When I was on vacation in Cuba a few years ago, I had an interesting conversation with the bartender at my favorite bar on the beach. He asked me where I was from and what I did. When I explained what I do as a "CX consultant" - helping companies understand and better serve their customers - he said, "Oh, the exact same thing I do!" I had to laugh, but he was actually right. When he saw me arrive, he'd set out my favorite drink, and he had a perfect sense of whether I was in the mood for a conversation, or whether I'd rather ponder while gazing at the endless sea.

Personalization of the customer journey, the touchpoint and the relationship with the customer is something that comes completely naturally. Every baker and every consultant knows that you have to respond to the individual needs and context of the customer - otherwise the business will soon be over.

In practice, however, larger companies, with their larger budgets, have a much harder time with this. For several decades now, we have been hearing about it - whether under the banner of CRM, or Customer Experience (CX), or Customer Centricity (CC) or... well, you know what I mean - that personalization has finally arrived. But what we are presented with is usually just a very poor imitation of personalization.

Limits of personalization

Is it personalization if I click once on Facebook, rather out of boredom than deep interest, on the ad of a company offering staircase renovation, and afterwards (unfortunately without exaggeration) for weeks every fourth Facebook post is an ad, from numerous companies offering different types of renovation? Or is this a completely screwed up algorithm that has nothing to do with personalization, but is just flat commercial overkill? Is it personalization when Amazon, after I've picked out a ladder after a lot of back and forth trying to distinguish the fake reviews from the real ones, finally put it in my cart, THEN suddenly shows me which ladders other people have also looked at? Is this a service to the customer? Probably not, since it leads to confusion and irritation. Or is it actually an expression of the fact that Amazon now earns almost more with advertising than with sales?

Is it personalization when the wife of my co-founder sits down in the car when her Audi is delivered, and the salesman sits down next to her and says smugly, just suppressing the word “Missy”:

"So, shall we take a look at all the buttons then?"

And that, after he basically only approached her husband when buying the car, and not her? It's probably more a salesman who is stuck in outdated stereotypes or even thinks in certain personas, but doesn't see who he's dealing with here practically (instead of purely theoretically).

You see, I'm pretty good at getting upset about the shenanigans that go on under the banner of personalization when we could be doing so much better. But perhaps the biggest complaint I have, and the biggest obstacle I see, is the dominance of personas.

Personas are not the answer for everything

We all know personas. It's a useful methodology for thinking broadly about what a target audience might look like. You all know the examples well enough:

"Our persona A is Clara Culture. She is 28 years old, works in an agency, and rides her bike to work with her little scotch terrier Waldo in a basket. On weekends, she goes to classical concerts, and likes to drink light alcoholic beverages outdoors."

This is wonderful if we want to place an ad - presumably it should be visible on the billboards along the bike route. But it does us no good at all if we want to customize the Customer Experience for our customers - after all, there is no such person as Clara Culture! Nor is there a larger group that has exactly the same needs as Clara Culture - along the entire Customer Journey. Klara is a purely theoretical construct.

How can we get out of this theoretical situation and into the real world?

Welcome to Touchpoint Personality: Touchpoint Personality!

By no longer talking about personas, and also parking the wild algorithms for now, and focusing on touchpoint personalities. We must try to understand what moves a person, what is important for him or her - now, today, at this touchpoint and in this context.

Futurelab worked this out a few years ago for Volkswagen in Poland, for the touchpoint test drive or car dealership visit. We know from our many years in the automotive sector that there are a lot of customers who would rather go to the dentist than to the car dealership - an ideal starting position for striving to improve the customer experience.

After many conversations with car dealership owners and salespeople, we found that they had a hard time identifying personality and preferences of clientele. Very practically - even the best of the salesmen, who knew very well how to conduct a good conversation, had at least once a week the experience of being completely off the mark, having hit the wrong note and thus losing potential customers.

"If we knew beforehand what kind of personality we were facing, we could make sure to really treat those according to their needs."

Customers have different needs - the method