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.