Revisiting personalization through customer experience journey

Abstract

Firms use personalization in order to influence the customer experience through numerous touch points. This influence has positive and negative consequences, which have further strong impact on the customer responses and overall success of the firm’s communication with the customer. Personalization and customer experience have the common path of their development and share the fields of applications; however, scientific literature is currently fragmented and analyzes the narrow aspects of either personalization or customer experience. This conceptual article investigates personalization with the focus on the overall customer experience journey and its use for the estimation of customer responses and touch points’ utilization. The need for this focus is based on the necessity of the firm to understand customer responses to personalization as well as the factors appearing at pre-purchase, purchase and post-purchase stages of customer decision making. The theoretical novelty of the paper embraces positive and negative consequences of personalization for identification of future empirical research directions. These conclusions include the impact of anthropomorphization through embedded automated interactive messaging, history-based and group-based recommendation systems as well as the impact of increased touch points and influence of informational vulnerability on customer trust, click-through intentions and reactance. Managerial contributions relate to the suggestions on possible actions required to either enforce particular effects with positive outcomes for customer experience or diminish negative ones in terms of technological facilitation, measurement possibilities and enhancement of information transparency.

Personalization effects in online retail: Case of the Russian market

“…Historically, personalization was attributed to the services due to interpersonal character in contrast to goods. Nevertheless, with the advent of technology, personalization has become a feature embedded in the websites that is no longer for services only (Gogua & Smirnova, 2020). In its current form personalization can be described as embedded communications points, instant communication with an e-store (Song, Zinkhan, 2008).…”

“…To begin with, personalization can be characterized based on a consumer engagement in communication, which allows to define several personalization types: pull personalization (when a customer explicitly requests personalization), passive personalization (still requires customer's action, but is more reliant on the company), push personalization (company provides personalization service directly to a customer without request from him/her) (Wedel, Kannan, 2016). Apart from that, authors suggest that personalization techniques can be divided into those establishing the feeling of personal communication (achieved through anthropomorphization) and those creating the sense of belongingness to the group and awareness of a customer preferences (achieved through recommendation systems) (Gogua & Smirnova, 2020). Anthropomorphization refers to such tools as chatbots, intelligent agents and conversation agents, while recommendation systems involve displaying the offers to a customer based on his previous searching history, actions of similar customers or the average preferences of a similar group (Gogua & Smirnova, 2020).…”

“…Apart from that, authors suggest that personalization techniques can be divided into those establishing the feeling of personal communication (achieved through anthropomorphization) and those creating the sense of belongingness to the group and awareness of a customer preferences (achieved through recommendation systems) (Gogua & Smirnova, 2020). Anthropomorphization refers to such tools as chatbots, intelligent agents and conversation agents, while recommendation systems involve displaying the offers to a customer based on his previous searching history, actions of similar customers or the average preferences of a similar group (Gogua & Smirnova, 2020).…”

Treating customers as individuals in online retail

“…The focus of research endeavors has been gradually shifting from employee-customer interactions and simple digital solutions (such as targeted mails) in 1980-1990s to advanced technology-enabled solutions (such as augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), Internet of Things (IoT)) in 2010-2020s [Kranzbühler et al ., 2018, Kumar et al ., 2022 . The most recent studies almost unconditionally claim that the future of CX management in Russia and abroad stands on CX individualization technologies powered by AI [Gogua, Smirnova, 2020;Dolganova, 2021;Hoyer et al ., 2020] .…”