How to balance personalization and trust in business: PwC

Phil Regnault

Principal, Adobe Alliance Leader, PwC US

Closing the trust gap helps create a more sustainably tight-knit relationship with customers

Take a moment to think about your closest friends. What makes those relationships different from the rest? There’s no agenda and nothing to gain. Just an honest and genuine interest in the other person that yields equal results for both. Now, compare connecting with your friends to an interaction that has the potential of a transaction at its core. The differences couldn’t be starker.

Trust is at the heart of all healthy relationships. It helps you open up, get personal, and feel safe and comfortable enough to move closer — to deepen the relationship for the long term.

In business as in life, relationships matter, and they depend on trust. That said, business leaders haven’t quite captured the opportunity to engender trust with prospects and customers. While 84% of executives think that customers highly trust their company, only 27% of customers say the same, according to PwC’s 2023 Trust Survey.¹ This trust gap suggests a significant disconnect and a real opportunity. When you’re close to your customers, they will be more likely to come to you when they need something. The surest way to establish meaningful trust is by making your counterpart in the relationship feel heard and understood, not by pushing a sale. Modern marketers do just that: They nurture and enhance relationships with their customers to help pull them in. And that’s not just good business — it's proof you care.

With 82% of consumers willing to share their personal data² in exchange for a more personalized experience, marketing leaders have an unprecedented opportunity to get beyond the next transaction and go deeper in your relationship. At the same time, you have an unprecedented responsibility to listen carefully and act accordingly, all while protecting your customer’s privacy in the process. One slip and that 82% will likely decrease. Bank on it.

If used right, customer data makes it possible to anticipate evolving needs and elevate the customer experience. To build trust with customers, though, you must first take steps that demonstrate to them you’re in it for them:

1. Stop selling

Nothing turns off a potential buyer more than the seller fast-forwarding to a transaction prematurely. Ultimately, it cheapens your brand, undermines your relationship and trades short-term opportunities for the long-term trust that’s fundamental to building long-term customer lifetime value. In a recent PwC Pulse Survey, only about one-third of CMOs strongly agree that they effectively use personalization to attract customers, yet marketers are uniquely positioned to employ tools to close the trust gap, if given the time.³ Modern tools can help marketers translate listening into a responsive interaction model faster than ever. So use them. Deploy tools that deepen understanding of your prospects’ needs, their wants, even their hopes and fears. Start selling when your customer is ready. If you listen closely, you’ll know when to begin, and your customers will be receptive.

2. Start imagining

The design of a bespoke customer journey and the corresponding experiences matter at every juncture of the customer interaction. Retention and advancement along the customer journey rely on each interaction showcasing empathy and anticipating wants and needs. GenAI is a powerful tool available to design those empathetic journeys on the fly and to generate digital content that deepens resonance with the customer. According to the Pulse Survey, 54% of CMOs are increasing investments in marketing AI use cases.³ With AI-enabled listening tools able to discern intangibles like sentiment and planned actions, it’s not only possible to develop a better understanding of your customer’s attitude and interests — you can deliver enhanced and personalized experiences that cater to their ever-fluctuating behaviors and preferences.

3. Address segments of one

According to Adobe, companies that create personalized experiences grow year-over-year incremental revenue by 1.7x, and more than double the lifetime value of their customers.⁴ Personalized experiences ranging from product recommendations to remembering user preferences can give your business the kind of human touch that makes each customer feel heard and valued — motivating them to keep coming back.

More than half of consumers say they would stop buying from a company that they otherwise liked after several bad experiences, and 8% say they would stop after just one bad experience.² It doesn’t take more than an error or two to lose trust and jeopardize a relationship. When harnessing customer data to deduce sentiment or intent, it’s important to strive for near-certainty. Even hitting the mark 90% of the time means 10% of your communications can be a 100% turn off for some customers. Narrow that uncertainty gap.

4. Act responsibly: Build privacy and security into everything

When handling customer data, don’t limit yourself to baseline levels of compliance. Comply with regulations that don’t exist yet but should exist or are expected to be in place in the future. In the Trust Survey, two-thirds of both consumers and employees say it’s very important for companies to disclose data privacy policies, but only 42% of organizations say they do.¹ Articulate your stance on privacy in terms that are easy to understand, not loaded with legalese. Be transparent about how and why you plan to use their data, and importantly, what they’ll get in return and for how long. Go the extra mile to engender trust in your privacy policies and treatment of their data and your customers will be on your side.

Summary

Regardless of the number of customers you have, the size of your company or your share of the market, good business is and will always be an intimate, human endeavor. Trust cannot be assumed. It has to be earned and carefully maintained. When used responsibly, modern tools such as customer data platforms, multi-dimensional GenAI and flexible content management systems can help close the trust gap and inspire the lasting loyalty that can keep your business growing long into the future.

Sources:

^{_{1 PwC. “PwC’s 2023 Trust Survey”, 2023}}_{^{2 PwC. “Creating loyalty in volatile times, PwC Customer Loyalty Survey 2022”, 2022.

3 PwC. “CMO and marketing leaders, Latest findings from PwC’s Pulse Survey”, 2023.

4 Adobe. “Building the future of ecommerce”, 2021.}}

Putting the personal back in personalization