Personalization in 2024: Why Customers Feel Brands Can Do Better 60% of consumers believe that brands know a lot about them but fail to consider their preferences

The Integration of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) into e-commerce, entertainment, and other sectors, is opening new doors for marketers to make customer experience more seamless, satisfactory, and efficient. And this is exactly what customers are expecting from companies beyond data production. Nevertheless, organizations are not getting personalization right.

Adobe in its recent report "Digital Trends 2024" mentioned that despite data privacy concerns, consumers are generally comfortable with brands using AI, particularly if it would lead to brands making better recommendations and improving communications. For instance, 77 per cent of consumers felt "quick and efficient customer support through automated systems like chatbots is important or critical."

However, it's not surprising that 49 per cent of consumers rate their experiences with chatbots as either "very poor," "poor," or just plain "adequate." It suggests brands need to up their game when it comes to integrating modern technologies and planning to provide end-to-end personalization experience.

Consumer's Priorities

The survey suggests that 80 per cent of customers want to know when they are talking with a human or a bot. Additionally, 71 per cent of customers expect their experience with brands to be seamless across all their existing platforms including website, app, and call center. Being notified of how their data is being used is important for 67 per cent of customers while 65 per cent are concerned over how much data brands hold upon them.

Organizations need to be more transparent with data usage to build trust, which, in turn, will make consumers more willing to grant permission for data use. Nonetheless, 60 per cent of consumers believe that brands know a lot about them but fail to consider their preferences.

"It's not as simple as just hooking up to the internet and putting whatever comes back in front of customers. It has to be thoughtfully done. But I absolutely think generative AI can help us in ecommerce, marketing, and software development. There's a lot of opportunity, but it's a marathon, not a sprint," said Jordan Broggi, Senior Vice President & President – Online, Home Depot.

Consumer's New Values

Consumers are now prioritizing receiving communications on their schedule. Nearly 60 per cent said they would prefer to receive an email on top offers over a personalized text message. Meanwhile, 62 per cent of consumers preferred recommendations via website and in-app. Cross comparisons on app versus website, chat versus forms, and other preferences were almost equally split, suggesting there is no one right path for most customers

"Real-time personalisation is what our customers expect every single time, every single interaction. We must get that right and do it so you're not coming across as creepy or trying to sell something the customer doesn't need. You're coming across as a partner who genuinely cares for their customers and wants the best for them," said Parthiv Sheth, Vice President of Marketing, AT&T.

Customer Data Management Is a Future Investment

Many organizations got feedback from practitioners, who rated their customer data systems as merely "average" to "ineffective" in providing consistent data across all touch points (52 per cent) and enabling a holistic customer view (57 per cent). This feedback helped companies to recognize that their data strategies are still very much in the developing stage.

Nevertheless, with the growing importance of customer data management (CDM), 55 per cent of senior executives identified CDM as the top technology area they prioritize for investment in 2024.