The Power of One: Gaining Business Value from Personalization Technologies

by Nirmal Pal and Nirmal Pal & Arvind Rangaswamy

Corporate giants and world-renowned academic institutions combined work on value delivery through personalized products and services, addressing every component of customerization. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1412011213
• ISBN13: 9781412011211
• Release Date: July 2006
• Publisher: Not Avail
• Length: 261 Pages

Customer Reviews

Awesome inputs

Loved the book. Content is accurate, well written and has helped me generate an online personalization strategy for my company.

Best book so far on personalization

Having May 2004 finalised my Graduate Diploma in E-business with a thesis on Online Personalization, I'm happy to say that this book was one of my key sources. There are very few well-founded books on personalization. This one includes a number of interesting articles on very different angles on personalization (business, technical, privacy, etc.). The first part of the book is on the more strategic issues and the second part on the more operational issues. STRATEGIC ISSUES One of the lead chapters is on "How to evaluate personalization initiatives". The book recommends two dimensions: External Customer Acceptance and Internal Business Value Two sub-dimensions control External Customer Acceptance: - The perceived value for customer; i.e. how well is the customer need fulfilled and does it happen timely for the customer. - Ease of data collection; i.e. how much can be based on the knowledge the business already has - and how much must the customer type manually. Two sub-dimensions control Internal Business Value: - Customer's Share of Wallet, i.e. the business' ability to sell more of the same products and/or different products to the customer - Ease of implementation, i.e. the classic trade-off of production flexibility and production efficiency. How easy is it to customize the offering to the customer and what are the marginal costs in doing this compare to the marginal revenue. Another interesting chapter is on the evolution of website's personalization. We often talk about personalization as either or. It's too simple. There's a whole spectrum of tools to make a website continually more personalized. The degrees of personalization are from static sites over dynamic sites to global personalized sites. The book uses the definition from personalization.org: Personalization is the use of technology and customer information to tailor electronic commerce interactions between a business and each individual customer. Using information either previously obtained or provided in real-time about the customer, the exchange between the parties is altered to fit that customer's stated needs as well as needs perceived by the business based on the available customer information. The purpose of this information technology combined with marketing practices specialized for the World Wide Web is to: 1. Better serve the customer by anticipating needs 2. Make the interaction efficient and satisfying for both parties 3. Build a relationship that encourages the customer to return for subsequent purchases If you're really interested in personalization, do also consider: Bruce Kasanoff's "Making it Personal - How to Profit from Personalization without Invading Privacy" (2002). Peter Leerskov, MSc in International Business (Marketing & Management) and Graduate Diploma in E-business

Thought-leadership on Personalization

Today's digital technologies enable and empower organizations to collect, analyse and store vast amount of customer information. The ability to connect islands of customer information has led to better customer profiling and better marketing strategies.Various personalization technologies and electronic agents, to some extent, assist customers to navigate the ocean of market information. With our bounded capability to process huge amount of information and to gather all the necessary information for decision-making at any one time, such technological advances are welcome. However, such personalization technologies may intrude and invade privacy. Such are the core themes when it comes discussing about personalization. Such are the challenges of personalization technologies, faced by corporations, governments and individuals. In "The Power of One", Nirmal Pal and Arvind Rangaswamy has succinctly captured the essence of the current thoughts on personalization and successfully steered through the complex mosaic of the subject to deliver penetrating insights. Pal and Rangaswamy assembled a superb collection of thoughts and ideas together with researched materials on personalization. Personalization is one of the core building blocks of the Real-time Organization - the ability to sense-and-respond and adapt in the emerging global, digital economy. As noted by Pal and Rangaswamy, "if a firm is fully personalized, it "rents" out to customer just the right set of its assets for just the right amount to serve their individual needs." It provides the basis for enterprise-wide integration. Successful implementation of personalization technologies enables organizations to redefine the meaning of customer-centric. Overall, this book provides thought-leadership on personalization and is a must-read for business executives. Those who are assessing the impact of personalization and those who are planning to implement the initiative within their organizations can learn about strategic issues (Chapter 1 to Chapter 5) and the nuts-and-bolts of personalization (Chapter 6 to Chapter 11). Researchers on the subject will value the diversity of personalisation-related issues being addressed in the book. Consumers, like you and me, can gain a lot from the in-depth discussions on privacy found in the book. Readers will find this book easy to read and grasp, as all the contributors have eloquently narrated complex issues into coherent perspectives. Pal and Rangaswamy customized this book to address personalization and thumbs up to them. It's timely, as personalization technologies may well be the killer-app for the next generation e-business.