I’ve been watching the whole Facebook thing pretty closely. It’s a look at personalization, at playing human behavior to give people what they want (even if they don’t necessarily realize it’s what they want), and all of that. Say what you will about Facebook, but they’re an interesting look at what can be done when you know a whole lot of information about the customer targets of your product. It’s this odd perfect storm of knowing what people share on purpose, along with what people share sort of inadvertently in terms of sentiment, hobbies, activity, etc.
Going back to Minority Report (the movie), you might recall people walking into a store and the signage changing. I’ve come back to this myself several times in talking about personalization and customization of the customer experience. It’s what advertisers SAY customers and target customers want. It’s what ad platform people SAY they are good at providing and that it’s helpful. Oddly, it’s also what those customers SAY they don’t want.
But then people complain if they get ads for candy if they’re diabetic. Or ads for hats if they don’t have a head. (Just seeing if you’re paying attention). People are funny that way – they complain about personalization and customization of the targeting, but then complain if it’s not done as well. Go figure.
Back to Facebook and what’s going on – they are modifying the feeds to show your friends and family information first, vendor, ad and other commercial type things secondarily. Who knows what the real mixture will be, but the amount of information Facebook has on viewing habits, usage of the platform and so-on must be showing them that this is something people will want to do, whether we know it yet or not.
This is important because so many of us are fully engaged in customization of our own. From the simple “ask your audience the types of things they want to see” to the more specific “use the information from your customers to determine product or service direction” all the way to hard-core customization where the customer experience is highly tailored to their needs. If you jump in your next shared ride service run and the music suddenly starts playing your favorites automatically, or if you go into your favorite grocery store and they have your most frequently purchased items displayed just so for you… are those good things?
There is this weird science behind extreme customization. I think as data people we’re headed to a space where we’re going to be walking some very fine lines of using the information we really do have on those using our goods and services and giving them more of what their actual actions indicate they would like to have. While at the same time, we can’t trip that “Big Brother” switch. I don’t know what the line is, but I do think we need to be aware that there is a line.
In customers I’ve been working with lately, it’s all about “full speed ahead!” on customization, but there are a few cases where people start to get a little nervous. They start to realize what is known about them and get worried about what else that suggests is known. All of this comes down to data systems. The systems that will support these use cases will need to be extremely robust, allow for customizations themselves, and most of all, we need to be extremely cautious about really sharp-edged customization based on our data.
Unless, of course, that’s what your customers really want. Or not.