Customer intimacy: The balance of personalisation and privacy

Responsible use of data has become a dealbreaker for customers in the digital economy, despite a rising expectation for brands to deliver personalised experiences at scale.

In the digital economy, customer trust is now a value driver for brands, and balancing personalisation and privacy is key.

The Adobe Trust Report 2022: APAC found customers will reward businesses that gain their trust but are equally willing to walk away from a brand forever if their trust is violated.

Customer intimacy and trust go hand in hand. Strong data governance and privacy, combined with dynamic and engaging personalised experiences builds a foundation of trust with your customers, allowing you to further enhance that relationship over the long term.

Customer intimacy comes from having the tools and skills to truly find that balance, leveraging your customer data in the right places and at the right times.

It’s as much about knowing when not to push messaging to customers as when to engage them.

As an example, think about your experience with an airline.

If I’m booking a flight, I expect the airline to know who I am across platforms throughout the entire journey from booking to checking in, boarding to the in-flight entertainment and beyond, regardless of whether I booked on their website but then used an app to check in.

Equally, I expect them to recognise the times when it’s not appropriate to engage me. The trust built through a great experience can quickly dissipate with one poor experience, like sending a ‘personalised’ email promoting a European sale when I’ve just booked flights to France.

It’s this nuanced understanding of the customer experience that sets the leading brands apart from the pack and truly builds that long-term trust and loyalty.

Putting personalisation at scale into action

Rolling out personalisation at scale within your organisation is a three-step process.

Firstly, you need an end-to-end personalisation strategy at scale to help you utilise the right data at the right time to meet customer expectations. This will ensure you’re ready to personalise all customer touchpoints based on immediate context and previously observed behaviour.

Building this strategy starts with asking yourself a few questions, namely how do you ensure proper data governance and privacy, how do you unify all your data to draw insights, how do you identify the right data at the right time for each experience, and how do you connect and analyse your data in real-time to personalise across any channel at scale?

The second step is finding the technology to power your strategy. For example, Adobe Real-Time Customer Data Platform collect, normalise, and unify consumer and professional data into real-time customer and account profiles for personalising, targeting, and engaging customer experiences at scale

When paired with Adobe Journey Optimiser you can create end-to-end real-time experiences by leveraging the unified profiles and actionable audiences whilst creating, managing and delivering personalised experiences from a single platform.

Finally, putting this all into practice relies on champions to bring their teams along for the journey through upskilling and changing culture.

The good news is though - you don’t have to do it alone. The Adobe Professional Services team can work with you to seamlessly implement Adobe Experience Cloud into your business.

It’s time to take action on personalisation and privacy, or risk being left behind.

Stephen Wise is Head of Adobe APAC Professional Services.