Hyper-personalization initiatives are in vogue as CX teams become more strategic around individual customers and leverage their data in new ways.
Dynamic pricing and discounting, timely engagements, and real-time product notifications are examples of how brands are doing so.
Behind these use cases are personalization engines, which vendors are increasingly infusing with AI to add more personal touches across the customer lifecycle.
However, some vendors are going to greater lengths than others, pushing the boundaries of innovation while maintaining customer value.
In its Magic Quadrant, Gartner evaluated ten prominent providers of personalization engines, isolating six market leaders that are doing precisely that.
The Definition of Personalization Engines
Personalization engines allow marketing teams to devise the optimal experience for an individual customer by leveraging in-house and third-party data.
That data - including purchase histories, contact reasons, and demographic information - feeds the engine with vital customer context.
From there, businesses may deliver communications – such as offers, promos, and other content – through the best-placed digital channel.
Such communications typically fit into three buckets: marketing, digital commerce, and service/support – and Gartner expects providers to serve up use cases across each.
Moreover, the analyst lists the following as core capabilities of a personalization engine:
- Live behavior tracking, data collection, and ingestion features
- Interaction triggers based on real-time customer context
- Flexible user segmentation to support dynamic rules
- Testing features to trial various personalization tactics
- Predictive analytics features to present relevant content at the optimal moment
- Performance tracking of various personalization initiatives
There are also optional capabilities, such as support for account-based data structures, machine learning to improve personalization outcomes, and voice of the customer (VoC) tools.
Additional differentiative features also rise to the fore inside Gartner’s evaluation of each provider's strengths and cautions.
Once the analyst weighed all these up, it split each vendor into four groups: Leaders, Challengers, Visionaries, and Niche Players.
Gartner Magic Quadrant Leaders
Leaders in the Magic Quadrant prioritize customer success, offering scalable, user-friendly solutions that don't have a steep learning curve. Beyond this current execution, they also provide a well-defined roadmap demonstrating a deep understanding of the market's direction and safeguarding buyer investments. This year's leaders are:
- Dynamic Yield
- Insider
- Adobe
- SAP
- Salesforce
- Sitecore
Dynamic Yield
The strategic vision and innovation on display within the evolution of Dynamic Yield’s Experience OS platform impresses Gartner. Indeed, the analyst highlights how marketers can seamlessly compose and execute scalable personalization strategies using an intuitive dashboard. Moreover, it isolates product/content promotion and testing as differentiators for Dynamic Yield. The latter includes a visual editor, live preview, and AI/ML features for content generation and customer affinity matching.
Insider
Insider offers superior tools for engaging aimless customers trawling the website. How? Through personalized search results, configurable experience (inc. swipeable templates), a quiz commerce engine, and more. Garter applauds these additions to the browsing experiences while commending Insider's comprehensive roadmap, guided selling, and interactive product recommendations. The latter crosses many digital channels, including WhatsApp, with the vendor even condensing entire commerce journeys into the app.
Adobe
Adobe Target offers real-time personalization across many platforms. These include websites, apps, contact centers, digital kiosks, contact centers, and even vehicle screens. Such flexibility allows Adobe to bring new personalization opportunities to marketing, service, and commerce environments. Gartner notes this as a core strength of the platform, alongside its testing features and scalability. Also, as part of Adobe Experience Cloud, the engine benefits from a robust partner ecosystem, global operations base, and flat-fee pricing.
SAP
SAP Emarsys has "market-leading" measurement capabilities, according to Gartner. Indeed, its reporting dashboards uniquely offer out-of-the-box reporting personas alongside advanced customization options and alert thresholds for specific KPIs. The Magic Quadrant report also isolates targeting, triggering, and journey orchestration as major plusses of the Emarsys solution. Finally, SAP supports audience data sharing with various CRM and social media platforms for enhanced targeting.
