No One Wants Hyper-Personalized CXNo One Wants Hyper-Personalized CX
While we celebrate the current efforts to break down data silos and achieve better, more unified customer views, let's not kid ourselves about where this will take us.
May 7, 2025
We hear a lot of buzz about "personalization" in customer service these days. Companies are touting their ability to tailor the customer experience to each customer. Personalization lives on a spectrum. The basic IVR, for example, can route all callers requesting service to the same queue, and that’s a blunt form of personalization. As more and more of our CX interactions are digitized, customers provide more clues on what’s important to them. Contact centers and marketers can leverage these clues to create personalized experiences. The concept is so powerful, that some vendors are now touting hyper-personalization.
True hyper-personalization is a bit dystopian. It is, without doubt, coming. It’s probably about a decade away, and it can probably be filed under careful what you wish for. I’m not crazy about giving my name to the barista or prying questions from my Uber driver. I enjoy the little anonymity I have left.
I recently came across an interesting tree and wanted to know what kind it was. I asked Google Gemini and provided a quick photo. I wasn’t sure it would work because the spring leaves were still a few weeks away. Gemini knew the tree instantly, but not just by the photo. Gemini also noted the time of year and my location, which is information I didn’t provide. One could consider this to be a magical CX moment. My question was, after all, quickly and correctly resolved. On the other hand, it’s a bit creepy that these robust systems leverage information I didn’t provide to create a personalized experience.
There are two significant steps necessary to achieve personalized interactions. First, the collection of detailed, specific information about each customer. Some of this is easily observed from clicks and words, and some is derived from behaviors. It can include purchase and browsing history but often goes much further. The second step is to leverage that data into truly personalized interactions. This can include anything from targeted marketing to improved contextual awareness that can also enable predictive services.
Customers practically donate their data; the big barrier today is less about data collection and more about data silos. Customer data is collected all over an enterprise, from service, marketing, finance, and more. Often, this data is locked in disparate systems. Isolated like separate grain silos.
The CRM doesn't talk to the marketing automation platform, which has no clue what's happening in the contact center. Each has an incomplete picture of the customer. These silos sometimes stem from acquisitions, but more often are due to different departments adopting separate systems to address their specific needs. Whatever the cause, the result is a fragmented view of the customer. So-called personalization, even hyper-personalization, is stitched together customer views from inconsistent data, like attempting to create a movie from a series of snapshots.
The current wave of "personalization" initiatives focuses on reducing the friction between these applications and data stores. The old way of silo busting was various forms of APIs to create a real or virtual centralized data repository. This approach is complex, requires API enabled systems, as well as lots of talent to create and maintain them.
The fact we’ve been talking about silo busting for decades confirms it is really hard to do. Integrating complex, often outdated systems is a technological and logistical nightmare. Ensuring data quality and consistency across platforms is a constant battle. And even when you manage to wrangle the data, deriving truly actionable insights that lead to hyper-personalized experiences requires sophisticated analytics and AI capabilities that are still evolving.
There tends to be gaps between the vision of personalization and the reality. We're still dealing with too many gaps in the data. A unified view of past transactions doesn't tell you what the customer is currently feeling, their immediate needs, or their likely next step. We're achieving better personalization, but we think we want to do better.
So, what does the future of hyper-personalization look like? It's a world where the organizations that are already deeply embedded in our lives – the ones tracking our every digital and even physical move – connect their silos.
In Dave Eggers’ fictional book The Circle, a Google-like company needed some old photos and realized they had them from their prior acquisition of Facebook. It seemed silly; only a fictional book could suggest Facebook, now Meta, could simply be acquired as a footnote. But someday, either by M&A, hook or crook, or old-fashioned integrations, these giant data repositories will enable hyper-personalization.
Think about all the digital breadcrumbs we leave. The connected smart speaker as an alarm clock that wakes us. Before the feet even hit the floor, we scan our emails on our smartphones. The smartwatch has already updated its servers on the night’s sleep quality and morning heart rate. Separately, these are just data points. But imagine an organization that compiles all this data for a complete picture: the exact moment you wake up, a baseline understanding of your physical state, and the initial content that captures your attention.
Then the day starts. The phone records the journey, whether by car or public transportation, and we are monitored the whole way, including nuances of text chats, and the podcasts or songs played. We may share interesting thoughts or observations on social media. In a city, we are likely captured on countless security cameras. The office badge swipe notes our arrival time. Software at work (or at home) meticulously tracks productivity.
A quick stop at the supermarket allows more tracking by our loyalty card and credit card. Back on the couch, the shows we stream are noted with precision. Every fleeting search query, every abandoned online shopping cart, every search result clicked – it's all recorded.
Your email provider knows not just the content of your communications but also the frequency and nature of your relationships, when you work, and who and what deserves a response. They can infer social circles, political leanings, professional networks, and even the strength of those connections. Our cell phone providers know where we are and who we are with.
Think about how much information companies like Google, Microsoft, Meta, credit card providers, and your cell phone provider have. This is today; all of this surveillance data already exists. Bought cheaply with points, discounts, and services. The missing piece of the hyper-personalization puzzle isn't the data collection – it's the integration of these disparate databases into a single, comprehensive understanding. We see a glimpse of this potential and its inherent risks in the ambitious data integration efforts underway in China. Winston Smith, the protagonist in Orwell’s 1984, had more privacy.
Does this dystopian surveillance sound more like what a country would do than those trying to sell us stuff? The differences and boundaries between countries and nations are blurring. Super-corps are acquiring power and influence comparable to, and in many cases exceeding, nation-states. Google's diverse array of services, ranging from mapping to business tools, has "Googlized" large parts of the economy and human experience. This concentration of essential services echoes the role of national governments.
Apple has billions of users in its ecosystem and vast cash reserves; its influence rivals that of major economies. SpaceX has more capability than NASA. These, and a few dozen other big tech firms, control key resources like AI processors, quantum computers, and robotics, positioning them at the forefront of technological advancement, surpassing government and academic institutions.
Things that have been the province of governments today, like education, healthcare, and defense, perhaps soon currency, could be provided by these super-national companies. Consider that eBay and PayPal’s dispute resolution system handles around sixty million disagreements a year, three times as many as the entire U.S. legal system. Ninety percent of these disputes are settled using technology alone.
So, while we celebrate the current efforts to break down data silos and achieve better, more unified customer views, let's not kid ourselves about where this will take us. We are indeed on a journey to hyper-personalization. Thankfully, we aren’t there yet. With some luck, maybe the hyper-personalized experiences I will receive will intentionally disguise how much they know about me.
Dave Michels is a contributing editor and Analyst at TalkingPointz.
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