One in four companies said a lack of data skills we preventing for realising these ambitions and 22% of UK business leaders felt their ability to develop personalised customer experiences was being held back by the lack of a good data-centric culture.
Adobe’s Mind the Data Gap report highlights UK business leaders’ strategic priorities for 2020, including improving their ability to gain real-time customer intelligence (46%) and improving customer segmentation and targeting (40%) to deliver engaging, personalised experience for their customers.
The study also found that 22% in the UK felt their ability to develop personalised customer experiences was being held back by the lack of a data-centric culture, while 24% identified the absence of a unified technology platform as the biggest obstacle. These findings show that both technological and organisational improvements must be made in order to rise to the challenge of delivering against the increased expectations of customers for personalised experiences.
Despite being ideally suited to analysing and organising large amounts of data at speed, just over a third (34%) were deploying AI to deliver personalised customer experiences, and 24% said they had no plans to deploy AI. The reasons behind this are two-fold; only 15% were confident that AI was effectively embedded into their technology stack, while two-fifths (41%) said the platform they used could not stitch together customer data in real time.
Regardless of these obstacles, the research found that business leaders were clear on the importance of striving to deliver personalisation at scale. When asked about their strategic priorities for 2020, UK business leaders identified gaining real-time customer intelligence (46%) and improving customer segmentation and targeting (40%) are the top areas to improve. There is, however, room for improvement from a process perspective as while many are collecting data from their customers, just 19% of businesses are confident they can aggregate online and offline data and only 17% are implementing good data hygiene practices, such as cleaning and standardising the data sets they have.
Gavin Mee, Vice President of Northern Europe and Middle East and Africa at Adobe said: “Today’s consumer is all about speed and convenience, and they share data with brands on the understanding that they will have a more personalised experience in future. Our figures should act as a wake-up call for businesses and encourage them to re-focus their efforts on delivering against the heightened expectations of their customers. Having the right skills to capture and analyse data are important, but so too, is instilling a data-centric culture across the business that means insights and technology platforms are used to create amazing, personalised experiences.”
Source: www.adobe.com
