FOR: Customer
Experience
professionals
Contextualization
by Ron Rogowski, stephen powers, and Anjali Yakkundi, november 19, 2012
key TakeaWays
knowing user Context is Critical For delivering Relevant experiences
Three ingredients make relevant customer experiences: profile data about who the
customers are, historical data about what customers have done, and situational data
about what’s happening in their lives now.
personas, personal history, and Real-Time Customer information
give Context
Combining the user-archetype information that personas contain with an
individual’s history, preferences, and current environment can help companies
design experiences that feel like they were designed for a specific user, even if they
were not.
Contextualization optimizes The digital experience seamlessly
Contextual experiences feel natural and unforced and should go unrecognized
by the customer. Getting contextualization right means bringing to bear all of the
relevant information a user provides actively or passively to provide a predictive -but not invasive -- customer experience.
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For Customer Experience Professionals
November 19, 2012
Contextualization
Delivering Relevant Experiences In The Multichannel World
by Ron Rogowski, Stephen Powers, and Anjali Yakkundi
with Harley Manning and Allison Stone
Why Read This Report
Firms want to deliver the right experience to the right user at the right time and on the right device — a
tricky proposition in this age of device proliferation. The splinternet — and the devices that comprise
it — presents challenges for engaging customers, but it also provides new opportunities to better
understand customers’ context. User profiles combined with historical data and real-time feedback can
help firms deliver increasingly relevant, tailored experiences that meet specific user needs. We call this
contextualization. This report helps customer experience professionals understand what contextualization
is, what its benefits are, and what tools can help deliver the benefits associated with contextualization.
Table Of Contents
Notes & Resources
2 Today’s Customers Demand Relevant
Experiences
Forrester interviewed 16 vendor and user
companies, including: 3M; Adobe; Autonomy,
a division of HP; Baynote; Bluefly; Coveo
Solutions; Dell; Ektron; iSite; Monetate;
Oracle; Razorfish; RichRelevance; SDL;
Siteworx; and UncommonGoods.
Firms Struggle To Deliver Relevance At Scale
3 To Maximize Relevance, Think
Contextualization
Three Types Of Data Inputs Power
Contextualization
5 Contextualized Relevance Is Powerful
recommendations
Related Research Documents
It Ain’t Personal: Get Up Close And
Contextual
November 19, 2012
6 Contextualize The Right Interactions For
Your Customers
The Unified Customer Experience Imperative
April 30, 2012
7 Supplemental Material
Use Customer Analytics To Get Personal
February 17, 2012
The Future Of Mobile Experiences Is Context
October 26, 2011
© 2012, Forrester Research, Inc. All rights reserved. Unauthorized reproduction is strictly prohibited. Information is based on best available
resources. Opinions reflect judgment at the time and are subject to change. Forrester®, Technographics®, Forrester Wave, RoleView, TechRadar,
and Total Economic Impact are trademarks of Forrester Research, Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective companies. To
purchase reprints of this document, please email [email protected]. For additional information, go to www.forrester.com.
For Customer Experience Professionals
2
Contextualization
Today’s Customers Demand Relevant Experiences
More than ever, firms need to deliver relevant experiences to their customers across a range of
devices.1 These experiences must:
■ Meet customer needs. A highly relevant experience meets the content and functionality needs
of a customer while satisfying the underlying emotional needs that trigger an interaction.2
■ Feel personal. Consumers expect — and appreciate — personalized experiences.3 Truly
personal experiences deliver relevant content and function based on explicit and implicit
feedback about customer needs and preferences.
■ Deliver in the moment. Relevant experiences take into account a person’s current state —
such as time of day and location — and deliver on situational needs, such as finding additional
product information using a barcode scanner at the point of consideration.4
Firms Struggle To Deliver Relevance At Scale
What stops firms from delivering highly relevant experiences? Companies fall short of meeting
customer expectations when they:
■ Guess at what their customers want and need. Despite the proliferation of tools such as
personas and journey maps, in a recent survey, only 41% of the 86 CX professionals from our
ongoing Marketing & Strategy Research Panel said that they consistently use customer research
as an input into customer experience design projects.5
■ Don’t share customer data across silos. Nothing says “I don’t care about you” more than
forgetting a customer from one moment to the next. But that’s exactly what companies do when
they fail to share customer information across organizational or channel silos.6 As a result, when
customers cross from one touchpoint to another — for example, moving from a mobile app to a
desktop website — firms fail to recognize them, so customers have to start pursuing their goals
from scratch.
■ Don’t take advantage of real-time cues. Users’ current circumstances, such as location, time of
day, and even weather, can determine their immediate needs. But even though today’s
connected devices can provide a wealth of information about users’ context, few firms take
advantage of this data to predict what users want and need from them in the moment.7
© 2012, Forrester Research, Inc. Reproduction Prohibited
November 19, 2012
For Customer Experience Professionals
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Contextualization
To Maximize relevance, Think Contextualization
To succeed in today’s digital environment, firms must deliver smarter, more customer-centric
interactions that feel like they were tailored for each user and his or her specific set of circumstances.
That’s why firms need to evolve their thinking to focus on contextualization, which Forrester defines as:
A tailored, adaptive, and sometimes predictive digital customer experience.
Contextualization combines and extends existing segmentation and personalization techniques with
in-the-moment details. This enables more-dynamic, more-predictive experiences by processing
explicit and implicit user information.
Three Types Of Data Inputs Power Contextualization
Three key types of data inputs, which occur at both the aggregate and the individual level, power
contextualization (see Figure 1):
■ Profile: who the customer is. Aggregate information about the audience segment members
and their behaviors — for example, how they interact with digital channels, key concerns, and
subject-matter knowledge — helps companies design the right overall experience. Personal
information about the individuals, such as where they live and their specific interests, allows
additional tailoring.
■ History: what the customer did in the past. People leave many markers when they interact
with a company, including a record of the web pages they visited and the purchases they made.
A firm can combine aggregate data from all of its users with individual histories to anticipate
customer questions and/or predict future actions.
■ Situation: what’s happening with the customer now. Factors such as time of day, geographic
location, device, and browser indicate a user’s current situation. Organizations can map this
data to aggregate information about similar users to help predict what an individual may be
trying to achieve at a given point in time.
© 2012, Forrester Research, Inc. Reproduction Prohibited
November 19, 2012
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Figure 1 Contextualization Leverages Multiple Aspects Of Customer Understanding
1-1 Contextualization blends profile, history, and situation
Profile
Persona
History
Buy
this
Situation
Sale
1-2 Inputs that power contextualization
Inputs
Description
Aggregate
Individual
Profile
Who the customer is
Personas
Country, language, age
What the customer did in the
past
Journey maps
Product history, service history
What’s happening with the
customer now
Point in customer journey Location, device, time of day,
entry point, clickstream, point
in customer journey
History
Situation
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© 2012, Forrester Research, Inc. Reproduction Prohibited
Source: Forrester Research, Inc.
November 19, 2012
For Customer Experience Professionals
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Contextualization
Contextualized Relevance Is Powerful
Contextual interactions manifest themselves in a number of ways, including:
■ Location-targeted content. Location-targeted content can take a number of forms. For example,
GateGuru, a mobile app that helps travelers find restaurants and services at airports, suggests
a list of local airports to view based on user location. Home Depot adjusts some of its featured
content based on seasonal changes, featuring patio furniture to people in the South in early
spring while pitching kitchen remodeling products to people in the still-cold Northeast.8 And to
help bolster its mortgage loan business, Commonwealth Bank of Australia created an app that
uses augmented reality to provide listings with prices, photos, and data on comparable homes.9
■ Adjacent content. Users’ path through a site or application gives telltale signs of what they’re
interested in. Firms can combine this information with aggregate data to deliver related content
specific to the browsing patterns of their users. For example, photo equipment retailer Jessops
tracks movements and provides dynamic recommendations based on business rules that limit
the price differential between the product initially viewed and the recommended product.
■ Right-sized content and functionality. Users don’t want every piece of content everywhere —
they want the right pieces of content and functionality sized for their needs. For example, Amazon.
com’s mobile site does not provide the same level of detail as its website, nor does it provide
editorial reviews or author information for books. Instead, the mobile site focuses on price and
limits product details to the essentials needed to make a decision.
■ Adaptive designs. When a firm needs to support users across devices with highly varied display
characteristics, it can use a liquid layout that will render cleanly — but differently — from one
device to another. Sites such as Purina’s catchow.com and The Boston Globe provide a single set of
imagery, navigation, and content that adjusts to the size of the user’s browser, regardless of device.
© 2012, Forrester Research, Inc. Reproduction Prohibited
November 19, 2012
For Customer Experience Professionals
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Contextualization
R e c o m m e n d at i o n s
Contextualize The Right Interactions For Your Customers
Contextualization can be powerful if companies know how to apply it. To focus their attention
on the moments where knowing a user’s context can make or break an interaction, customer
experience professionals should:
■ Map and evaluate key customer journeys. Customer journey maps give a visual
representation of the series of interactions a customer goes through in pursuit of a goal.
These artifacts help customer experience teams uncover the critical moments of truth that
can make or break an experience and give them context for what came before and what
will come after each moment. It’s at these critical points where companies can benefit from
their understanding of general and specific user behaviors to provide the most relevant
experience possible.
■ Discover which interactions need a personal touch. Many interactions could benefit from
bringing more personal information and context to bear. But firms must choose the right
interactions that have the most impact. Since mobile devices offer more implicit details —
such as device, browser, and current location — mobile interactions are great candidates for
harnessing the full power of context.10 For example, a customer who scans a QR code in a
store is revealing a great deal of data about location, product consideration, and the fact that
she needs additional information at the point of potential selection.
■ Not get carried away. Companies need to deliver contextualized content based on
understanding someone’s context while avoiding the trap of making misguided assumptions
about a customer’s preferences. Consider what happened when Urban Outfitters tried to
tailor its online experience for female shoppers by funneling them into the women’s part of
the site only, effectively shutting off access to the men’s area. It didn’t take into account the
fact that many of its female customers regularly shop for men’s items as well.11
© 2012, Forrester Research, Inc. Reproduction Prohibited
November 19, 2012
For Customer Experience Professionals
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Contextualization
Supplemental MATERIAL
Companies Interviewed For This Report
3M
iSite
Adobe
Monetate
Autonomy (a division of HP)
Oracle
Baynote
Razorfish
Bluefly
RichRelevance
Coveo Solutions
SDL
Dell
Siteworx
Ektron
UncommonGoods
Endnotes
1
Today’s empowered customers own multiple connected devices and have high expectations for getting
information and services when and where they need them. As of Q3 2011, the average US consumer owned
two connected devices. Given forecasts for continued smartphone and tablet adoption, that number will
likely increase in the coming years. Source: North American Technographics® Online Benchmark Survey,
Q3 2011 (US, Canada).
2
Customers can’t always articulate exactly what they want. But rather than merely designing for stated needs,
firms need to stay one step ahead of their customers by walking the line between researcher and customer —
and not only for a single project but also as a regular practice. See the January 18, 2011, “Mastering Emotional
Experience Design: Address Customers’ Real Goals” report.
3
Sixty-two percent of consumers find personalized retail websites useful when shopping online (i.e., when
an online store recommends products based on other items that the consumer may be browsing or buying
[e.g., “You might like . . .”]). Source: North American Technographics Retail Online Benchmark Recontact
Survey, Q2 2010 (US).
4
Successful mobile services must be immediate, simple, and contextual, which requires using more of the
available contextual information to deliver more meaningful content and functionality to users. See the
October 26, 2011, “The Future Of Mobile Experiences Is Context” report.
5
Source: Q4 2011 Global Customer Experience Peer Research Panel Online Survey.
6
Fifty-four percent of 86 surveyed customer experience professionals said that lack of cooperation across
organizations is a significant barrier to improving their organization’s customer experience. Source: Q4 2011
Global Customer Experience Peer Research Panel Online Survey.
© 2012, Forrester Research, Inc. Reproduction Prohibited
November 19, 2012
For Customer Experience Professionals
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Contextualization
7
Personalization technology has grown well beyond greeting people by first names into complex, real-time
decision engines that make offers. But marketers still rely on stated demographic attributes to execute
personalization because of the easy availability of this data in a customer profile. One retail bank executive told
us that the customer’s post-login experience on the bank website consists of addressing the customer by name
and including a message or offer based on the customer’s account profile — a fairly basic execution of postlogin personalization. See the February 17, 2012, “Use Customer Analytics To Get Personal” report.
8
Source: Natalie Zmuda, “Home Depot Localizes With Spring-Loaded Pitch,” Advertising Age, April 4, 2011
(http://adage.com/article/news/home-depot-localizes-marketing-suit-regional-weather/149699/).
9
Commonwealth Bank of Australia uses augmented reality to allow users to simply hold up a mobile device
with the application open and point it at a home to get values that appear on top of the image. To see the
prices relative to other homes in a neighborhood, a consumer simply moves his or her mobile phone so
that the home is visible on the phone’s display. This action has fewer steps than typing in addresses or listing
numbers and searching. See the December 22, 2011, “Case Study: Home Buying With Mobile Augmented
Reality” report.
10
Consumers will adopt and use convenient services and products. On mobile phones, this means services
that offer immediacy and simplicity through a highly contextual experience. Context — the sum total
of what is known about an individual at the moment of engagement — is a moving target that will pull
consumer perceptions of convenience with it. Successful mobile initiatives will focus not only on what is
delivered but also on how it’s delivered to each customer. See the October 26, 2011, “The Future Of Mobile
Experiences Is Context” report.
11
Source: Natasha Singer, “E-Tailer Customization: Convenient or Creepy?” The New York Times, June 23,
2012 (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/24/technology/e-tailer-customization-whats-convenient-andwhats-just-plain-creepy.html?pagewanted=all).
© 2012, Forrester Research, Inc. Reproduction Prohibited
November 19, 2012
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