Sleep Country Harnesses the Power of Personalization

At its core, a retailer’s digital transformation journey is about delivering on your promise to customers. Companies need to adopt a customer-first mindset across their entire organization with the consumer at the centre of strategies.

At Sleep Country Canada, now in business for 30 years, we have remained true to delivering on our long-held promise to exceed customer expectations. As Canada’s leading specialty sleep retailer, this means leveraging the established knowledge and expertise of our ‘sleep experts,’ who have helped millions of Canadians get better sleep by listening to their needs and matching them to their perfect sleep solution. Personalized service and expertise have always been at the heart of Sleep Country, both in-store and digitally.

For a customer at Sleep Country, finding the right product, whether a mattress, pillows or bedding, is not a one-size-fits-all proposition, as there are many choices and varying product features to explore and experience. In the digital world, this requires understanding each customer’s needs and providing the right tools and experiences to guide them through the selection process with a seamless transition to a sleep expert online or in-store.

When it comes to customer experience, personalization is key to engaging in meaningful ways. Put plainly, personalization is how a business delivers a unique experience for the customer, with messaging, content, promotions and the right timing based on the customer and where they are in their journey with the retailer. This could be presenting a specific offer, a tailored homepage experience or product, the ideal image on the website or simply triggering an e-mail for that customer.

While personalization isn’t new, not all retailers execute individualized strategies to their full potential. Personalization was previously based on large, broad customer segments and often was not relevant to the customer. However, with the evolution of artificial intelligence (AI) and sophisticated machine learning algorithms, retailers can shift from broad segmentation to personalization based on individual customer behaviours, and from reacting to customer behaviours to anticipating them. AI has matured and now there are numerous practical applications in retail that can enhance an experience. For instance, with AI, a website’s search results can be significantly improved and provide customers with a faster path to purchase. Another example is leveraging AI to enhance product selection and recommendations based on the customer’s behaviours and preferences.

Consumer expectations are continually evolving and retailers must be equipped to adapt to these changes. Though the concept is simple — utilize data and analytics to deliver highly engaging experiences — a retailer needs to determine the right technology solutions, including how they can leverage AI to power the experience. With a suite of personalization tools, you can activate your data to drive product selection, messaging, content and timing, depending on where the customer is in their journey.

Personalization is an ongoing, iterative process. You must establish a test-and-learn framework with success metrics like engagement rate to measure interactivity and conversion to evaluate the ability to drive revenue. Then you must quickly identify what is and is not working, utilizing the right metrics to enable you to continually improve and optimize your interactions and drive increased value to the entire business. In this process, you must be agile and stay true to what your customer is telling you and pivot as needed. With this approach, you can continue to build on your foundation with increased sophistication to better understand and respond to your customers’ needs.

A successful personalization strategy requires cross-functional collaboration and educating the organization to adopt new ways to work. As with many business strategies, personalization is best accomplished holistically across channels and touchpoints. When personalization is cross-functional, all teams are aligned so you can best leverage the expertise of each team member to deliver.

Organizations need to assess their level of maturity in personalization. This will dictate how fast you evolve your strategy, and the business and technology roadmap needed to get there. No matter where your organization is in its personalization journey, continue to focus on the customer and their changing expectations with a flexible approach. The strategies, tools, technologies and skills needed in your organization will continue to evolve. Remember that the journey to building long-term relationships with customers through personalization never ends.

Sari Deckelbaum is senior vice-president of e-commerce at Sleep Country Canada.