What is the Real Time Interaction?
Real-time interaction is the ability to provide an optimized real-time response to a customer event. Forrester defined RTIM as: “Enterprise marketing technology that offers contextually relevant experiences, value and usefulness at the appropriate point in the customer’s lifecycle through the customer’s preferred touch points.” The main applications of RTIM today are in the generation of contextually relevant content and personalized messages and offers, in the context of an interaction with the customer.
RTIM Best Practices
- Full integration between channels in real time
- Integration with all relevant customer touch points is the most essential requirement. Without this key piece in place, brands cannot succeed at RTIM.
- Integration into data sources that can provide context
- Successful real-time interactions require integration with data sets that can be external to a brand, but help to inform the context. For example, by ingesting weather data in each U.S. zip code every 15 minutes, a coffee chain can determine which drink to display, depending on whether it is hot or cold.
Offer personalized experiences across all channels
The ability of an RTIM system to integrate via email, SMS, push and mobile inbox is a good starting point, but it also requires that the opt-in status for each of these channels is communicated and respected by means of the your system. For example, a brand knows that a customer buys the same pair of basketball shoes each season, then sends an email to the customer with a discounted offer on a pair of basketball shorts. However, if the RTIM system observes that the customer has broken a geographic barrier at a specific store, and the brand offer management system is aware of the stock, the brand can send an offer that is very unique or specific to the customer at that store. moment that time.
Features of an RTIM tool
- Unique identification of a customer across all channels: Improve the customer experience on all devices with identity management, which securely identifies customers and reduces friction in the registration process. Gigya and Janrain are examples of technologies used for this purpose, allowing customers to use their Facebook or Google social login. Customer identification is the first step when interacting with anything related to a brand. The basic profile with personally identifiable information, such as phone number, device identifiers, acceptance status, email addresses, username and password, is captured in this layer and possibly augmented with collected basic demographic data, such as gender or age.
- Context Management: Forming and using a rich user context will trigger relevant interactions. By capturing the user’s context – before and during an interaction – and interpreting it in real time, the brand generates high-value and impactful conversations that will increase consumer interest and conversion.
- 360 ° date of enriched customer: 360 ° customer data is aggregated and comprehensive historical data on all interactions between the consumer and the brand. It is enriched with product or brand environment data (store or restaurant location) so that the mapping can be discovered between the product and / or store location. These mappings come from statistical analysis of purchase or navigation data and identify any propensity or affinity between the consumer and the products. For example, an insight of propensity would be that, at a certain time of the week, a particular consumer likes to buy a large coffee from a chain of restaurants. In the process, affinity data indicates that coffee at a certain time of the day is often purchased with a full breakfast meal. A decision engine will then produce an offer of free coffee at a certain time for that customer.
- Customization Mechanism: The content and, by extension, the offers are attributed to customers according to personal analysis. The combination of personalization based on persona and relevant context triggers the visibility of the content or offer by the customer. Offering or attributing content and their actual visibility to the customer are two separate steps calculated in sequence, sometimes almost instantly. The first stage is performed by the personalization mechanism and the last one by the decision mechanism.
- An offer management mechanism: The engine creates offers, publishes them on a point of sale or e-commerce system for redemption, and publishes them on a campaign engine or through a mobile application that can announce the availability of the offer to the customer. This ad is sent by push or email notification or a portfolio of offers on a mobile app.
- Performance and scalability: Consumer events are generated in very high numbers at a very high rate, especially when ordering online on Black Friday or several times a day for QSR networks. The ability to process these events in real time, collect user profiles, identify their context and apply personalization rules – all at a glance – is one of the new technical requirements for Marketing Technologists. The scalability and performance of RTIM should not be underestimated and should be the main criterion for selecting the solution. Proof of concept with an initial performance test is also highly recommended.
The brands that implement RTIM technology and the best practices that meet the above criteria open up new possibilities for interactions with the customer that increase the perception of the brand and its value to the consumer. Interactions become more relevant and personal and lead to increased customer loyalty.