Finding Your Digital Soulmate This Valentine’s Day

Who is your “digital soulmate” this Valentine’s Day?

While today is all about romantic soulmates, there’s another soulmate that is prominent in experiences you have every day in the digital world: your digital soulmate.

Jeff Bezos defined this term in an interview with 60 Minutes as a person or group of people have similar behaviors, histories, context and preferences to you. Leading companies can use digital soulmates to provide the most relevant and personalized experience, while anticipating your needs with recommendations.

Finding “digital soulmates” solves a fundamental issue that has plagued companies who are trying to personalize every touchpoint. One way to solve this is to find patterns within their visitor base that can help identify the content and experiences that will lead to a successful outcome.

Doing this for one set of “soulmates” manually is difficult enough, from the initial analysis to the creation of the personalized experiences. Multiply this by the entire audience of your website, and it becomes impossible. The key that companies who have been able to implement this have found is in artificial intelligence and machine learning. Rather than go in and analyze the data and make changes to the personalized experiences by hand, artificial intelligence can automate the analysis of your visitor base, automatically finding the digital soulmates and identifying the patterns to create personalized experiences.

Finding Digital Soulmates Starts with a Unified Layer of Relevance

You can’t expect to have a successful relationship without a solid foundation of communication skills. Don’t expect that finding digital soulmates and applying those insights can be successful without a foundation either.

This is where the “unified layer of relevance” comes in. The unified layer of relevance allows every interaction to inform the next, regardless where this information lies. Customer and employee digital journeys today are fragmented into different channels and platforms. Anyone who has struggled to find information in a mobile app, then had to repeat the same queries in a website before calling a contact center and essentially repeating your process can attest to how frustrating this can be – and how much brands have to lose by ignoring this issue.

The unified layer of relevance is the solution. It connects the interactions into one continuous customer experience, with the data and knowledge of the visitor traveling with them to different channels and platforms.

Anyone getting excited over the ability to find a digital soulmate that has yet to start thinking about their unified layer of relevance needs to take off their love goggles and properly evaluate their strategy. Without the foundation of a unified layer of relevance, digital soulmates are not actually soulmates because their “profile” will not be an accurate representation of their complete experience. There are four key elements of a powerful unified layer of relevance, and each is crucial to finding digital soulmates:

Unified content. From mobile apps to customer communities, the customer experience today is truly multi-channel, with each channel providing different clues to the customer’s intent. Too often, brands are siloing these interactions by platform. What if all of the content and the data from those interactions was unified in one place?

Leading organizations are realizing that to truly deliver a personalized experience, it has to be. When you embark on the matchmaking of digital soulmates, it’s even more crucial to use data from every interaction to paint more realistic pictures of true digital soulmates and the content that leads to successful outcomes. Your true digital soulmate will have similar behavior and history over the entire experience, not just in one channel or platform. Without unifying your content and the knowledge from these interactions, however, this is not possible.

Artificial intelligence and machine learning. Imagine if every person using a dating app or site had to be hand-selected by an analyst for their “matches.” It may sound reasonable for the first handful of users, but beyond that, it’s not possible. As your business and audience grows, the costs and resources for finding digital soulmates will not grow if you have invested in the unified layer of relevance. Thanks to machine learning and artificial intelligence, the unified layer of relevance will automate the analysis of your database and the “matchmaking,” as well as the delivery of personalized content.

The unified layer of relevance can push your organization to its next innovation, including chatbots, virtual assistants, voice-based experiences, the IoT, and more. But sustainability starts with scalability.

Continuous, unified interactions. Here’s the exciting part about the unified layer of relevance: the larger your audience grows on your various platforms, the smarter and smarter it gets. As it knows more about your users and their needs with more interactions, finding digital soulmates becomes even more precise.

To put it another way, professional matchmakers get better with experience as they collect more “data” on human behavior and motivations. The more data you provide to your digital soulmates with more interactions, the more experienced it becomes, and the more successful matches it can make.

While digital soulmates may not be the most exciting soulmate in your life this Valentine’s Day, for companies looking to pioneer innovative customer experiences, it is. Digital soulmates are revolutionary for customers and employees who are struggling to find the relevant content and insights, and therefore, just as revolutionary for the companies who need to increase conversion rates, improve customer retention rate, and overall, increase revenue.

Who do you think your digital soulmate is? And what would you want companies trying to be “matchmakers” to know? Let me know by tweeting at me @Floisand.