a product executive's perspective: assembling a world-class personalization team

Personalization Pioneers Summit 2017September 5th, Soho House Berlin

Personalization Pioneers Summit 2017

A Product Executive’s Perspective: Assembling a World-Class Personalization Team

Sascha Meissner, Head of Product

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About Mister SpexEurope’s favorite way and place to buy eyewear

Who are we - Mister Spex at a glance

Largest European Online Optician

More than 2 Mio. customers

Multichannel approach

> 500 employees

Value PropositionLargest assortment in stock, best value for money, andbest customer experience

We operate in 10 countries

Why did we start looking for a CX platform?• Content injection for campaign and onsite support

à to better serve local needs in various countriesà ease to use, fast time to market, low DEV effort

• Segmentation and Personalization à to deliver the right content to the right audience

Convenience vs. Inspiration vs. Trust

• Product recommendations

Create relevance and resonance and give customers what they need

Getting started with DYPhase 1

Onboarding phase showed early success

Gender HP USP tiles Exit intent Product reco

Challenges after the initial 6 months

Trust Do we trust the numbers and the proposed uplift? Why is there a mismatch between DY data, onsite data and DWH data?

Tool What else can we do with the tool?Is this the right tool for us? Why do we have two testing tools in place?

Ownership What’s next? Who is allowed to do what?Can we run parallel experiments in marketing and product without any conflicts?…Knowhow | Organizational setup | Processes

We were not in the driver seat

Top 5 reason why personalization fails

Source: Chris Goward - Strategic Personalization @ Growth Summit 2017

Getting behind the wheelPhase 2

… by building cross-functional teams

Core team for DY

• Project ownership and responsibility for tool moved to product management

• Members of onsite and product as main departments using DY• Total 5 people (2 Marketing, 2 POs, project lead)

Knowledge base

• Business and technical training for larger group of people / various departments

Team Segmentation / Personalization

• Members of onsite, product, CRM, BI• Integrated in hypothesis board

Team Recommendations

• Members of onsite, product, category management/purchasing, CRM

UX

SEO

DEV

… by setting up guiding principles

DY is used for• Temporary content injection• Experiments (manual or automated AB testing)• User-segmented targeting and personalization

DY is not used• To fix bugs• as a second CMS

Principles for each application areaCapabilities

Concept & implementationReview

QA & ReleaseCommunication

DocumentationMonitoring

… by integrating in our ideation / testing process

Explore Generate ChallengePrioritize

Validate

• Data-driven approach

• gather insights from

existing data

• identify relevant

segments

• Generate ideas

• Formulate

hypothesis

• Hypothesis board (cross-functional)

• discuss / challenge

• prioritize hypothesis

• define validation

approach

• rigorously test to get evidence

à qualitative

à quantitative

Pushing the gas pedalPhase 3

Next steps for us

Internationalize use cases

Optimize and test more recommendation strategies

Gather insights from audiences

Input CRM data for better targeting

à type-based personalization, e.g. buying behavior (brand affinity)

Learn and adapt organizational setup and processes

Takeaways

3 success factors for strategic personalization

create an expert optimization team

establish a proven optimization process

gather meaningful customer insights

Source: Chris Goward - Strategic Personalization @ Growth Summit 2017

THANK YOUsascha.meissner@misterspex.de

@misterspex@MSXtech