The power of personalising your internal comms…

As a rule, people don’t like to puzzle over how to do things. As far as possible, a webpage or anything digital should be self-explanatory. Steve Krug’s brilliant book, ‘Don’t make me think’, is about a common sense approach to usability, with the simple premise that it should be intuitive. It says that when ‘users’ (that’s people to you and I) interact with a website (or other digital channel), it should feel natural and unhindered — everything should make sense visually and contextually. Well, that makes perfect sense to me, if you think about personalising it too…

In my previous post, I harped on about how important data is to your internal digital communications. If you missed it, let me re-iterate: Data is like, REALLY important! Without it you’ll have no idea whether your digital comms are effective. But let’s assume that you’re all over that. Awesome. You’re now ready to start thinking about wielding the power of personalisation to create a great user experience (UX).

94% of companies agree that personalisation is crucial in improving digital comms

Econsultancy

Making that connection

Whether it’s just about reading an email or an entire onboarding programme, personalisation offers a powerful opportunity to make a real connection with your teams. Making it personal means harnessing behavioural trends across different segments and using sentiment analysis (or text/opinion analysis) and things like automated questions such as ‘Do you need some help?’ that appear if the help section is accessed more than twice a day… Adding these little touches at key points in the user journey will go a long way in super-charging your internal comms.

We’re working on modules like this, that you can plug into your intranet giving you heaps of functionality with little effort, keeping your finger on your organisation’s pulse. Soon you’ll be tailoring content across platforms like your ESN (Enterprise Social Network, such as Yammer) and email – with each tweak refining the user experience and maximising engagement so it looks a little something like this:

The future, now

Imagine you visit the intranet and it already knows you, your role and what you’re interested in. It pre-empts what’s useful and relevant, and serves up content just for you, saving you time and stopping you wading through masses of unhelpful information. It’s genuinely helpful, asking you questions on topics that matter as well as just wanting to know how you’re doing today.

Well that’s all possible, hugely cost-effective and relatively easy to achieve, thanks to the data your IT team already have. If you combine using data properly AND a personalised experience, you’ll create a much more memorable, immersive journey, taking your internal comms to the next level!

What do you think? How are you currently personalising your internal communications? Let me know in the comments section below.