Avoiding Hyper Personalization

Mostly we don't notice this until its pointed out to us.

Brands are using AI to drive hyper-personalization, but can it also help them avoid being hyper creepy?   By Vince Jeffs in Customer Think

Apparently, I have 8 seconds to grab your attention, so here goes.  What if I personalized every aspect of this blog for you?  That is, I knew so much about you – your reading behavior, the writing style you prefer, subjects you love – took all of it into account, and assembled these words and pictures just for you?  Would you find that creepy or cool?

At our conference in Las Vegas recently, I was a guest on Sam Charrington’s, podcast series “This Week In Machine Learning and AI.”  In that episode, we discussed a similar hyper-personalization scenario, where an automotive company used intimate knowledge about a consumer and her connected car to custom-tailor each marketing and service treatment[i].  And half-way through (at 23:07), Sam observed that although “consumers appreciate personalized experiences,” it can go too far and “sometimes come across as creepy.”

And suddenly, we both realized something.  Customer experience experts haven’t used AI to govern this.  In other words, CX pros personalize without recognizing if their personalization levels are approaching creepiness.

Which led to this question: can creepiness be quantified?  And if so, with that knowledge, could a company effectively use it?  With the right tooling, could they safely test and simulate how far personalization should go, carefully delivering each customer a tailored experience with the right level of relevance and value, without crossing into their creepy space?  Simply put, hyper-personalizing without being hyper-personal — the personalization paradox.. ... "