The Next Customer Experience Movement Is Offline Personalization

Marketers often fixate on personalizing the digital customer experience, but their next goal should be to bring that experience offline. Greg Portell, lead partner for consumer industries and retail practice at global management consulting firm A.T. Kearney, spoke with eMarketer’s Caroline Cakebread about the state of personalization in 2018, and the challenges brands encounter when taking it beyond the digital storefront. Portell was interviewed as part of eMarketer's June report, "Customer Experience 2018: Personalization Still Elusive as Marketers Seek Answer to Single View of Customer."

With a digital storefront that changes instantly, it's easy, but taking that model and making it work in a physical store is much harder. When you’re working with a hundred-thousand-person workforce, you can’t just move aisles to make it convenient for a specific customer.