Segmentation, dynamic content, recommendation algorithms and marketing automation are standard equipment in larger companies today. Yet the customer experience often doesn't improve. Companies have the data and the technology. What they lack is working with context: they focus on what to send the customer, and much less on when and why it makes sense in the customer's situation.
Why personalisation alone is not enough
Personalisation scenarios are usually created with good intentions, but they are optimised for partial metrics: email opens, clicks, short-term conversion. That is only a small part of how a customer makes decisions.
When communication is driven by individual events without the wider picture, every channel reacts on its own. The customer gets more messages and less value. Fatigue follows, then ignored messages and, in the worse case, lost trust.
What context is
Context is the situation the customer is in right now: what they are dealing with, how urgent it is for them and how much room they have to decide. The same person has very different needs at different moments. What helps today can annoy tomorrow. Context therefore cannot be stored as a single field in a profile. It changes over time and needs to be evaluated continuously.
From campaigns to decisions
Personalisation that works moves from producing campaigns to deciding about individual interventions. Instead of asking "what content do we send", it is more useful to ask what the customer needs right now. A simple order helps:
- understand the customer's situation,
- estimate what they are trying to achieve,
- decide whether and how to step in,
- only then choose the channel and format.
Often the result is that, at that moment, it is best to send nothing.
The role of technology and data
CDP, CRM or marketing automation are tools, not goals. They make it possible to work with data in real time, combine information from different sources and manage communication across channels. On their own, they do not guarantee a better experience.
What matters is what the company uses them for. If only for faster and more frequent sending, the problem grows. If they help to understand the customer's situation better and to make fewer but more meaningful interventions, they pay off.
A good customer experience does not depend on the number of personalisation scenarios. It depends on whether the company can tell when the customer needs help, when information and when to be left alone.
For an example of this approach in practice, see the analysis of Delta Air Lines' customer experience.
