Customer expectations are higher than ever before. As a brand, you’re judged against the last great experience they had – and not just from interactions with your organization, but from anywhere.

Today, brilliant experiences are relevant and differentiated at every touchpoint. And if you deliver that, your organization can benefit from higher conversion and better brand affinity – with a positive impact on long-term relationships with your customers.

To be a brand that delivers true personalization, you need a full and complete view of the customer. This data can be used to provide dynamic context for what individuals are searching for and, importantly, what content to serve them and when. This is next-generation personalization.

Making this happen requires the tools that enable these types of exceptional, personalized customer experiences. Tools that can produce content at scale by leveraging several real-time segments at once, helping to create content that drives meaningful results, while also speeding up time to market.

Delivering hyper-relevant experiences in every moment You might be thinking, what are these ‘right tools’? Generative AI is currently a major buzzword – and not without reason.

But what does that truly mean? Generative AI is a form of machine learning that goes beyond analyzing or acting on existing data. It instead employs cognitive capabilities to produce novel content.

One of the big problems with personalization and content generation is that it must be at scale. This means you really need a stronghold of content authors and personalization specialists to get an effective strategy in place. It’s easier if you’re a Fortune 500 company, but more of a challenge for medium-sized enterprises.

Consider a treatment center in the healthcare industry. A fleet of doctors – with a wealth of knowledge and information – are writing articles about how to treat an illness. One patient might find a couple of articles on their illness and read them in full. However, if they come across articles about different conditions, they quickly return to the search engine. The challenge is, how can you make sure they see the relevant articles and stay in your ecosystem?

Once integrated into the healthcare system, generative AI can solve this problem – where it will read each article and automatically form a model. Articles then get a similarity rating, without needing a staff member to manually tag each one. So, if there’s a blog post about a new discovery around a particular treatment – the blog will share the same categorization as other articles about the treatment.

Taking customer experience to the next level with Sitecore While generative AI can understand text and images, and connect the dots between different content pieces, Sitecore’s composable CDP capabilities take these insights, manage and store them centrally, and decide the best content to display based on the user’s context with Sitecore Personalize.

So, if you take the example above, by pairing generative AI with Sitecore technology, the organization can use the patients’ profile information to curate a list of articles relevant to the patient’s condition. Keeping them engaged with the right content, and supporting them on their journey. This is how it’s used in a Next Best Article or Next Best Offer scenario.

If you want to start unlocking customer data to optimize digital experiences, look no further than Sitecore Personalize and CDP.

• Sitecore Personalize activates your data across all customer touchpoints to create seamless and consistent customer experiences. You can use live data to respond in real-time with relevant content and customer-tailored interactions.
• Sitecore CDP is packaged software that creates a persistent, unified customer database that is accessible to other systems. It connects your data across your ecosystem, removing silos and setting you up to create content that converts. It’s like the glue for all your channels, as the context follows the customer.

Combined, you have the tools to connect and activate customer data and personalize with ease.

How else can it be put into action? Many people believe that they understand personalization. But the reality is, they’re about 15 years’ worth of promises behind. If you consider search as separate to personalization, then there may be a maturity gap in your organization.

Imagine you’re an online retailer of white goods. You offer many different products with overlapping search terms. A customer is looking for a refrigerator, and because you have CDP software, you know that they’ve previously bought a mid-range oven and dishwasher in a chrome finish. You also know a service agent did the installation, and they have a maintenance and care plan.

These insights can help you answer questions for the customer like, are they more concerned about quality or cost? What color do they want the appliance? Will they be installing it themselves? You can then offer these options as a default selection during their search and purchase journey. This is a good example of Sitecore and generative AI for context and personalization.

Tagging comes in handy for images too. It’s common to have hundreds of thousands of images available for use, and the practice today is for a digital asset manager to organize, curate and make them searchable. Generative AI can do this for you – saving significant time and reducing human error.

Say you’re a content author at a bank, looking for an image showing a family outside their new home for a new mortgage article. After searching for appropriate images, you click on one, only to discover it’s been used in several campaigns. Thanks to accurate and appropriate tagging, you can find alternative similar image and content options that haven’t previously been used – keeping your content unique.

Ready for your next stage? As you can see, it’s crucial that marketers make smart, informed decisions about which tools will best enable exceptional customer experiences and reduce the burden on your content teams. But once you do have the right tools in place, creating personalization on a global scale can be your reality.

This technology is still in its early stages, with the future holding many unknowns. Avanade is at the forefront of its development, making significant investments in generative AI and its applications to bring you new opportunities and make sure you can do what matters.

If you think you could benefit from Sitecore Personalize and CDP, we have the broad technical expertise to support you with this journey to the world of composable technology and generative AI.

Contact us today and let’s chat about where you want to go.