Behavioral Marketing: Delivering Personalized Experiences At Scale

8Channel-Level PlanningDelivering Insane Relevance Every Time

As an evangelist for Silverpop, I travel like an unadulterated fool. I see an average of just over 100 customers face-to-face annually, typically in their offices, and in three- to four-hour sessions with the entire marketing team. I live in Atlanta, so this requires me to get on a Delta jet extraordinarily often; usually I rack up about 180,000 SkyMiles a year. So you can imagine the breadth of my relationship with Delta Airlines.

I am the epitome of the multichannel user of Delta's offerings. On any given day I'm liable to open the iPhone app, dial up the call center, buy a ticket via my corporate travel portal or interact with Delta's Twitter-based customer service reps. To call me channel schizophrenic would be a radical understatement. The good news for me—and for Delta's business—is that they understand channel mix, and they do a nice job of eliminating friction out of many of my channel interactions.

As a simple example, the interactive voice response (IVR) system auto-recognizes my caller ID number and greets me by name and loyalty level. From there, I'm routed to the correct group of reps (with an expedited hold time), who greet me by name again, and who have all my booked itineraries up on their screen. In most cases, Delta is beginning to answer my question with a real human within 90 seconds of me dialing the 800 number. That's pretty well tuned.

So let's look at the various channels we as marketers have ...