Importance of Personalization in the Customer Journey

Every delightful customer interaction begins with the marketer, and it can only be as powerful as the #CRM and #metadata underpinning it. With agents supporting them at every step of the customer journey creation process, marketers and #customerengagement teams can now create superior experiences shaped by intelligent and emotionally resonant conversations. At a cognitive level, the human brain no longer perceives AI as a “chatbot.” It perceives a relationship. This emotional shift fundamentally changes how consumers relate to brands, fostering deeper loyalty and trust. When customers interact with agents in a way that feels natural, their engagement deepens. The implications go far beyond engagement. Every AI-driven interaction generates a wealth of contextual data, far richer than what brands could ever collect from a single web form or survey. In one conversation, an agent can gather insights about a customer’s preferences, behaviors, and intent, building a more complete, dynamic customer profile. This continuous intelligence loop allows brands to maximize the value of every interaction. Let’s bring this to life with an example... Imagine Melanie, one of your many potential customers. She’s been thinking about joining Posh Fitness, a popular gym chain in her city. Instead of filling out a form, she decides to engage with the agent on their website. As they chat, it quickly feels more like a friendly exchange than a transaction. Melanie shares her fitness goals, whether she wants to lose weight, gain muscle, or improve flexibility, and the agent listens closely, asking the right questions to understand her needs and intent. The agent gathers valuable insights through this conversation that a simple web form could never capture. Melanie mentions her dietary restrictions, her preference for a supportive personal trainer style, and that she loves outdoor workouts but needs a flexible schedule due to her busy life. In just a few minutes, the agent collects a wealth of data about Melanie: her goals, preferences, and availability—all essential to crafting a personalized experience. And because the conversation feels human-like and emotionally resonant, it creates an immediate connection to Posh Fitness. By collecting this richer data early in the relationship, Posh Fitness can offer tailored recommendations and build Melanie’s loyalty well before she signs up. This isn’t just about closing a sale. It’s about building trust and delivering personalized experiences that evoke emotions and feel deeply human. Brands that will thrive in the era of #Agentic #AI are those that recognize the shift from transactional interactions to relationship-driven engagement. This isn’t just about personalization; it’s about creating experiences and dialogues that feel alive—where AI and marketers co-create journeys that adapt in real time, amplifying the impact of every customer moment.

People value what they create 63% more. Yet most digital experiences treat customers as passive recipients instead of co-creators. This psychological principle, known as the "Ikea Effect", is shockingly underutilized in digital journeys. When someone builds a piece of Ikea furniture, they develop an emotional attachment that transcends its objective value. The same phenomenon happens in digital experiences. After optimizing digital journeys for companies like Adobe and Nike for over a decade, I've discovered this pattern consistently: 👉 Those who customize or personalize a product before purchase are dramatically more likely to convert and remain loyal. One enterprise client implemented a product configurator that increased conversions by 31% and reduced returns by 24%. Users weren't getting a different product... they were getting the same product they helped create. The psychology is simple but powerful: ↳ Customization creates psychological ownership before financial ownership ↳ The effort invested creates value attribution ↳ Co-creation builds emotional connection Three ways to implement this today: 1️⃣ Replace dropdown options with visual configurators 2️⃣ Create personalization quizzes that guide product selection 3️⃣ Allow users to save and revisit their customized selections Most importantly: shift your mindset from selling products to facilitating creation. When customers feel like co-creators rather than consumers, they don't just buy more... they become advocates. How are you letting your customers build rather than just buy?

Contrary to the belief that increasing digitization has eroded hospitality, digital experiences can actually enhance meaningful customer engagement at scale. By leveraging customer-level data, brands can create personalized, human-centric interactions that deepen customer relationships. Luxury brands, for example, excel at this by using detailed customer notes to offer highly tailored experiences, but this approach is scalable for any business with the right tools like a CDP to turn data into actionable insights. Rather than detracting from hospitality, digitization can elevate it, turning transactions into lasting relationships through thoughtful, data-driven personalization. In today’s market, it’s the personalized connection that makes the difference between a loyalty program that simply rewards transactions and one that builds lasting relationships. 

Personalization in Air Travel: Turning Complexity into Competitive Advantage As expectations of modern travelers are evolving and rising—shaped by experiences from businesses such as Amazon, Netflix, and Spotify—the airline industry is under pressure to deliver a more personalized shopping experience, offer end-to-end journeys, and make interactions that are in real time and at all touchpoints. For airlines, personalization can provide a sustainable competitive advantage, an increase in loyalty, an increase in the sale of ancillaries, and a reduction in marketing costs. For customers, personalization can provide an improvement in travel experience through an understanding of their individual needs and preferences as well as their value. Airlines such as Lufthansa, Singapore, and United are already beginning to report measurable, although incremental, benefits through higher conversion rates, higher sales of ancillary products and services, and an improvement in customer loyalty. But personalization needs to go beyond tailored websites, seat selections, and in-flight services such as meal preferences and in-flight entertainment. It requires expanding the scope of the journey from airport to airport to door to door, and with a seamless and consistent experience. The expanded scope of the journey requires, first, overcoming the incompatibility of legacy systems and integrating fragmented data, and second, working with real-time data, AI, and agentic platforms to anticipate and meet individual customer needs—not just reactively, but proactively across the entire journey. Airlines must redefine personalization beyond segments and personas, embracing it as a strategic, data-driven capability that spans operations, customer service, and retailing. Coordination with airports, integration with technology platforms, and a workforce empowered to act on insights and foresights are all key. The real opportunity lies in transforming personalization from a marketing tactic into a critical competitive differentiator that enhances and grow revenue and improves operational efficiency. Achieving this vision demands investment—not just in technology, but in people, processes, and partnerships to reduce complexity and overcome legacy incompatibility. Personalization should not be treated as a cost center. Instead, it’s the foundation of modern airline strategy. To go beyond incremental benefits, to justify the needed investment, and to catch up with other industries, airlines need innovative resources, and out-of-the-box thinking. Collaboration with partners can reduce complexity, overcome the incompatibility of legacy systems, visualize new forms of the end-to-end personalized journeys, increase speed to market, and generally embrace ideas from the broader consumer environment. #AviationStrategy #AirlineRetailing #CustomerExperience #DigitalTransformation #AIinAviation #EndToEndTravel #Personalization #TravelTech #AviationLeadership #CXInnovation