All The Proof You Need That Personalization Is Not Enough

“Personalization” was the Association of National Advertisers ‘marketing word of the year’ in 2019. Three years later, nearly seven in 10 respondents to our martech study said “personalization” remained their top marketing tech priority. But personalization is not enough.

At least since COVID, consumer expectations have changed; automating the insertion of your contact’s name into an email salutation simply won’t cut it any longer! In other words, while your customers and prospects still want personalization, they don’t always feel like they’re getting it — and when they do, it’s often too frequent or too “creepy.” 

So, what are the keys to mastering personalization in our metaverse era? 

Well, first, it’s understanding what we even mean when we say it. According to CEI research, while 39% of organizations are referring to predictive personalization, leveraging customer data to anticipate future needs and intentions, 28% are focused on “poignant” personalization, or connecting with customers through meaningful conversation; 23% prioritize “productive” personalization, forgoing emotion for straight-to-the-point guidance; and 10% essentially still consider a personalized salutation sufficient.

The truth is, no matter how you define or dissect “personalization” in CX, only 15% of customers believe their communications with brands are personalized at all — and that’s a problem since personalization without consistency, transparency or authenticity won’t improve CX or drive revenue, whether your brand communications and experiences are empathic or not.

The Future of Customer Experience: A Conversation with Con Cirillo

To get some additional perspective on CX personalization, I recently interviewed Con Cirillo, former head of customer experience for Carro and founder of Procket, for CEI’s The Future of Customer Engagement online event. Not only do we jibe like long-lost brothers, we prove through concrete, real-life experience why personalization alone really doesn’t suffice.

The Importance of Empathy in Customer Experience

Con Cirillo, Former Head of Customer Experience, Carro, Talks Importance of Empathy in CX

I think it starts and ends with empathy. If understanding how someone got to where they are at that moment… What is the context? So, if somebody's chatting in, and you're a support agent, and they're super frustrated, and you can see maybe the company screwed up the order, a few steps up the food chain, so to speak, or up the process, you know in that moment to express empathy and [solidarity] and… “Hey, I'm so sorry, let's work on this together.” Right? So, being able to empathize with where somebody is in their customer journey or in that life cycle directly impacts how well you can serve them and what you can do for them.

And being able to understand, okay, how do all the pieces fit together…? If you're a support agent, what is sales doing? What's marketing doing? How did this person get to you? And having visibility to understand the problems that they came to your company to solve, the experiences and touchpoints they've had along the way, and the more perspective and purview you have into those things, the better experience you can deliver them in that moment.

The Importance of Consistency and Transparency in Customer Experience

Philip Mandelbaum, Senior Content Analyst, CEI, and Con Cirillo Talk Importance of Consistency and Transparency in CX

Philip Mandelbaum: 

These two maybe could go together: consistency and transparency. I had an experience with a company very recently that, without warning, stopped using its phones. You'd call and they'd say, “Sorry, we're so busy that we're not answering the phone anymore.”

Con Cirillo: 

Due to unexpected volume. Yeah, yeah.

Philip Mandelbaum: 

[laughing] Which should be the opposite, right? Unexpected volume means you're doing… Well, it either means you're doing something really good or really bad — and you need to be on the phone. So, I, being — in an industry or two — somewhat of an influencer, took to social media — and I held them responsible… That was a lack of transparency, right? And the lack of consistency came in the fact that they publicly took care of me immediately, as other people who don't have verified accounts, or whatever it is that qualified me as high value, have been waiting for months and ‘@ing’ them on social media for months to no avail. Um, also not good.

It helped me; I had a fine customer experience once I went to social [media]. But that is not how things should be done, at least publicly. How do businesses juggle that? It's really important to kind of rank and rate customers within your platforms, so you know who's a priority, you know who might be on their way out, you know who might be on their way in. And at the same time, customers better not know you're doing that.

Con Cirillo:

To the point about transparency, when you look at a lot of B2B SaaS tools and they're like, “Hey, paid support is included in this plan,” or like, “You get web chat, you get a knowledge base,” it is okay to give or not give or to give more — so long as you are clear about that. I agree, when it's opaque, like, “They help me, but, like, why?” Right? “Why me and not someone else” or “Why someone else and not me?” — I think the opacity there, that's just where it just doesn't feel good. It feels kind of yucky. 

And so from a consistency side… It's not always malice… People go, “Wow, the brand… responded to me on social [media] right away but ignored my emails or my phone calls.” And honestly, sometimes from a customer experience standpoint, it might even just be two teams of agents and two separate contact centers that have no clue that you were angry over here and they just solved your problem over here. [Because] they're nice people, right? And so there's a lot of time where it's ignorance, not malice, that makes the customer experience disjointed. And that's something that as a consumer, again, we don't care. 

One of the things I learned from Dharmesh [Shah] when I was at HubSpot was this idea of the customer code and really not exposing or solving for systems, but: ‘solve for people…’

If the brand goes, “Hey, we've shut our phone service down. Here's why we're making that change. Here's what you can do instead, here's a clear action or a clear path forward,” that change probably doesn't feel weird or might be even more palatable to you. But it's just that lack of saying anything, right? And when a change happens, or the rug gets pulled out from you in an experience — even if it's something mundane or small — when you're not told about it, and you kind of find yourself clutching pearls, like, “What happened…,” it just magnifies anything that's going on. 

Brands certainly can do a great job at being transparent and consistent… “Here's what's happening, here's why it's happening, and here's what you do.”

The Importance of Authenticity in Customer Experience (and Employee Experience)

Philip Mandelbaum and Con Cirillo Talk Importance of Authenticity in CX and Authenticity in the Workplace

Philip Mandelbaum:

If you are really using customer experience the right way, you can actually learn things that can improve your product. And instead of hiding that or being ashamed that a customer knew better than you, you can highlight that. I mean, how's that for customer experience to show that you really appreciate them? Right…?

Every business should have their core values. You know, they have their value statement… There's a reason for business, but… ideally there's a reason you started the business other than profit. If not, you probably shouldn't try to fake it, [be]cause you'll be caught.

And what does that mean to customers today? I'm seeing more and more that the future of CX or the future of business success might have more to do with political ideology or those types of social values than ever before.

Con Cirillo:

It certainly is. And I feel there is kind of a blending and emerging of… workplace cultures where you're encouraged to bring your whole self to work. Right? That inherently includes all aspects of your identity… And from a values perspective, as a customer you talk about stakeholder capitalism, right? And being more conscious in the world. People want to do business with brands that stand for the things that they do.

And so there certainly is this interesting balance, where you want to be authentic and connect with the things that your customers seem to care about or your audience cares about. And how do you do that in an authentic way? 

I will tell you, for pride month, you see all of these companies make a rainbow logo, right? So I think there's a lot of performative work that's being done. And the thing is, people see through that — and so it's kind of hard as a brand: Is it better to not do anything, or do something in an inauthentic way?

I actually lean more towards: it is more respectful to not say anything than to do something half baked or half assed. It's like, look, if that's not the thing or the cause that we want to care about or a value we want to embody, let's not try to. I think it really is the case of do[ing] fewer things better and stand[ing] for the things you really care about… And don't try to kind of boil the ocean with supporting every cause and every value and trying to appease everybody.

You can do that without being exclusive either, right? You can say, “Hey, if this is the thing that you identify with or you care about, awesome. We are not maybe going to put energy into that. But it's not to say it's not welcome. It's not to say that it doesn't matter to you. It's just not something we as a company are going to invest in. And that's okay.”

The Future of Personalization in Customer Experience, Sales and Digital Marketing

Con Cirillo Talks Treating People ‘How You Would Want to Be Treated’

Personalization — we are long past tokens, right? We are long past, like, “Hello, company name.” Right? Where I see personalization moving towards much more now in 2022 and in the future is more about goals and role, and much more about the job to be done, truly… So what is a sales rep who logs into your B2B SaaS tool trying to accomplish versus their sales director. Right? It's two people from the same company logging into the same tool, but they're trying to get very different things done. And so the way that you would onboard and communicate and sell to… becomes contextualized at that point. 

So, I think personalization [is] a mindset of just: ‘how do you want to be treated?’ Right? Kind of that golden rule. I heard someone call it the platinum rule. Treat someone how you would want to be treated, or how you want others to treat you. 

And so it's really this just thinking ahead to: “OK, what would I want?” And that's the level of personalization you should aim to deliver. And it costs $0 to do that, right? You don't need a big fancy tech stack. You don't need a team of a million automation folks. It starts with that mindset — and that's, frankly, the most important thing.

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Image Credit 

Photo by Külli Kittus on Unsplash: https://unsplash.com/photos/KQfxVDHGCUg