Generative AI for Rich Personalization: Transforming Customer Experience
By Osvaldo López, Marketing Strategist, BORN Group
Introduction
In the rapidly evolving landscape of digital solutions, generative artificial intelligence (Gen AI) has emerged as a powerful tool for creating rich personalization experiences. As consumers become increasingly discerning, businesses must adapt to meet their expectations. Generative AI not only facilitates this adaptation but also redefines how organizations engage with their customers, fostering deeper relationships and driving business growth.
Understanding Generative AI
Generative AI refers to algorithms that can create new content—such as text, images, or entire experiences—based on the input data they are trained on. Unlike traditional AI systems that primarily focus on recognizing patterns, generative AI can produce novel outputs that mimic human-like creativity. This capability opens numerous possibilities for businesses, particularly in tailoring interactions and products to individual customer preferences.
The Importance of Personalization
Personalization is no longer a luxury; it has become a necessity. With the sheer volume of choices available to consumers, organizations that can deliver personalized experiences gain a competitive edge. Personalization enhances customer satisfaction, increases engagement, and drives loyalty. Studies show that companies excelling in personalization can experience a revenue uplift of up to 15%.
How Generative AI Enhances Personalization
1. Dynamic Content Generation
Generative AI can create tailored content in real-time, allowing businesses to deliver unique experiences to each user. For example, in retail, it can analyze customer preferences and generate personalized product recommendations, promotional emails, or targeted advertisements, increasing conversions and fostering a sense of connection with the brand.
2. Predictive Analytics
By leveraging generative AI, organizations can analyze vast amounts of data to predict future customer behavior. This capability enables businesses to proactively tailor their offerings to meet evolving needs, such as streaming services generating personalized playlists based on viewing habits.
3. Enhanced Customer Interactions
Generative AI can improve customer service through intelligent chatbots and virtual assistants that simulate human-like conversations, offering personalized assistance based on individual histories and preferences, enhancing the overall customer experience.
4. Content Customization at Scale
In media and publishing, generative AI can produce a range of content variations tailored to specific audience segments, distributing personalized articles, videos, or social media posts that resonate with diverse demographics.
5. Product Design and Development
Generative AI can inform product design by analyzing consumer feedback and trends, identifying market gaps, and creating products that closely align with customer desires, leading to successful launches and greater satisfaction.
Implementing Generative AI for Personalization
1. Data Collection and Management
The foundation of effective generative AI lies in high-quality data. Organizations must invest in robust data collection and management systems to gather insights on customer preferences, behaviors, and feedback, enabling meaningful outputs.
2. Selecting the Right Technology
Businesses must evaluate and select generative AI tools that align with their objectives, considering factors such as ease of integration and scalability.
3. Creating a Culture of Innovation
Successful implementation requires a cultural shift within organizations, encouraging employees to experiment with new technologies and embrace data-driven decision-making.
4. Monitoring and Iteration
Personalization requires ongoing monitoring and refinement. Organizations must continuously analyze the effectiveness of their generative AI initiatives and adjust based on customer feedback and performance metrics.
Challenges and Considerations
While generative AI offers significant opportunities for rich personalization, it also presents challenges. Privacy concerns are paramount; organizations must navigate data protection regulations and ensure ethical use of customer data. Striking a balance between leveraging AI capabilities and maintaining a human touch in interactions is crucial, as the best results often come from a hybrid approach where AI enhances human creativity.
Conclusion
Generative AI is revolutionizing how businesses approach personalization. By harnessing its capabilities, organizations can create richer, more engaging experiences that resonate with customers on a deeper level. As the digital landscape continues to evolve, embracing generative AI will help businesses meet today’s consumer demands and position them for future success.
At BORN, we have vigorously embraced AI and possess deep expertise in the field. We can help your brand fully leverage generative AI, ensuring that your personalization efforts are both effective and innovative. Together, we can navigate the complexities of the digital world and create meaningful, sustainable experiences that will set your business apart.
Every year the stakes are higher and competition for sales is more arduous. Site performance is one of the most important factors that define customer loyalty, improved conversion to sales, and growth in market share.
There are currently around 20 million ecommerce websites globally with 2 billion consumers placing orders yearly for an estimated 5.5 trillion dollars in global sales (2022). (Similarweb)
With ever-growing stakes and more competition in the ecommerce race, your online storefront needs to be powered by a high-performance platform to stay ahead of the pack.
BORN XDS has been engineering and developing global award-winning enterprise ecommerce sites for over a decade, we know exactly what it takes to beat the competition and how to design performance enhanced sites that win over customers.
“Improvements to your site’s performance will directly impact customer experience and will lead to greater revenue for your company”
PerformanceDriven Revenue
Why site speed and performance are important and how they impact your profits
1. Revenue Increase
Investing in site speed optimization can positively impact a company’s revenue by improving conversion rates, reducing cart abandonment, boosting user engagement, enhancing user experience, optimizing mobile sales, and increasing organic traffic. Greater sales in any industry resulting from these factors increase revenue and enables a constant revenue stream throughout.
2.User Experience
Fast-loading websites provide better user experiences which increase customer satisfaction and engagement. Slow sites lead to higher customer bounce rates (a metric representing the number of users leaving a site without interaction). Performance improvement on a site makes the navigation more interesting and fluid for customers. Users have become accustomed to fast-loading websites and have little patience for slow ones. When a website loads quickly, users can access the desired content or complete their tasks efficiently, leading to higher satisfaction levels. Fast site speed minimizes frustration, reduces waiting time, and ensures a smooth browsing experience.
3.Conversion Rates
Studies show that even delays in website loading time can lead to significant decreases in conversion rates. Faster websites facilitate smoother navigation, quicker product searches, and faster checkout processes, which contribute to higher conversion rates and ultimately more sales. Increased load time of 1 to 3 seconds raises the risk of customers leaving by 32%, that number increases to 123% with a 10 second delay. This shows just how appreciative customers are when you provide them with an efficient experience, and how unforgiving they can be about performance issues.
4.Search Engine Ranking
Search engines, like Google, consider website speed as one of the factors when determining search rankings. Faster websites tend to rank higher, leading to increased organic traffic and visibility. Improved visibility can attract more potential customers to your ecommerce site, positively impacting profits.
5.Mobile Commerce
New studies show that nearly 80% of all online purchases are being made through smart mobile devices. Mobile users often have limited bandwidth and slower internet connections. Optimizing your website for mobile devices and improving its speed can enhance the mobile shopping experience, leading to higher conversion rates and increased revenue from mobile users.
6.Customer Trust and Reputation
A slow-loading website may create doubts about the professionalism and reliability of an ecommerce business. Customers may question the security of their personal and financial information when using a poorly performing website. A fast and responsive website helps establish trust and credibility, leading to repeat business and positive word-of-mouth recommendations.
7.Better Site Management
Faster loading times make it easier for your team to manage and update the website, reducing the time spent on site updates and maintenance tasks. This efficiency allows you to focus more on personalized targeted marketing, product management, and customer support, ultimately driving higher profits.
8. Operational Efficiency
Improved website performance and speed can also benefit the operational side of your ecommerce business. To maximize profits, it’s crucial to regularly monitor and optimize your site’s performance, focusing on factors such as page load times, server response times, and overall user experience. Conducting regular speed tests, optimizing code and images, utilizing caching techniques, and investing in robust hosting infrastructure are some strategies to improve website performance and speed. [BORN can help you implement and manage these complex steps]
“…even the most passive online consumer is too savvy to tolerate bad performance“
Consumers know what they want;
they expect you to provide it!
Today, every individual, whether just a casual internet user or daily online ecommerce customer, has their own expectations, needs, wants, and demands when it comes to the user experience they have come to expect; from bespoke personalized landing pages to personally tailored shopping carts, to pinpoint targeted and customized user journeys. In 2023, ecommerce business better be able to meet those unique expectations.
We often see brilliantly designed ecommerce sites that have beautiful aesthetics with award winning interfaces get totally ruined by back end failure with slow and cumbersome checkout systems that totally hinder the sales process (if not lose sales altogether). It’s the classic “form over function” dilemma, and today, even the most passive online consumer is too savvy to tolerate bad performance. This isn’t to say that ecommerce sites should consider function over UI/UX design, but rather that the two MUST complement each other to create a fast, beautiful, user-friendly streamlined digital sales experience.
The competition is intense and the leaders set the pace!
According to Similarweb, 4 out of the top 10 most visited ecommerce sites worldwide are Amazon marketplaces (Amazon.com, Amazon UK, Amazon Japan, and Amazon Germany). The Reason: ease of use, a naturally intuitive and personalized UI/UX, and the delivery of a nearly faultless performance, which gives every single user a repeatable, simple, and hassle-free shopping experience for every visit and purchase.
Amazon closed $514 billion (US Dollars) in global online retail sales in 2022, and It dominated nearly 40% of all online retail in the US, the next highest single operator being Walmart at 6.3% (Statista.com). While Amazon’s platform will probably not win on its looks, it does offer comfort in its simplicity and ease of use. A one or two word search inside the site’s marketplace almost always delivers perfectly ranked pages of expected results. That search can then be easily filtered by cost, shipping dates available, free shipping vs paid, brand names, ratings and reviews, and previous purchases. One click adds the item to your cart, another click checks you out. No need to worry about tracking that purchase, Amazon will send you automated updates on when the order was received, fulfilled, shipped and “out for delivery”.
$514 billion
(US Dollars)
40%
Online retail in the US
Offer comfort
in its simplicity
Search
delivers perfectly ranked pages
Hudson’s Bay Company : Performance must be measured!
Among the hundreds of award-winning projects BORN XDS has produced, our work with Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) showcases how much improved performance can affect ecommerce websites.
HBC is the parent company of the iconic online and brick-and-mortar fashion stores, Saks Fifth Avenue, Saks OFF 5th, and The Bay. With estimated yearly sales revenues of $9.5 billion, Hudson’s Bay had very good reasons to want to ensure they stayed competitive.
When Hudson’s Bay came to BORN XDS, they had an ambitious goal of improving the response time of their different ecommerce websites by 30%.
To start this project, BORN XDS conducted an in-depth performance review of their websites’ operational speeds, the front and back end technologies, and third-party integrations. During this process several performance issues were determined; which included 3rd party integration problems, connectivity issues, and product ataloguing issues.
After the BORN technical audit was concluded and performance issues were identified, the sites experienced TTI (Time to Interactive) and LT (Load time) improvements of up to 49% in key pages of the sites like Search Page, Product Array, Product Details, and Cart Page.
The following figures show the dramatic front-end response time improvements experienced by Hudson’s Bay’s key web sites, after BORN XDS’s intervention:
48% Home Page Speed
64% Shopping Cart Page Speed
48% Search Page Speed
53% Overall Site Speed
33% Product Page Speed
49% efficiency increase in key pages
Improvement in Time to Interactive
Improvement in Time to Interactive
Hudson’s Bay Company : Performance Results
As part of BORN XDS’s comprehensive audit and website overhaul, a series of back and front-end changes and industry best practices were implemented. Among many others, Java script errors and unused code packages were removed, page caching was fine-tuned, image formats were standardized, and ‘Wishlist’ features were optimized— as a result, HBC’s revenue increased by an astonishing 7%. BORN XDS has the expertise to measure real results and pinpoint the performance improvements required to enrich customer experience that result in greater revenue.
Staying ahead through Continuous Improvement
All that is gained from a robust performance rebuild can be lost over time; healthy ecommerce demands constant monitoring, testing, and care. Much like an elite athlete, a top-performing ecommerce site needs to constantly develop in order to stay ahead of the ever-encroaching competitor. Techniques and technology that win today can change tomorrow and if your brand doesn’t stay in top shape, it can soon find itself out of first place.
If your brand is ready to impress the world with the power of performance that can go the long haul, we’d love to show you how we can enhance your site for results.
Easter. It may well be the most important holiday of the year for Christians, but it is also the season for all kinds of celebrations – a time of renewal, hope, and optimism as winter gives way to spring and all the excitement and fun of warmer weather. Celebrations inevitably mean marketing opportunities. Last year Easter-related E-commerce spending reached a staggering $24 billion in sales – an average spend of $192 per shopper. Given today’s robust economy, we expect even better Easter season results in 2024.
As with every holiday season, there’s an obvious retail connection for traditional Easter items ranging from holiday cards to the vast assortment of seasonal candies and gifts. But every holiday season also represents a great chance to market seemingly non-related items. Think spring cleaning, home improvement, vacation planning, and the whole world of outdoor activities. Easter and springtime represent an ideal occasion to ramp up all relevant marketing opportunities.
We’ve got some ideas to help you invigorate your marketing and merchandising efforts during the Easter season, but remember that Easter, like Christmas, is both a religious holiday and a secular one. So whatever you do, be thoughtful and respectful with your marketing messages and strategies. (The safe approach is to stick to the more secular associations of Easter.)
Evoke the season throughout your online presence.
Create an enticing atmosphere that resonates with the holiday spirit to heighten anticipation among your audience. This might be as simple as using Easter-themed imagery across all your digital platforms or as ambitious as creating a lot of new themed content for your homepage, social media channels, blogs, ads, landing pages, and even your SEO strategy. If you can ramp things up even more, look for new ways to differentiate your Easter theme from that of your competitors. (In other words: think beyond the Easter bunny and Easter eggs.)
Create a sense of urgency.
Easter is a big holiday season, but a lot of shoppers will procrastinate – and online shopping nearly always requires some degree of lead time. So instill a sense of urgency among customers through, for example, countdown timers and by leveraging social proof techniques. Highlight your delivery capabilities and incentivize early shoppers with special offers or discounts. You’ll lose the sale if the buyer can’t be confident of delivery before Easter Sunday. You might also create compelling digital products to satisfy the last- minute shopper.
Craft irresistible Easter offers.
Develop exclusive and clever promotions and discounts tailored to the season using messaging that’s relevant and meaningful to your audience. Countdown deals, themed product bundles, and complimentary gifts are always good ideas for compelling offerings. Again, strive for differentiation by connecting Easter and spring themes to your product or market space.
Leverage social media.
Actively engage with your target demographic– particularly the 18 to 34 age group – on social media platforms using Easter-centric themes and messaging. Holidays almost always connect to childhood, so tap that nostalgic feeling with interactive initiatives like virtual egg hunts, contests, and quizzes. Harness the power of hashtags to further to broaden your social media efforts – with plenty of lead time to facilitate conversion. If possible, collaborate with relevant influencers to amplify your social media presence and cultivate even more engagement.
Boost average order value with thematic bundles.
Another tried-and-true merchandising tactic is to encourage higher spending by curating Easter-themed (or springtime-themed) product bundles. Remember that holiday shopping is very different from “normal” shopping, and customers are primed to spend if they find a compelling offering. A well- crafted bundle that embraces and reflects Easter season traditions (or creates new ones) is a great way to enhance your revenue potential.
Optimize email marketing.
Of course, you’ll use email campaigns to promote your exclusive Easter season offers. Work hard to infuse them with the full spirit of this time of year to enhance the success of your promotions, but also work hard to make them stand out from all the Easter-themed emails your prospects are undoubtedly receiving. Holidays are a particularly good time for employing dynamic elements like GIFs and animations that engage consumers. Personalize your emails to forge a more intimate connection with customers while ensuring clarity about your offers. Remember, too, that while a seasonal promotion may have different imagery and messaging, consistent branding is still important to your long-term success. It should always be clear that your emails, no matter how seasonal or topical, are clearly your emails.
Ensure your website is ready.
Holidays like Easter represent good opportunities to make sure your online infrastructure is ready for heightened volume. While you’re planning your offerings and promotion, optimize your website speed and functionality. Enhance product presentation with high-quality images and differentiating descriptions. Prioritize mobile optimization to cater to the growing demographic of mobile shoppers and to ensure a seamless and intuitive user experience across all channels and devices.
By eliciting a sense of renewal and optimism, Easter and springtime may be uniquely compelling in terms of their thematic importance. If you can complement and amplify those feelings with your marketing efforts this year, you and your customers will be well-rewarded.
Color & Your Brand: Be Recognized and Be Remembered
By Nandhini Mehra, VP of Brand
On March 25th*, Indians around the world will celebrate Holi, a joyous occasion that marks the end of winter, the arrival of spring, and the triumph of good over evil. Holi revelers make music and dance and eat, but most famously, they daub each other with bright colors in what must be one of the most visually spectacular holidays in the world. Indeed, this Hindu holiday is often referred to as the “Festival of Colors.” Red, for example, may symbolize love and passion. Yellow suggests knowledge, prosperity, and happiness. Green represents the new beginnings associated with spring. As Holi celebrants know, color hasmeaning.
Consciously or unconsciously, all of us make decisions every day based on our relationship with color. We form associations and attach meanings to specific tints and shades; color can evoke visceral, emotive responses. If you manage a brand, you wrestle with the meaning and importance of color because you know that color is essential to your brand identity.
But how, exactly, is it essential? And much more importantly, how do you choose the right palette? It may seem like an impossible task given the wide range of possible emotional responses to color and the equally wide spectrum of a color’s cultural nuances. And here’s the reality: there is no single correct formula or approach, but you can make better choices by understanding color psychology and its effect on branding – and by having a clearly articulated vision for the brand you’re building.
Start With Emotion & Color Psychology
Whether you’re building a new brand or refreshing an existing one, you start by thinking about the emotional response you want to elicit and build the brand palette around that. Are you aiming for a sense of playfulness and fun? Or luxurious and sophisticated? Perhaps boldness and dynamism are central to your vision. A carefully crafted color palette will be a key component of your brand identity, and the colors you choose must support that.
Color psychology is a great place to start. This evolving discipline is based on the reality we can all acknowledge: that, as research has shown, personal experiences, upbringing, and preferences for colors can subconsciously affect the human brain, triggering neurochemical reactions as well as emotional responses. But that’s just one half of the equation. Color psychology also delves into the cultural meanings of colors. To cite just one example, green is associated in the West with nature, luck, and prosperity, while in some Asian cultures, green represents exorcism and infidelity. Being cognizant of these well-established cultural nuances can help you avoid ill-considered choices.
Color psychology won’t give you the precise answer, but it can help you understand and refine your choices.
Understand Trendiness but Focus on the Long-term
Color psychology focuses on how colors work and what they mean based on actual physiological responses and cultural norms. But color also has an element of timeliness: What is cool and on-trend today?
Last year, Pantone’s “Color of the Year” was “Viva Magenta 18-1750,” a shade that “vibrates with vim and vigor” and “revels in pure joy, encouraging experimentation and self-expression without restraint,” according to the global authority on color. This year, the Color of the Year is PANTONE 13-1023 Peach Fuzz. Pantone asserts that Peach Fuzz “captures our desire to nurture ourselves and others. It’s a velvety gentle peach tone whose all-embracing spirit enriches mind, body, and soul.”
I am quite confident that Pantone is as good as anyone at distilling the current cultural zeitgeist into a single hue, and no doubt they have reams of research and tons of smart people to back their findings up. But I have my doubts about whether this is particularly useful to the brand manager. Remember that trends are fleeting – as even a casual look at the last several “colors of the year” will attest – and focusing on what’s popular today can mean you’ll be heading toward a swift rebrand tomorrow.
As Rebecca Kowalewicz, Vice President of Digital at Clearbridge Branding Agency, said, “Color is not just revolutionary; it’s evolutionary – a kaleidoscope of cultural connotations constantly turning in an ever-changing zeitgeist of perception and trends.”
Understand Your Brand First
I hope it’s clear that I value the insights of color psychology and it’s always at least a little useful to know what’s hot in the world of colors – but I believe neither will fully solve the challenge of developing a new brand palette (or a rebrand).
Here’s what to do instead. Start by articulating, well and thoroughly, the intent and persona of your brand and, as mentioned above, the emotional resonance you want to convey. Evaluate companies in your competitive space and decide how you want to differentiate your brand. Then choose three colors – a primary base, a secondary accent, and a tertiary neutral tone – that (a) reflect all your inputs and (b) can be applied to the full spectrum of communications opportunities you face. The goal is not to be trendy but to use a palette that makes sense for your audience, your strategy, and your brand.
Getting the palette right is a big challenge, but perhaps an even bigger one is to apply that palette, consistently and thoughtfully, fully: on your website, in all advertising and marketing efforts, on social media, and in packaging and signage. The goal, of course, is to develop a cohesive visual language – a strong, memorable, and resonant visual identity – which in turn improves your brand recognition and deepens engagement, sometimes dramatically.
Another important consideration for brand palette decisions is accessibility. About 300 million people around the world – about 8% of men and 0.5% of women – have a color vision deficiency. Developing an accessible palette shows that your brand is conscious and inclusive. One aspect of this is ensuring your palette has enough contrast between background and foreground colors. In today’s day and age, this is a very straightforward accommodation to make with several online tools that help ensure compliance.
Color Should Set You Apart
We all believe that color is important in shaping a consumer’s view of a brand, and research backs this idea up. Indeed, according to a Secretariat of the Seoul International Color Expo study, “84.7 percent of the total respondents think that color accounts for more than half among the various factors important for choosing products.” But finding the right color is never going to be easy because colors are packed with meaning and nuance and our response to color is complex, determined by a hard-to-fathom mixture of subconscious preferences, emotional connections, and cultural experiences. By all means, study color psychology and evaluate what’s going on in the world of color. But at the end of the day, work very hard to understand your brand’s persona and mission so that your color palette is based on something unique to your enterprise. Then turn that small set of carefully chosen hues into a unifying, meaningful, and central part of every component of your presence.
Do this well, and your color palette becomes an integral piece of your brand and its potential for success.
*This date varies every year, depending on the Hindu calendar.
To continue this color conversation or to chat about all things branding, feel free to reach out. If your brand is looking for enhancement, BORN would be happy to walk you through our creative approach.
By Ramy Youssef, SVP & Global Head of Marketplaces, BORN Group
Just as online marketplaces have reshaped the way people buy and sell tangible products, digital service marketplaces are revolutionizing the way people and companies buy and sell services.
Marketplaces like Upwork and Fiverr have made it possible for businesses to source talent for writing, design, and data entry and for consumers to find resources for small tasks. Online service marketplaces are already substantial—but they have only scratched the surface of the opportunity.
What makes for a successful service marketplace? At one level, success looks a lot like a great product marketplace. A solid service marketplace will feature a strong array of offerings, enable sellers and buyers to find each other, and facilitate fast, reliable, and safe transactions. But successful service marketplaces require special considerations, capabilities and functionalities.
First, marketing and selling services is more complex than selling products. To be a good service marketplace provider, you need a deep understanding of the complexities of service offerings, definitions, and modeling. For example, most service marketplaces operate using one of two models: a bidding model, where providers compete for work with tailored proposals, or a direct hire model, which enables clients to choose a provider based on detailed profiles and explicit service offerings. The platform must have the ability to manage those complexities with your technology architecture.
Second, trust and transparency are critical to any kind of marketplace, but they are even more important for service marketplaces, which means that functionalities like provider ratings and customer feedback are paramount. You’ll need a system capable of managing reputation to ensure marketplace integrity, inform buyer decision-making, and foster public accountability.
Finally, successful service marketplaces tend to be more specialized. A more niche approach is generally better, particularly for higher-end services. Most clients seeking services will gravitate towards a marketplace with a high degree of focus, which makes it easier for them to find the precise set of skills they require and gives them more confidence in the process.
The Blueprint: Getting Started
You start by recognizing how a product marketplace differs from a service marketplace. Product marketplaces require merchants, products, and logistics from ordering to fulfillment. Service marketplaces require service providers and service execution, which is more complex:
Services involves more significant time considerations including the business/operating hours of the provider, expected response time, lead time and scheduling, and the time required to deliver.
Services generally involve multiple variants that must be considered for each engagement, such as seasonality, geography/geofencing, and product requirements, all of which make service modeling much more complex.
So when designing, building, and managing a service marketplace, you need to focus on the following elements and best practices to deliver a quality experience and optimal performance:
1. Clear Service Definition and Modeling
As noted, service engagements involve a web of complex variables, including the diversity of service models (discrete services, rentals, subscriptions, and provisioning) and demand a more sophisticated system for matching clients with providers and managing their interactions. This means that service definition and modeling is paramount to the creation of a successful service marketplace. Understanding the dynamics of service time mapping and conversion, especially for national service providers, is vital.
Best practices include:
Build a proficient team: You’ll want a team with experience in the complexity of service modelling.
Consistency in the business model: Another component of the partners you choose is ensure some degree of consistency in terms of the services they offer. It’s difficult, and may be impossible, to customize the service model for each provider, and buyers want to be able to make meaningful comparisons between service providers.
Matching algorithms: A successful service marketplace will use AI and data analytics to create robust algorithms that successfully match customers with appropriate service providers.
Clarity and confidence: To build lasting client engagement and satisfaction, you’ll want to ensure clarity in terms of the offering and confidence in terms of delivery and execution. When terms are convoluted or uncertain, clients may simply hesitate to engage at all.
2. Attract and Support the Best Service Providers
This is clear and obvious: You need excellent service providers to make your service marketplace successful. So choose your partnerships wisely to ensure quality and efficiency, prerequisites for building trust. Remember clients will use your marketplace because they trust you as an operator to enable them to find good providers. It also means you should design your marketplace platform in a way that makes the best service providers want to use it.
Best practices include:
Automate the onboarding process: A smooth and efficient onboarding process can make or break the service provider’s experience. You’ll want to streamline the onboarding journey with automated checks and a minimal number of steps without compromising on the rigorousness needed for trust and safety on the platform.
Meet the needs of large service providers: In many marketplaces, larger providers are better, so your service marketplace model should be able to handle an intricate configuration of multiple entities under the same provider banner. A large provider will typically need to maintain distinct profiles for different locations and different service tiers, each with its unique pricing, availability, and offerings.
Subscription and payout structure: Most service marketplaces will need to be able to support single-transaction services as well as subscription-based models with recurring monthly orders. Automated subscription setups have to be carefully designed to manage first order fee, recurring fees, and the associated payout calculations.
Payout system: It’s crucial to establish a transparent and reliable payout system that can handle various scenario (such as mid-cycle changes, refunds, or service credits) to maintain provider trust and satisfaction.
Robust scheduling functionality: Marketplaces need to be flexible, giving providers the tools to indicate their availability accurately while ensuring that customers have access to timely services. A dynamic scheduling system that can handle real-time updates and can integrate with providers’ external calendars is a key component of a successful marketplace.
Allocation: Most service marketplaces operate on a “first in, first served” (FIFS) booking principle, which can potentially lead to scheduling conflicts and overbooking if not managed properly. Providers must be able to list all their available slots while the marketplace must possess the capability to prevent double-bookings. Well-executed and reliable scheduling is a key component of a positive experience for providers and customers.
Regulatory and compliance: We noted earlier the incredible importance of trust when it comes to service marketplaces. Marketplaces should invest in automated verification systems that can efficiently validate (initially and as needed) the credentials of providers. A good service marketplace must be able to ascertain and uphold licensing requirements and industry-specific regulations—configured for every service provider and offering—to mitigate risks and ensure marketplace integrity of the marketplace.
Incentive strategy: Another key to attracting and retaining high-quality service providers—and boosting provider participation—is designing valuable incentives, such as waiving marketplace fees, a service provider success program, or ways to leverage the network effect. Incentives must be carefully designed to promote marketplace growth without sacrificing profitability.
3. Facilitate Service Execution
Clients expect services to be rendered promptly and competently. Hiccups in scheduling, delivery, or quality will tarnish a platform’s reputation and reliability. Furthermore, the marketplace must provide tangible proof of service completion that satisfies both the provider and the client, safeguarding against disputes and ensuring trust in the platform.
Best practices include:
Effective bundling of services with products: The interplay between services and associated products can be complicated by factors such as inventory management, variable pricing, and service quality assurance. For example, consider a service marketplace providing home maintenance. When a provider needs physical products—say, a water filter—this adds a logistical complexity to service delivery. A good service marketplace should enable the creation of linked orders and allow synchronization across payments and returns. This integration reduces the risk of discrepancies and enhances the overall customer experience.
Encourage the use of the platform: You naturally want to encourage transactions within the platform by making it easy to change the scope of a service engagement. Direct engagements between service providers and clients (negotiated outside the platform) may be valuable in terms of personalized service delivery, they can result in missed revenue opportunities for the marketplace. So create mechanisms and incentives that make it easy to book additional services through the platform itself.
Enable stackable services: To capitalize on the time spent on service execution, marketplaces could allow for the stacking of compatible services, thus maximizing efficiency and customer value.
Service completion evidence: Platforms must establish a straightforward and accessible method for documenting and verifying the completion of services.
Quality assurance: Given the high premium clients place on consistent, high-quality service, marketplaces must implement strict quality control measures. This could include customer feedback systems.
Next Steps
Service marketplaces offer tremendous opportunities for platform operators who understand the nuances and best practices of service marketplaces. Start by thinking carefully about what the needs of the market you want to serve, then work on developing a technology architecture that provides the agility and scalability to go to market and—just as important—to evolve with that market.
If your brand is looking to learn more about Service Marketplaces and BORN Group’s proven approach, we would love to walk you through it.
Digital Transformation & Airport Marketplaces: Redefining the Airport Experience
By Ramy Youssef, SVP & Global Head of Marketplaces, BORN Group
“Digital is no longer an afterthought addition to existing physical processes; it is becoming an intrinsic part of the airport brand.” — Chris Au Young, General Manager, Airport Authority Hong Kong
Every day, about one million people around the world are in the air — and every one of them spends time at one of the world’s 40,000-plus airports. Airports are already big business, and they are evolving rapidly thanks to privatization, visionary airport managers, changing consumer demands, and — perhaps most important — technology.
In fact, digitalization and experience transformation are taking airports even further as they evolve into fully connected, digitally-powered ecosystems, leading to better experiences for travelers and new opportunities for airport marketplaces.
Digitization and the Airport
In the early days of digital transformation, airports embraced digital technology to automate operations and processes, optimize passenger tracking and security, and leverage data and analytics for faster (and improved) decision-making and more effective management of energy and waste.
A key benefit was improvement in getting people on and off planes more efficiently and with less labor, which saw still further improvement with the onset of the “connected traveler” experience, enabling a much more seamless journey through security, gates, baggage claim, customs, and ground transportation — all the major components of getting passengers to their destinations.
Better operational efficiency and a more connected passenger experience means a better customer experience. When travelers are worried less about finding the gate and making the plane, they have more time for stress-free recreation and shopping. The textbook example of the potential of this investment may well be the Changi Airport in Singapore. As the New York Times put it, “many airports have spots that can delight, if you know how to find them. Changi, in Singapore, for example, is the superstar of airports, worth spending a whole weekend exploring.”
Today, digitization is being extended to airport marketplaces — with good reason. The millions of travelers who pass through airports each day represent a large, captive market — and a substantial opportunity to increase non-aeronautical revenues. The conclusions of two major consulting firms highlight the potential of the airport marketplace:
In a September 2023 report on traveler satisfaction, J.D. Power and Associates said: “Satisfied travelers [are] spending more money at the airport: There is a direct correlation between overall passenger satisfaction and spending at the airport.”
And according to Forrester’s CX Index, when an airport increases its customer experience score by one point, it generates an additional $3.39 in incremental revenues per customer.
An airport marketplace powered and transformed by digitalization can enhance the customer experience, improve gross merchandise value (GMV), and, ultimately, increase your return on investment (ROI) of non-aeronautical revenues.
Digitalizing the Airport Marketplace
When you transform the airport marketplaces into a digital marketplace, you are reinventing the airport retail business model. Digitalization improves multiple aspects of the customer experience:
Improved visual merchandising and more omni-channel experiences, in-airport, on the web, and via smartphone apps.
New possibilities for digital marketing, including predictive retailing, hyper-segmentation, and personalization: tools to attract and engage buyers by delivering superior information and unique offers to the right consumer at the right time.
Seamless integration of content and commerce: efficient cataloging of products and services and making it easier for buyers to find what they need and want.
New opportunities for non-aeronautical tenants, making it easier to attract, onboard, and retain them.
These CX improvements enables all kinds of new opportunities for growth. In just a single concrete example of the benefits of a digitally enabled marketplace, Glasgow Airport launched its own app and redesigned its website to improve the traveler experience and found that parking revenues from digital channels increased by 20%.
At BORN Group, we have helped airport retail operations level up by creating state-of-the-art web sites and smartphone apps — backed by a digital-first tech stack —that serve as guides and access points to everything available, from transportation and parking options to opportunities to shop, dine, and relax. While at the airport, flyers can be sent real-time, location-based, and appropriately customized recommendations. The app could, for example, direct a business traveler to the appropriate airline lounge and offer suggestions for a good meal. It could offer shopping,dining, and entertainment suggestions to vacationers or travelers with long layovers (including personalized duty-free offers for international travelers).
The Tech That Drives a Digital Ecosystem
Digital transformation to pave the way to a successful airport marketplace focuses on five distinct streams:
Enterprise technology: A scalable tech stack to enable enterprise commerce, deliver a high-end omnichannel user experience, and automate personalization.
Partner & ecosystem management: The ability to recruit and onboard the right sellers/partners efficiently and manage the entire ecosystem effectively to ensure that everyone – including passengers – benefits.
Retail products & services: Successful airport marketplaces require a modern technology infrastructure that supports retail shops, restaurants, and other consumer service providers. From a macro point of view, this means merchandizing, content strategy, and production at scale.
CX management: The customer experience goals of the airport marketplace are similar to those of other marketplaces: multiple and seamless touchpoints for consumers to discover and transact with retailers. The difference is how these touchpoints are designed and delivered for air travelers in the context of the airport and each user’s needs and preferences.
Fulfillment and assurance: Getting products to consumers is critical to any marketplace, but airport marketplaces pose different challenges, like eligibility (say, for duty free passengers) and product delivery (while most products are delivered at the place and moment of purchase, some are delivered at the gate or the destination airport or shipped to the purchaser’s home).
Effectively addressing these components of the value chain enables airport marketplaces to meet the key factors for ongoing success:
Onboard enough sellers and the right kinds of sellers.
Embed the airport marketplace (and its brand) into the airport’s website and digital apps.
Display high-quality content and product data.
Build trust through transparency.
Automate processes wherever possible (particularly when it comes to personalization).
Case Study: A Leading Airport Marketplace
As an example of how digitalization can make a real difference in the success of an airport marketplace, consider the example of a leading airport, one of the largest transportation hubs in Asia that serves more than 100 airlines and more than 77 million travelers per year. Shopping at this airport involves more than 100 brands offering everything from luxury goods and high-end electronics to make-up and fashion to restaurants and convenience stores.
The BORN Group was chosen as a technology partner to build a curated marketplace for the airport in ways that would enable business growth, align with the airport’s digital transition, enhance its reputation for exceptional customer service, and serve its tenants more effectively.
We built a curated marketplace that delivered a seamless omnichannel digital experience across all brands. Key challenges included the following:
Airport stores tend to operate with limited stocks of products, so a real-time, reliable inventory management was a key component of this digital transformation.
The existing ecommerce platform was not robust enough to handle increased traffic in a secure fashion.
Different brands have different content requirements and, typically, rely on their own content producers. This needed to be reimagined and consolidated for the airport’s web shopping portal.
We approached this massive engagement with a well-defined set of guiding principles:
Prioritize the customer experience at every step.
Adopt a flexible, component-based system architecture.
Ensure the technology framework is dynamic, capable of growth, and can be seamlessly enhance to meet the evolving needs of tenants, features, and channels.
Focus on enhancing efficiency and streamlining corporate workflows.
Offers robust content services to facilitate swift tenant integration, ensure tenants get onboard quickly, and position them for success.
Solution Highlights: A State-of-the-Art Omnichannel Ecommerce System
At the heart of our engagement for this major airport was SAP Commerce, which stitches the many layers of the solution we developed into an integrated whole capable of handling millions of transactions in real-time. The solution includes these components:
A headless storefront with componentized views.
An experience-driven content management system (CMS).
A curated marketing platform.
An omnichannel order orchestration layer.
A commerce engine using SAP CX Commerce.
An order management and fulfillment system.
A comprehensive analytics layer.
Managed services layer.
Security services.
Significant Improvements
The system the BORN Group developed has been live at this airport for nearly five years and is already delivering substantial progress:
Marketing effectiveness has increased by 70% across multiple engagement points.
Operational efficiency has improved by 80%.
Dramatically improved time to market for tenants in terms of content and product.
Conversions have been accelerated by 60% and consumer fallouts have declined by 30%.
All told, marketplaces sales have increased by 80% through a combination of cross-selling and upselling.
The BORN Group Approach
Domain expertise in the market sectors featured in airport marketplaces, which typically include beauty, fashion, electronics, food/restaurants, and wine and spirits.
Technology expertise including marketplaces, commerce, content management order management, enterprise resource planning (ERP), point of sale (POS), customer relationships management (CRM), and analytics.
Transformation expertise including strategy, consulting, CX, omnichannel, change management, and implementation.
Like most transformation challenges, success demands a true partnership with a provider who understands all of these streams and has the experience and expertise to deliver results.
To learn more about digitization and airport marketplaces, BORN Group would love to walk you through our proven approach.
