The stock answer to this is that "actual personalization" doesn't scale. But I think that's BS. It comes from people who think of web business customers as datapoints—heartless automatons traversing A/B test optimized sign-up funnels.
Today's and tomorrow's high-margin businesses do and will invest in real humans. It's truly mind-blowing that Apple can find and very comfortably pay nice, smart, real people who can understand the problems of any customer who walks in off the street and fix them, one by one. But they do.
I think that the future of support / customer service / customer development / marketing involves more humans and less automation. I'm part of the Intercom team and we've designed the first version of our product to fill the gap between now and that future—we have a great amount of automation and a great amount of one-to-one communication features, integrated tightly together. By design, we don't allow our customers to send automated messages that can't be responded to because we know that the real value happens when real people get involved.
Today's and tomorrow's high-margin businesses do and will invest in real humans. It's truly mind-blowing that Apple can find and very comfortably pay nice, smart, real people who can understand the problems of any customer who walks in off the street and fix them, one by one. But they do.
I think that the future of support / customer service / customer development / marketing involves more humans and less automation. I'm part of the Intercom team and we've designed the first version of our product to fill the gap between now and that future—we have a great amount of automation and a great amount of one-to-one communication features, integrated tightly together. By design, we don't allow our customers to send automated messages that can't be responded to because we know that the real value happens when real people get involved.