Here are a few customer experiences you are probably familiar with:
Your barista knows your drink.
The service manager at the auto dealer greets you by name when you pull up.
You buy groceries using your rewards card, then receive a coupon for products that directly compete with the products you’ve just purchased (or maybe even purchased in the past).
You receive a mortgage offer in the mail that knows what you owe, and shows you what your payment will be if you switch.
Your favorite social networking site suggests people you might know — and you know all of them.
You login to an e-commerce site to search for computer equipment, can’t find what you want and leave. Five minutes later, you receive a call from your account rep saying, “I noticed you were on XYZ.com, and just wanted to make sure you found what you were looking for.”
This is one of Responsible Marketing’s challenging gray areas: Building personalized and relevant one-to-one relationships with customers and prospects vs. respecting their privacy.
Here’s a video from the ACLU (love ‘em or hate ‘em) that takes the privacy question to the extreme:
To be responsible, you have to balance personalization with privacy. The irony is, one of the best options to to do it is to know just how personalized a customer wants their experience to be.
What do you think?
Comment below to weigh in.
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Special thanks to my partner Bill Boyd for sharing the above video.
