The Failure of Personalization: How Can Effective Contextualization Enable Enterprises to Achieve Customer Empathy@Scale

This IDC Perspective discusses what it means to engage in a contextually relevant manner with customers and, crucially, scaling contextualization to achieve customer empathy through foundational priorities in data, intelligence, and privacy/trust imperatives. The future of customer experience will be fueled by two fundamental imperatives - data and intelligence. In this scenario, contextualization will become the dominant strategy for enterprises that want to differentiate themselves. To get there, enterprises will need to master capabilities such as optimizing every customer interaction in real time, maintaining context continuity across the customer life cycle, and managing synchronous and asynchronous customer conversations longitudinally."Current efforts at personalization, even when transactionally correct, have netted suboptimal business outcomes in terms of greater loyalty or lifetime value. The intelligent next step is for enterprises to focus on customer context, which enables enterprises to find, keep, and obtain more lifetime value from customers in a trusted and sustainable manner," says, Sudhir Rajagopal, research director for IDC's Future of Customer Experience. "Practices such as a sound foundation of unified customer data, trusted data sharing across ecosystem networks, and a systematized approach to industrializing customer intelligence will lay the foundation to effective contextualization and achieving customer empathy@scale."