled as a family, and offered ideas on what they could do to help mom have a super nice return home. She’s going to be tired, she’s going to be stressed, so let’s do A, B, and C.? Then let’s see how she responds… what she likes and doesn’t like, so that next time she’s coming home late, we can do this even better!? Let’s play it cool so she doesn’t know that we got together and planned this.

Voila! This is personalization in action. Company assets (er... family members) responding to data (information and cues) to modify normal procedures in order to optimize for this particular customer (er... mom) experience.? That only leaves one question before we know about Carol’s complete satisfaction… how did she enjoy Little Sister’s lemonade?......

Words from the Author

Having worked across a variety of industries, companies, and product types, eventually it became clear to me that personalization is a key principle, a kind of horizontal layer, that applies to so many different things we do at work, both in the products we make for companies and consumers, as well as in the way we do the work ourselves. I find that exciting, and I enjoy uncovering new opportunities or personalization. Thanks for reading my article, this was a light attempt to connect a professional pursuit with some of the parts of our real lives which leave room for optimization :) Bill Crean