Forrester: Why Customer Experience Management Needs To Be Personalized

By David Roe (@druadh20) Jan 24, 2012

Customer experience management (CXM) begins with customer data. Ultimately, it also ends there. While CXM can gather insights from consumer data garnered around individual behaviors online, if the consumer is not prepared to provide certain data voluntarily, the picture is incomplete. A recent report by Forrester shows that acquiring that data is increasingly problematic.

The report, entitled Personal Identity Management Success Starts With Customer Understanding, shows what many suspect: Consumers, or customers, are increasingly unwilling to give out certain kinds of information to online sites, and that some of that information could be crucial in understanding what your clients are thinking.

Yes, there are tools that can offer profiles of your customers — and we saw last week in our Customer Experience Tweet Jam that analytics is considered key — but technologies like analytics are not everything. The Forrester report looked at how customers are willing — or not, as the case may be — to provide information.

Data, Privacy, Breaches

The crux of the report is that, with all the coverage of high-profile data breaches and the Federal Trade Commission rulings that hold Facebook, Google, and Twitter accountable to strict privacy guidelines, customer attitudes to privacy and personal data sharing is changing.

Written by Fatemeh Khatibloo and based on Forrester’s Consumer Technographics, it shows that the way consumers view and protect data is dependent on consumer age and the type of personal data involved. The result is a paradigm of consumer behavior where no one type of analysis fits all.

The information for Forrester’s Consumer Technographics comes from a survey of 37,350 US and Canadian online adults between the ages of 18 and 88 and was carried out in August 2011.

Forrester says that, after taking numerous variables into account, it is 95% certain that the data gives a clear picture of the entire North American online population within that age group with a precision that is statistically accurate to within 0.51%.

In other words, it’s just about certain that the picture it has drawn paints the North American population in general. And if this is complicated, imagine the difficulty for global CXM professionals that are trying to analyze worldwide audiences.

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Personal Data Viewpoints

The first thing the Forrester report underlines that is that consumers look at different sets of personal data in different ways, and as a result, CXM professionals should do so too. There are four identified sets of personal data.

Individual identity data
Behavioral data
Derived data
Self-Identified data

Asked about the understanding and protection of these sets of data as well as its collection, sharing and use of this data by companies, it is clear that consumers have different attitudes to all of the different sets.

For example, it seems that consumers are considerably less concerned about access to social profile data than they are about access to credit card numbers. There are two implications from this:

1. Consumers have shown themselves to be 24% more likely to be concerned about companies accessing their identity data than they are about them accessing their behavioral data. Companies, Forrester says, should as a result rethink the kind of data they collect from individuals, and, more important, how they present those findings to their customers. It adds that, as most companies collect more data than they need, they need to look at how that data is captured and refine it to capture only the information that is relevant and inoffensive.