Q&A: James Fraser, Channels and Alliances Director – Dynamic Yield
Dynamic Yield provides all of the tools necessary to drive client revenues by serving the most relevant and valuable Customer Experiences throughout the customer journey in a single, easy-to-use platform.
What does your company do? / What is your USP?
We help clients increase revenue, one personalised interaction at a time. Web, apps, email, kiosks, IoT, call centers, you name it… tailoring both online and offline channels as well as traditional and emerging digital interfaces.
From a single solution set, we improve clients digital performance through improved speed, utilisation of a technology and the deep learning/AI embedded in Dynamic Yield.
What’s special about the platform and your approach?
First, our approach is holistic. We remove all of the complexity, frustration and fragmentation and training nightmare associated with multiple vendor bloat. By taking all of the solutions employed to complete specific jobs like Experimentation/Testing, Audience creation, Recommendations through to Social Proof and Basket/Cart Abandonment, we put them all under one roof. This improves clients abilities to utilise the technology they acquire as well as lowering the overheads and improving the speed of delivering Experiences
Second, we’re open and flexible, meaning you can integrate with all of the tools and systems you already use to more freely share data and easily activate it, using all your available knowledge to deliver the most valued and appropriate experience.
Third, with a raft of AI being integrated into the solution we automate the elements of delivering personalisation, offering machine-based insights and recommendations for audience development and the experiences being delivered.
How does a product/service implementation actually look and how do you measure success?
The implementation to start with Dynamic Yield is really simple, involves inserting a small amount of code on to web pages and has been accomplished within an hour.
From there It all depends on where we drive greatest value and what strategic goals the client wants to deliver. As an example if we’ve evaluated major growth will be achieved by improving product discovery, we would work closely with their team to develop use cases and experiments around that particular goal. For example, we can personalise the experience on a homepage or product list page based on the visitor’s gender, affinities, or past purchase behavior.
Using our library of pre-built templates, an experience could easily be customised to their specific preferences or brand aesthetic and served directly from the Dynamic Yield platform.
On metrics for success, many factors can be targeted from any experiment or experience, where we allow clients to test multiple variations against a control group to determine the best possible experience for any audiences being targeted. While revenue can be used as a goal it may be a blunt measure, but experiments can be created through to check out or other metrics used to define success for the clients changing an experience.
All experiences can be automatically adapted for apportioning traffic to the most relevant experience by audience and deliver testing up until statistical significance is reached to have winning experiments rolled out or alternatively sunseted for the future.
How are retailers using your systems to gain competitive advantage and what does best practice look like?
Competing on price and promotions, alone, is nothing but a race to the bottom. The retailers who use our platform understand this and that customer experience is the new battleground. By tailoring their product offering and services to the individual, they can forge more meaningful relationships with the people most important to their brand, and in doing so, set themselves apart from the competition.
Best practise is to experiment everywhere and use analytics to keep learning and constantly understand how each targeted audience behaves, supported by the Dynamic Yield algorithms to give increased knowledge and understanding.
What advantage does it add?
From our valued Partners and other Industry experts, Personalisation using Dynamic Yield has been proven to reduce acquisition costs by as much as 50%, generate revenue uplifts stated at 5-15%, and increase the efficiency of marketing spend by 10-30%.
These are significant values and all the byproduct of delivering a better overall experience for customers – most of whom are expecting to receive some sort of personalisation as they grow more and more accustomed to the benefits and perks it provides, as well as increasing their loyalty.
What challenges and opportunities do you see in UK retail for 2019 / What challenges are retailers facing in 2019?
Retailers everywhere are struggling to establish loyalty in such a crowded marketplace, given the cost of access is often low, the challenge is always differentiation as stated, beyond just price
As consumers have so many options and are more likely to make one-off purchases for the right deal or promotion rather than continue doing business with a brand who they love and trust. Not saying this isn’t a reality for some, but it’s much harder to establish that kind of bond these days when most shopping is done online and it’s focus has become a very transactional. It’s not a new hardship, but retailers have to learn how to penetrate this problem, or they will continue to miss out on the luxury of repeat purchases from returning customers, increasing their Life Time Value (LTV) metrics.
How will you address these challenges and turn them into successes?
The beauty of personalisation is in taking everything you know about a customer and using it to not only better understand their intent but also predict what they are looking for in the future.
If you are able to fulfill their needs in such a way, your brand then becomes invaluable to them – they will recognise that you remember all of their important affinities and preferences and repay you in attention, engagement, and most importantly, continued business.
What is on the horizon for you as a company?
We plan to accelerate our efforts in product development, where we’re working to launch a host of new enhancements and capabilities around AI & ML, BI & Analytics, implementation, campaign workflow, and more.
We’re welcoming new and strategic solutions and technology vendors to our Partner Program so we can more deeply embed personalised experiences across the digital ecosystem.
Finally, we are focused on increasing Dynamic Yield’s presence and reach in strategic markets like the UK and more broadly across Europe.
Any final thoughts?
Personalisation isn’t a tactic, it’s a discipline that needs to be applied across a business.If you want to find out more about personalization and how we are working with Styla to tell personalized 1 to 1 product and brand stories at scale, then join our webinar on the 29th May. Register here!
