While personalization has become table stakes in customer experience, the risks associated with it are becoming harder to manage.
“When we first started seeing personalization, people often described it as creepy — like, how do you know this much about me?” said Jeannie Walters, founder and chief experience navigator of Experience Investigators. “But now that’s completely flipped.”
The challenge for CX leaders is no longer whether to personalize, but how to do so without breaking consumers’ trust, as personalization can feel invasive, unfair or simply incompetent.
“Personalization only works when trust is already in place,” Katie Costanzo, president of CX at CSG, said in an email.
Deliver what customers expect
Walters’ rule of thumb is simple: Personalization works best when brands deliver what customers expect.
“It’s really important to stay within the lane of the original agreement you have with that customer,” Walters said.
That’s because the further personalization moves into prediction and inference, the more likely customers will perceive it as advancing the company’s goals instead of their own, according to Isabelle Zdatny, head of thought leadership at Qualtrics XM Institute.
Personalization can be divided into three main categories, Zdatny said, including:
- Low-intensity approaches that are widely accepted, such as recently viewed items and location-based currency changes.
- Relationship-based approaches, such as remembering preferences, pre-filling address forms, continuity of communication across channels, reorder reminders, delivery updates, and other actions that “feel earned because there’s an ongoing relationship,” Zdatny said.
- High-intensity approaches, such as browsing-based recommendations, churn prediction and surveillance pricing. Such approaches are “where things get stickier … that’s where a lot of people get off the train,” Zdatny said.
When personalization goes bad
One reason the stakes feel higher than ever is that personalization failures are both memorable and shareable.
When personalization works well, consumers don’t realize their experiences are being personalized.
“The benefits can be pretty invisible,” Zdatny said.
But when personalization fails or feels invasive, it becomes a “really big story to tell,” Zdatny said.
“No one ever tweets, ‘Oh, the airline remembered my seat,’” she added. “But how many times have you seen someone say, ‘I looked at a crib once, and now everyone thinks I’m pregnant’?”
Zdatny framed the dynamic as a “creepiness to value ratio,” explaining that “customers are continuously making these intuitive judgments over whether they feel like the personalization is helpful or surveillance.”
That’s partly because consumers are “resigned,” not consenting, to sharing their data with brands, said Joseph Turow, professor emeritus of communication at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication and author of the forthcoming book, “The Problem with Personalization.”
The threshold for discomfort can be lower than brands assume. Qualtrics research shows that shy of two-thirds of consumers show a genuine appetite for tailored experiences, but only 41% believe the benefits justify the privacy costs. That’s no surprise, as just 39% of consumers believe organizations use their personal information responsibly, with nearly one-third saying they are uncomfortable with brands’ learning habits, remembering website behavior, predictive ordering and device listening/watching, according to the Qualtrics 2026 Global Consumer Trends Report.
That’s because personalization creates “micro-experiences for every customer,” leading to inconsistent experiences that can feel unfair, Walters said.
But personalization shouldn't come at the cost of consistency. Without shared context and coordinated orchestration across channels, brands risk applying different rules, messages and outcomes to different customers — or worse, to the same customer, depending on where they interact. That kind of inconsistency breeds confusion, erodes trust and puts unnecessary strain on operations.
“The goal is to create experiences that are tailored but still coherent. Customers should feel recognized without feeling like the brand changes its mind every time they engage,” Costanzo said.
The antidote is to create a baseline experience that’s consistent for everyone, with fair policies, high-quality products and services, accessibility and privacy.
“We need to make sure that personalization is not the promise,” Walters said. “It’s a bonus.”
Personalization can also make a brand seem incoherent to customers.
“Trying to maintain coherent, on-brand experiences across segments, across journeys, across context is so hard,” Zdatny said. “If you and I could go into the same store and have two completely different experiences — what is your brand at that point?”
And sometimes the failure isn’t about intent at all — it’s about systems that don’t connect.
For example, it’s common for a customer to receive a personalized offer on mobile, but when the code fails, and they call in, the customer service representative can’t even see it. From the customer’s perspective, “you broke a promise,” Walters said.
So, when it comes to personalization, experts recommend brands proceed with caution. If a company can’t clearly articulate why it needs data and how it helps the customer, it shouldn’t adopt that personalization approach.
“If you can’t explain it to the customer… then you should not be personalizing,” Zdatny said.
That’s because trust is “the prerequisite, not the outcome,” Zdatny said. “If you are starting from a trust deficit, personalization is not going to fix that. It is going to amplify that.”
