28.11.2024

Kirsi Vatanen

Druid Achieves ISO/IEC 27001 Certification: Security as Part of Our Customer Promise

Druid Oy has been awarded the ISO/IEC 27001:2022 certification following an external audit, underscoring the company’s commitment to high information security standards. This certification demonstrates that Druid’s information security management processes meet the internationally recognized standard aimed at protecting customer data and the company’s own information as comprehensively as possible.

The ISO/IEC 27001 certification covers Druid’s customer-specific software and web service development and maintenance, as well as internal business processes.

“The changing landscape of information security requires companies to invest more than ever before. We wanted to invest in certification to prove to ourselves and our customers that our information security processes are robust,” says Mikko Hämäläinen, CEO of Druid.

Why Information Security Matters to Our Clients

“Addressing information security in our daily work is not just a certification requirement, it’s also a vital part of Druid’s customer promise,” emphasizes Production Manager Pasi Järnstedt. “Our customers deserve not only first-class digital services but also the confidence that these solutions meet all accessibility, privacy, and information security regulations. A certified information security management system is one proof of our ability to handle compliance matters and, hopefully, improve our clients’ peace of mind.”

Continuous Improvement

The ISO/IEC 27001 certification was carried out in collaboration with KIWA Inspecta, who assessed and verified Druid’s information security management capabilities and practices. The certificate is valid for three years, with annual audits of Druid’s procedures to ensure the continuity of information security.

Improving information security is an ongoing process. We continuously maintain and develop our information security management system. New threats and security risks arise all the time, and we adopt new tools or practices to improve our overall security. The annual audit ensures that our management system evolves and that our operations meet its requirements.

What Does ISO/IEC 27001 Mean for Our Customers?

The ISO/IEC 27001 certification confirms that Druid has the required information security measures in place to protect customer data and ensure the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of information.

“For most of our clients, the services provided by Druid are critical to their business operations and contain confidential information. Therefore, security breaches in web services can significantly impact data availability, service usability, and the overall level of public data security and privacy. Certification shows our clients that we actively develop our security practices and can respond to potential incidents in a controlled and professional manner,” explains Pasi Järnstedt.

About Druid

Druid makes complex and challenging web development simple and effortless – we excel in our technical expertise and understand the regulatory landscape of web services. The result is high-quality, customized solutions for digital customer engagement, whether it’s websites, e-commerce, or self-service solutions. Our solutions share a foundation in open-source technology and a strong desire to help our clients succeed.

Big Questions About ISO?

Do you want to know more about ISO/IEC 27001 information security standards or hear about our experiences with implementing the management system? Get in touch!

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Author

Kirsi Vatanen

Marketing Manager

08.11.2024

Laurie Lim Sam

Hacktoberfest with Mautic

On October 31st, Hacktoberfest 2024 came to an end. Hacktoberfest is an annual event where open-source advocates come together to celebrate a month of code, collaboration, and community. The purpose of the event is to encourage contributions to open-source projects throughout October. This year I had the opportunity to participate by contributing to Mautic, the open source marketing automation platform.

Mautic is an essential component in Druid’s Digital Experience Platform, Druid’s XP. We use Mautic because it helps our clients deliver more customized experiences for website visitors. One of Mautic’s key features is website personalization, which allows for tailored content based on each visitor’s behavior, preferences, and demographics. This enables our clients to engage users with more relevant messages and improve their overall site experience. Hacktoberfest presented a perfect opportunity to give back to the community that maintains and improves it.

From Drupal to Mautic

Coming from a background in Drupal, I found understanding Mautic’s structure relatively straightforward. Like Drupal’s core, Mautic has its core bundles, and while Drupal uses modules for extension, Mautic can be similarly extended with plugins. Mautic is built on Symfony, starting with Symfony 2 and now upgraded to Symfony 5, so it felt familiar to me as a Drupal developer.

At Druid, we are actively encouraged to contribute to Drupal. We’ve held several contribution events throughout the year, and many Druids regularly participate in the Drupal community. However, as someone relatively new to Drupal, diving into the Drupal core issue queue can be daunting. There’s an overwhelming number of issues, some of which have been open for years, making it difficult to know where to start. By comparison, while Mautic has been around for a decade, it’s a smaller project than Drupal, making it easier to find issues to work on and navigate the codebase.

Contributing to Mautic

For this month-long event, a team was formed within Mautic to help onboard new contributors. There were both code and non-code contribution opportunities available, and just after I joined, I attended an online developer onboarding session led by a core maintainer who introduced the project and answered questions. During Hacktoberfest, non-code contributions were organized on a special project board, while code contributions continued to be tracked on Mautic’s Open Source Friday board, where issues and PRs needing review are listed. The documentation is thorough, and the Slack community is active, welcoming, and inclusive.

I was able to contribute in several ways. I reviewed pull requests and began translating Mautic’s knowledge base into French. I also set up the development environment locally, worked on a few issues, and submitted pull requests. One of my contributions was to create a data attribute for form elements that disables fields automatically based on the values in other fields. This feature is now part of the Mautic 5.2.0 release and is used in the form for creating custom fields. Another issue I tackled involved dynamically limiting a dropdown’s options based on related form fields and updating the dropdown as those fields changed.

Participating in Hacktoberfest was both rewarding and fun. It was a unique chance to contribute to a platform I already use in my work, while also gaining hands-on experience with Mautic’s codebase. This experience has inspired me to continue contributing to Mautic whenever I can.

Author

Laurie Lim Sam

Full Stack Developer

15.10.2024

Yevgeniya Kobrina

The notes of the DrupalCon first-timer

Although this wasn’t my first public speaking experience, it was my first time speaking at the biggest Drupal event. The most challenging part of the process for me was choosing a topic. After almost nine years of working with Drupal, I had accumulated enough development and project leadership experience to share, but every idea seemed to have already been covered. None of them really made me feel excited. I knew I needed to talk about something I was confident and passionate about to make it more engaging for the audience.

Then my husband asked, “What brings you joy? What are you proud of?” That’s when I realized: my long path in mentoring—helping others take their first steps in web development, learning Drupal, and building their confidence—was what I was truly proud of.

I felt mixed emotions throughout the submission process: excitement that I was finally proposing a session for DrupalCon, doubts about the topic’s value for such a large event, fear that I wouldn’t deliver the message concisely and engagingly (since I only had 15 minutes to speak), and, of course, the stress of having only three days to complete the submission. So you can imagine my disbelief when the session got accepted—and even more when I was chosen as a Featured Track Speaker for the Open Web community track!

Later on, when more than twenty people attended my talk, Empowering Drupal Developers: Redefining Training and Mentorship, and actively asked questions and sought my advice afterward, I felt reassured. It confirmed that the Drupal community truly cares about supporting each other and nurturing new developers. The community is clearly passionate about spreading knowledge and fostering a culture of mentorship and inclusion within their companies.

One of the biggest highlights of the event for me was witnessing Dries’ keynote from the audience. Seeing the father of Drupal casually queuing for waffles and chatting with everyone around him was surreal. It’s incredible how naturally people come together to share experiences, ask questions, and collaborate on projects. Contribution Day was another highlight for me—watching people volunteer their time and knowledge to improve and build the technology we all use and love was inspiring.

Overall, it was an amazing experience, both as a speaker and as a community member. I’m already thinking about what topic I could present at the next DrupalCon Europe. See you there!

DrupalCon Barcelona: Tech, Community, and Inspiration

DrupalCon Barcelona: Community Reunions, Business Insights, and an Unforgettable Hike

DrupalCon Barcelona: Not the City, But the People

Photos
Hero Bram Driesen, licenced as deed Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0. The original image was edited by narrowing it.

Author

Yevgeniya Kobrina

Senior Developer

14.10.2024

Simo Hellsten

Not the city but the people

I spent four nights in Barcelona but as for the landscape, I pretty much got to a conference center that was just the same as any other center and a hotel that was just the same as any other hotel. But for me the event was not about the city but the people attending.

Having worked in Drupal Core teams actively for some years I meet other developers and specialists on weekly bases in online meetings. With the Starshot initiative going on, with some people I even have regular meetings twice a week. DrupalCon is an excellent place to meet those people live or at least some of them. What a great feeling to actually meet someone after a couple of years of regular meetings over the internet. And also to meet your friends and acquaintances from the previous DrupalCons of course.

This time I had prepared a checklist of people I should have a chat with – to talk about a common task, ask advice for a project, to offer testing for a module or just to catch up. And by the last day of the trip I was happy to see all the names on the list checked, while having also made a number of new friends.

The cutting edge Drupal – a two edged sword

But it’s not only the people – we are also interested in what they do. This Summer and Autumn has really rushed the tech forward on many fronts. After the Starshot initiative was announced at DrupalCon Portland in the Spring of 2024 the community has really pulled together trying to make the deadline of Drupal CMS release in mid-January 2025. A lot of usability improvements have been planned to the Drupal CMS package, most important of which is the Experience Builder. Experience Builder allows easy but powerful wysiwyg page building experience with cutting edge components.

Experience Builder will unleash the creativity of the content editor, but Drupal has many faces. While one module or recipe will emphasize freedom another will be built on strict standards and structure. I myself can’t say which excites me more, the free flow of Drupal CMS and Experience Builder or the Schema.org Blueprints that automates Drupal content building using the Schema.org standard information structures. Sticking to the predefined content standards will make the site content extremely compatible with search engines and other automated tools. I expect it will probably also help with AI tools as well.

So I am looking at two seemingly opposite approaches to web content and love them both – they both have their uses but may even work together at the same time. Building components respecting the standards and fluently organizing them into pages using a modern page builder is something where Drupal can easily manage both in the future.

Being the one who always complains

For a few months I have been working as a member of Drupal Starshot’s (now officially named Drupal CMS) accessibility team. As Drupal CMS extends Drupal Core with a selection of prominent contributed modules we also wanted to expand the accessibility audits.

Dupal has a lot of great contributed modules and a lot of good people have poured their time and hearts into making them. Those modules that will be included in the Drupal CMS have now been under public spotlight for several months. As some of them have only one or two maintainers, I can imagine it’s a lot of pressure. (There are more people contributing code of course, but a maintainer has to make the decisions which fixes and changes go into the releases.) And now – on top of everything else – there are also me and my friends testing for accessibility and asking to fix this and that to meet some WCAG criteria.

Here the live meetings at DrupalCon help a lot. It’s one thing to send a formal sheet of accessibility issues by email to the maintainer and say: please fix this – and something quite different to have a cup of coffee with the person and say: Hi, nice to meet you. Has your module been audited for accessibility? If you like, I could do it. How would you like to get the list of findings?

A lot of developers are not so great with people skills and under pressure worse. I myself often say that I’m good with numbers and bad with people, but I try to learn. And I think I’m making some progress, as is Drupal’s accessibility.

DrupalCon Barcelona: Tech, Community, and Inspiration

DrupalCon Barcelona: Community Reunions, Business Insights, and an Unforgettable Hike

Photo Bram Driesen, licenced as deed Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 The original image was edited by narrowing it.

Author

Simo Hellsten

Full Stack Developer

14.10.2024

Mikko Hämäläinen

DrupalCon 2024 in Barcelona: Reflections on Community Evolution and Business Insights

Having DrupalCon 2024 in Barcelona holds a special significance for me. It was the first DrupalCon I ever attended, right after I joined Druid in 2015.

The almost ten-year gap between these two events is apparent in many ways. The community—and especially Drupal itself—has come a long way over the years. But there are also similarities. Back in 2015, the community was eagerly waiting for Drupal 8 to be released. The new version would bring significant improvements to Drupal, mainly the move to object oriented coding and the adoption of the Symfony framework. These changes also meant that from Drupal 8 onwards there was an upgrade path that allowed sites to be upgraded between major Drupal versions with relatively little effort. It was a massive change that benefited both the developers and the customers.

In 2024, the community is once again on the cusp of major, positive change. The ongoing Drupal Starshot project will release a new distribution of Drupal around the end of the year. This distribution will be somewhat unimaginably called Drupal CMS. While the name might spark some debate, the features it will bring will undoubtedly make Drupal the best and most marketing-friendly content management system to date. The “old” Drupal Core isn’t going anywhere, and it will remain a top choice for more custom, less marketing-driven web services.

During his annual “Driesnote” presentation at DrupalCon Europe, project lead Dries Buytaert showcased the outcomes of the community’s work on the Starshot project—and it was truly impressive. The customer centric presentation focused on showing everyone what can already be done with Drupal CMS. My personal favorites were the AI assistant for generating new content types, fields and importing data from existing web sites, the new recipes that allow grouping and installing site functionality with almost a single click and the ease of creating impressive looking web pages with the CMS’ Experience Builder.

Many have said that this year’s Driesnote was the best one yet, and I have to agree.

Another highlight of my DrupalCon experience was the Drupal Business Dinner. Formerly known as the CEO Dinner, this event brings agency leaders together to network and discuss the business side of the Drupal ecosystem. It’s an annual event, preceded by a survey on the state of the Drupal business, with the results presented and discussed during the dinner. This year, the presentation at the dinner was a shorter summary, while the full version was presented the next day during a BOF session at the venue.

A group of people discussing on CEO dinner.

The dinner is always an excellent opportunity to meet people working with similar challenges but in a different environment. This year, I found myself seated with people from the US, Canada, and Slovenia. We enjoyed a thorough discussion about the global state of affairs, accompanied by a hearty three-course dinner.

DrupalCon Barcelona: Not the City, But the People

DrupalCon Barcelona: Community Reunions, Business Insights, and an Unforgettable Hike

Photos:
Heading and middle Bram Driesen, licenced as deed Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0. The original images were edited by narrowing it.
Lower Jean-Paul Vosmeer, licensed as Attribution-ShareAlike. The original image was edited by narrowing it.

Author

Mikko Hämäläinen

CEO

11.10.2024

Toni Nissinen

DrupalCon Barcelona 2024: Tech, Community, and Inspiration

DrupalCon Barcelona 2024, great location, great weather, great tech and even greater community. Thanks to everyone that I had the honor of speaking with!

This was my first DrupalCon, though not my first Drupal event. Just like at the camps, what stood out to me most was the community – caring, supportive, and welcoming. Seeing a familiar face first thing in the morning as I picked up my badge immediately made me feel at home.

Of course, comparing DrupalCon to local Drupal Camps and meetups highlights some differences. DrupalCon is way bigger, with many more talks and BoF sessions, often diving deeper into technical and theoretical aspects. There were sessions on debugging techniques, accessibility (which, by the way, is top-notch), and other specialized Drupal topics.

The long conference days can be exhausting, and it’s impossible to attend every session you’d like to, but luckily, most of them are recorded and available on YouTube later. It’s such a great way to share knowledge across the community. I love that anyone who builds something innovative or learns something new can share it for the benefit of all.

I was especially excited to see some users (content creators, project owners, etc.) participating in DrupalCon. It’s fantastic that they could gather new ideas and insights on how to advance their projects. This, of course, might require some understanding of the technical aspects of Drupal, but I highly encourage more people using Drupal in their projects to attend future DrupalCons. There is so much value in being part of this community.

Read also about my visit to Drupal Mountain Camp

More about DrupalCon:

DrupalCon Barcelona: Community Reunions, Business Insights, and an Unforgettable Hike

DrupalCon Barcelona: Reflections on Community Evolution and Business Insights

DrupalCon Barcelona: Not the city but the people

Photo: Paul Johnson, licensed as Attribution-NoDerivs. The original image was edited by narrowing it.

Author

Toni Nissinen

Drupal Developer

10.10.2024

Arto Iijalainen

DrupalCon Barcelona 2024: Community Reunions, Business Insights, and an Unforgettable Hike

This was the second time I attended DrupalCon in Barcelona. Back in 2015, I traveled there earlier with my wife (girlfriend at the time), explored the city and got engaged!

On the morning of the first conference day, my wife-to-be flew back home, and the conference started. Whatever agenda I had prepared for the event was pretty much washed away.

This time, my wife decided to stay home with the kids and I was able to fully concentrate on the conference. My agenda was to understand what Starshot / Drupal CMS will bring to the table and how far are we. And, of course, to reconnect with old friends and make new ones within the Drupal community.

I am really thrilled with the progress of Drupal CMS! The first release candidate will be launched on December 11th at the time of DrupalCon Singapore and the actual 1.0 release will happen on 15th of January 2025. The only thing that we really need to wait for is the Experience Builder, which will be released with the Drupal CMS 2.0 in late 2025. The Experience Builder will be a game changer for the content editors as it enables them to easily compose the pages they are building with the components tied to the organization’s design system.

DrupalCon isn’t just about the conference sessions. As an owner and board member, I always find it interesting to attend the CEO/business dinner and hear about the latest market trends in Europe and the US.

The cherry on top of the entire trip was the DrupalHike, where we climbed to the summit of Sant Llorenc del Munt! Our guide and fellow Drupalist, Fred, led us along lesser-traveled paths with stunning views. The sense of adventure still lingers with me.

Mikko and Arto on the top of the Sant Llorenc del Munt

Author

Arto Iijalainen

Project Manager & Scrum Master

20.09.2024

Pasi Järnstedt

How to tackle the “monsters” lurking in public sector websites

As a website administrator, you face an increasingly demanding job. It’s not enough to create engaging content, master SEO, and keep your organization’s information up-to-date. On top of that, you also need to comply with the requirements of the Information Management Act, the Digital Services Act, and data protection laws. These “monsters” often end up lurking under the bed because you’re unsure where to even begin.

In this blog, I’ll briefly outline these “monsters” and provide a few tips to help you get started. These guidelines won’t cover everything or guarantee perfection, but a little is better than nothing.

Accessibility

Website accessibility means that as many people as possible, regardless of their abilities, can easily use the service. This includes technically error-free implementation, a clear and understandable user interface, and content that is easy to comprehend.

At a minimum, check the following:

Visit a random page from your site’s footer menu. Imagine a user lands on this page via Google. Can they understand where they are within the site and what topic the page relates to?
Ask a colleague to find a guide or page unrelated to their usual tasks. Does the menu make sense? Can they find the page in multiple ways (menu, sitemap, internal search)?
Can you navigate your site using only the keyboard (tab, space, and enter keys will be your friends here)?
Test your site on a mobile device.
Does your site have an accessibility statement?

Additional tips:

Use Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool for more guidance on improving accessibility, along with other useful information.
Explore the accessibility guides from Papunet and AVI’s Saavutettavuusvaatimukset.fi website (both in Finnish).

Data security and privacy

Data security is about ensuring the availability, integrity, and confidentiality of the service. Data privacy, on the other hand, refers to using personal data for its intended purposes and minimizing the amount of collected data.

Improving both data security and privacy starts with identifying what data is used and what risks are associated with it, followed by preparing for potential issues.

First steps to improve data security:

Gather information:
- What non-public data is stored in your service? For example, feedback, inquiries, or data behind login systems.
- List all the services connected to your platform, such as the content management system, analytics, chatbot, server capacity, domain management, etc.
- Collect a list of companies and contact information related to the services mentioned above.
- Gather a list of administrators and user accounts for the services.
Risk assessment:
- Do you know all the entities involved with your platform? Do you know who can modify the content?
- Would data leaks cause any harm?
- How long can the service be down without significant impact?
- What if all data in the service is completely or partially lost?
Get the basics right:
- Are user accounts only given to the right people, with appropriate access permissions?
- Do you know who logged into the system and when?
- Can you view the content’s version history?
- Do you know where backups are stored, and have you practiced restoring them?
- Have security updates been installed for your software? Who is responsible for this?
- How do you receive information about security threats?
Prepare for the unexpected:
- What steps should be taken if the service is down for an extended period?
- How can you restore backups?
- What if the service needs an emergency shutdown? For example, if it starts distributing viruses.
- How could you switch to an alternative service if things go wrong?

Checklist for improving data privacy:

Make sure your privacy policy is easily accessible, and that you understand its contents.
Ensure you aren’t collecting more data than specified in the privacy policy.
Keep personal data up-to-date, and don’t retain unnecessary information longer than necessary.
Are you transferring data outside the EU/EEA?
- If so, ensure this is mentioned in your policies, and that transfer mechanisms are covered in agreements.
- If not, avoid installing tools like Facebook Pixel or Google Analytics on your site.
If you use cookies that are not strictly necessary for the technical functionality of the service, ensure your cookie policy is on the website, and that it’s as easy to reject cookies as it is to accept them.

Remember, achieving perfection is nearly impossible. The key is to make continuous improvements step by step, focusing on what is most relevant and practical.

Would you like to hear more? Get in touch using the form, and I will get back to you shortly.

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Author

Pasi Järnstedt

Director, Production

05.09.2024

Mikko Hämäläinen

Website personalization in practice

One of the key challenges for online services is the ability to provide content and services to diverse user groups while maintaining discoverability. A company’s website serves many different user groups, such as prospective and current customers, job seekers, and investors. Each of these groups has its own specific needs when it comes to content.

In e-commerce, personalization has long been a standard, at least in the form of product recommendations. However, in other online services, personalization is often conspicuously absent, particularly in the public sector, which is increasingly offering transactional services through its websites. Megamenus have been an impersonal response to this challenge, one that could be addressed more intuitively by genuinely considering the user’s needs.

In this blog, I’ll show how a marketer can implement personalization in practice by leveraging the Drupal content management system and Mautic marketing automation platform—without needing to dive deep into the world of IT.

Target communication to different customer groups using automation

A company’s website is connected to its marketing automation system, and they have launched a new product serving two distinct customer groups: private sector businesses and public sector organizations. The marketing team has created a landing page in the content management system that provides a general overview of the product. However, they want to emphasize features that are particularly relevant to each customer group.

The marketing automation system segments visitors based on the content they have previously browsed, categorizing them as either private sector or public sector customers. Personalization is applied to all site visitors, regardless of whether they are identified users or anonymous visitors.

Putting plans into action

Let’s start by creating a dynamic content section tailored to private sector customers in the marketing automation system. We’ll create a list of personalization features that are relevant to private sector customers, illustrate it, and add a call-to-action link at the end.

This content section will be given the short name “customer-experience-private” (asiakaskokemus-yksityinen).

Next, we define the conditions under which the content will be displayed on the website. It’s sufficient for us that the user belongs to the customer segment “private sector customer” (Yksityisen sektorin asiakas).

After that, we move to the content management system to edit the previously created landing page. The dynamic content is embedded between the sections titled “Kohti parempaa asiakaskokemusta” and “Personoinnin rakentaminen”.

Dynamic content from Mautic can be easily embedded into any content management system using HTML code. The necessary line of code can be copied and modified to include the correct dynamic content shortcode.

If no dynamic content is available to display, the   automatically added by the editor will appear as a blank space on the page. However, this can be replaced with default text instead.

Testing personalization

Testing personalization is straightforward. Start by visiting the site in incognito mode, which keeps the user anonymous. The finalized landing page will look like this when the user has not been identified as a private sector customer.

For testing purposes, find the anonymous user in Mautic and manually add him to the “Private Sector Customer” (Yksityisen sektorin asiakas) segment. Mautic can track both identified and unidentified users; the latter are users who do not yet have contact information or marketing consent. Personalization is one of the few ways to enhance the customer experience for these anonymous visitors.

Normally, segmentation would be automated by building a campaign within the marketing automation system. The customer segment could be determined based on the visitor’s browsing history, such as their interest in specific customer case studies or other pages.

However, for this test, we’ll manually add the user to the segment.

The test user refreshes the landing page in his browser, and Mautic loads the personalized content onto the page. This means that the list of personalization features relevant to private sector customers—created with ChatGPT—appears in the desired location on the site.

Simple Yet Complex

This simple example demonstrates how website content can be tailored and targeted to a specific audience. The same outcome can be achieved in various ways, such as by creating separate landing pages for each segment and directing visitors to the appropriate pages via marketing campaigns. When personalization is integrated into marketing automation, it allows for better control over the customer experience for visitors arriving organically on the site.

Segments and personalized content can be created freely, making it possible to implement more complex scenarios as needed. Below is a view of three different versions of the same landing page: one for non-segmented visitors and two for segmented user groups.

a view for no personalizationed page, personalization for private and public sector.

I implemented this example using the standard features of Drupal and Mautic in Druid’s demo environment. With a few small adjustments, the content editing experience can be further improved. For instance, dynamic content can be embedded by selecting the appropriate content block directly from the drop-down menu in Drupal’s editor.

If this topic piques your interest or resonates with your everyday needs, feel free to reach out. I’d be happy to give you a more detailed demonstration of Mautic’s functionalities.

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Author

Mikko Hämäläinen

CEO

20.08.2024

Mikko Hämäläinen

Streamline your digital marketing path: Tools, trends, and customer experience

In 2024, the life of a marketing professional is a tale of two extremes: on one side, there’s an abundance of data-driven marketing tools and information available, but on the other, the scales are weighed down by tightening legislation, increasingly complex technologies, and consumers’ (justified) concerns about privacy.

Let’s start with the customers. Today’s consumers are more independent, idealistic, and demanding than ever before. Companies must approach customers more personally and communicate on topics that matter to them, such as ethics, sustainability, and environmental responsibility. Moreover, focusing on the Zero Moment of Truth —the stage when consumers actively seek information —has become a marketing necessity.

Customer experience has become as important as the product itself and the price point. According to a Salesforce study, 80% of customers valued the customer experience as much as the products and services offered. Personalization plays a critical role in managing customer experience. Freshworks’ Deconstructing Delight study reveals that 63% of consumers expect brands to communicate with them in a personalized, value-based manner. During the pandemic, 53% of consumers switched brands due to poor communication.

If a consumer’s purchase journey spans three to seven channels, maintaining relevant communication becomes a daunting task—especially if those channels are disconnected and there isn’t a comprehensive view of the customer. The physical dimension, like in-store experiences and phone services, should also be considered when crafting an excellent customer experience. Information must be collected from all channels and disseminated across all touchpoints.

Hyper-Personalization: The AI-powered evolution of traditional personalization

While traditional personalization relies on historical data, hyper-personalization is reactive and real-time. It involves collecting information on customer actions across channels, analyzing it, and delivering content that meets their current needs.

Since customers are known to seamlessly switch between channels—browsing on their mobile in-store or starting a purchase on a computer and completing it on a bus ride—we need to be able to recognize our service users and link disparate sessions to the same customer profile. This information is used in both marketing and sales contexts. Twilio’s State of Personalization 2023 report highlights that 53% of consumers become repeat customers after a personalized experience.

Many consumers view persistent marketing communication as one of the great nuisances of the modern world, and AI as the final nail in the coffin of privacy. However, research repeatedly shows that well-executed data collection is often met with approval. Transparency, honesty, and responsible use of data soften consumer concerns. While only 51% of consumers (according to Twilio) trust brands to handle their data responsibly, 77% (according to Freshworks) are willing to share their data for a better customer experience.

Beyond consumer attitudes, legal frameworks and browser manufacturers have also thrown a wrench into the machinery of personalization. Who still remembers GDPR and its impact on marketing? Now, with Chrome phasing out support for third-party cookies and the waning influence of social media, it’s high time to focus on systematically gathering your own marketing data.

Here are my tips for tackling this challenge:

Treat different channels as a unified whole. Consider how your customer’s journey crosses from the website to the mobile app and then to the physical store. What should ideally happen across these channels?
Centralize data collection so it’s accessible across all channels and units within your organization. Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) are well-suited for this, and many come as user-friendly applications.
Choose the right communication solutions, such as content management and marketing automation systems, and ensure their longevity, customization, and integration capabilities to avoid creating new silos.

A Unified customer experience across all channels

A system that delivers a coherent, multichannel customer experience is known as a Digital Experience Platform (DXP). Broadly speaking, this system integrates content management, marketing automation, CRM systems, and user data management under one umbrella. But it’s much more than that.

The goal of such a system is to create a seamless customer experience while providing the company with a holistic view of the customer through a single interface. It eliminates silos within the organization, allowing all units—from marketing to customer service—to better understand the customer’s needs and goals.

In terms of implementation, the system can be built modularly, leveraging components that the company already has in place—content management, marketing automation, analytics, and CRM. Customer data is brought together in a Customer Data Platform, where it can be further refined using AI.

A DXP can also be connected to other business systems as needed, such as e-commerce, product management, or ERP systems.

By tailoring the platform instead of opting for a ready-made (and often expensive) solution, you can build a DXP flexibly and expand it as your business evolves. This modular approach is cost-effective and allows for the replacement of individual components if they fall behind the curve.

Implementing such a system yourself enables vendor independence and ensures compliance with data protection laws. This is particularly beneficial in sensitive sectors (like healthcare, banking, and the public sector), where using traditional marketing stacks can be challenging due to privacy concerns.

I don’t believe every company should rush into building their own systems, but the facts are undeniable: in the future, competition for consumers will be tougher, the share of digital commerce will grow, and differentiation will become even more critical. Technology has advanced to meet these challenges, but it’s up to organizations to take the reins and start offering better customer experiences.

I discuss this topic in Finnish in the MarkkinointiRadio episode Customers Deserve Personalization. Listen to the podcast on Spotify or SoundCloud.

Want to learn more? Get in touch!

Author

Mikko Hämäläinen

CEO

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