Personalization and
Business Models
The study of personalization on net
has been around since the early days of the Internet era.
But Personalization as a phenomenon per say, is still in its
infancy on Internet.
Whether it's a particular industry related to B2B or B2C e-commerce,
or it is an enterprise portal, the status of the personalization
features stands at a very shallow stage as of now.
In Personalization, the most successful
and best online model, quoted quite often is that of Amazon.
Here a user is offered personalization features like give
your preferences, choices, etc., and based on business rules
and collaborative filtering the users are given a very personalized
experience while shopping on Amazon.
Similar or quite related features are also offered on other
sites or portals like Yahoo (example: create your own pages),
or other major sites like gmbuypower.com (create your own
car) or say nike.com to name a few.
A comprehensive study of personalization
features on Internet offered by various portals was undertaken
quite recently, and the study has clearly showed, that both
the number of personalization features on offer, and the depth
of these features is at a very shallow stage as of now.
For example, on Amazon the personalization features (like
users can indicate her preferences, choices for books, titles
etc.) being offered revolve around their business model or
revenue model. The same is the case with Yahoo and few other
portals.
What is lacking here is an integrated personalized experience
on these portals/sites.
However additional personalization features could also be
offered to the users, to give them a very enriching shopping
experience. These features could be like:
a. Write a book abstract.
b. Teach yourself or learn how to become
a good writer.
c. Personalize a book as you wish and
win prizes.
d. Experts can be called to edit/ submit,
a book an article as per their preferences and connect to
the community in large.
On Yahoo new personalization features,
based on the following parameters could be given:
a. Themes
b. Personal Choices
c. Behavior Models
To implement Personlization features
in its entirety, so that it touches the complete Business
Model of the company, these companies will have to tweak their
business models a bit. This could be a costly proposition
for these companies going by the current industry cost factors,
but this will be indeed a very useful experience for companies
to undertake.
Where do we stand in terms of personalization
on Internet as of now.
I would say we are at a pretty low level (lets say at a level
of 4 out of a scale of 10) in regard to the Personalization
features being offered on Internet today.
A lot of learning has to go to in order to scale the learning
Curve further in this field.
The following is a list of few Personalization features, which
could be incorporated by sites/portals, to enhance the User's
Experience and to give them a very high quality surfing time,
and in the end achieving great ROI.
Feature I
User Data Collaboration and Syndication:
This feature will lead to collaborative
commerce (c-commerce) and other community building scenarios.
This could be used on Industry specific sites along with other
portals.
An Example:
A user will do a complete registration of his preferences, choices,
interests on a particular site, and shall be able to access
other sites offering certain personalized features. She would
not have to submit her details and preferences again while accessing
personalized features on a new site.
This new site could be related to the same industry or it could
be a portal related to similar channels etc.
This will require a lot of collaboration
and understanding between various companies as they will be
required to share User specific data which is a very important
piece of information, plus it will be required to ask the
users for their permission to use their personal data.
It makes more business as well as operational
sense for various e-commerce sites and shopping portals to
adapt to this particular model. This will not only reap huge
profits for them, but will also help them to optimally utilize
their resources for logistics and delivery purposes.Various
third-party portals can also come into picture, and can offer
these collaboration services to e-commerce sites. These collaborative
portals can create a match between "users" and their
"preferences", and help various shopping sites to
tap into thier wide pool of user specific information. Various
research and consultancy companies will also be able to use
this consumer profiles data to mine valuable information out
of it.
Feature II
Future Trend Forecasters:
Companies can offer "futuristic choice
ranges" (in terms of trends and preferences). Here companies
can make use of users specific data to establish and forecast
future trends using various statistical tools.
An Example:
News Feeds, R & D Platforms, Consulting sites can share
such user specific research and information.
A third party player (like an online behavioral studying company),
can also broadcast and syndicate these valuable personalized
sources of information to help companies innovate and give
better and better services to their clients.
Feature III
Yellow Pages Personalization Portals (YPPP):
Here the idea is somewhat similar to Internet
"bots". Today we have valuable bots, which boasts
of information related to a particular topic created and maintained
by humans. Similarly in the same fashion, we can have personalization
portals related to any particular field of the user requirements.
An Example:
An example could be a Information Portal complete with personalized
features.
These portals will act as a vast repository of Users data
in terms of their demographics, income, education, behavior
patterns etc. Users will be able to access and manage their
personalized choice areas independently, and will also be
able to find users with similar choice patterns through these
portals. Once the users register on these portals they will
be able to upload, change, edit and manage all their choices,
preferences and profiles from their own desktops.
They could be assigned a unique identifier, similar to a unique
phone number. This number will identify all their preferences,
once that number is punched into the portal by an authorized
admin personnel or any other company user (who has been given
the rights to access user preferences and choices).
Various sites and portals who need
to offer Personalization features, could become a member of
these Personalized Portals on payment of a certain fee, and
will be given access to users data (of course with prior permission
of users). After paying an upfront fee, these sites/portals
could make use of ready made data sets and will be able to
target their offers straight to their potential users. This
will save them cost as well as valuable time.
These portals can also offer their vast repository of user
information to various
e-commerce and other similar kind of companies, and can help
them to get best of user profile - to what we offer kind of
matches for their product and services.
Users could also be e-mailed by these personalized portals,
every time a particular site needs to access their data and
their permission could be sought.
Feature IV
B2E Personalization Features:
This feature will help in betterment of
a typical employee-company scenario.
An Example:
The B2E Personalization features could be like, assigning
users specific areas on company's Intranet, and let them use
it as an online Personal room. Employees can use it as an
online club for recreation, chat, collaboration, posting comments,
exchanging professional discussions etc. Users will filter
and post their data in their respective sections and this
could be an interesting Personalized Business to Employee
Exchange (B2E) model.
Employees on the other hand, after receiving this data (in
the pre-agreed formats), will
fine-tune their relations, offers, and the overall environment
of their company as per the personalized choices of their
employees.
Conclusion:
To utilize and enhance the reach and depth of the Personalization
features company's will have to tweak their existing business
models a bit. This will save them a lot of pains and the gains
will be immense in terms of time and cost savings and increasing
ROI.
