Is Your Brand Making Your Customers Feel Seen or Watched?

Retailers can provide consumers with incredibly precise product recommendations and uniquely personalized offers by tracking their digital footprint across channels. You can learn a lot about your shoppers’ needs and preferences this way. Hyper-personalization takes it to another level with the help of real-time AI powered data and analytics.

The Dual Nature of Hyper-personalization

AI has the capacity to understand every interaction of every customer, tracking visits and personalizing touchpoints to be laser focused. It helps retailers engage with customers at every step, pinpointing their exact needs. For example, you can generate customized product lists and time alerts or offers based on data about your customer’s past purchases and interests.

Top retailers use AI to create custom webpages, making their shoppers feel like the site was designed just for them.

However, as beneficial as AI-driven, hyper-personalization sounds for retailers and customers alike, there’s more to it than what meets the eye. Besides concerns around customer privacy and data protection, the main criticism against hyper-personalized retail services is that they don’t feel personal—or rather, human.

As digital and social ads follow people everywhere, tapping into their preferences and offering them recommendations and special deals, these ads can easily make customers feel intimidated and watched—instead of valued and cared for.

There’s a significant difference between being seen and being watched, after all. Using technology without considering the human element will likely not lead to building trust and long-lasting relationships with your customers.

Human Interactions Are Still Key

Personalized digital touchpoints may bring some conversions by creating a sense of urgency and catering to impulse shopping, but their ability to drive customer loyalty is limited. People can only connect with other people, and for that, human interactions are needed.

As recent surveys uncover repeatedly, people still prefer to do most of their retail shopping in store. Why? Because they’re seeking that personal touch.

In our survey of more than 2,000 U.S. consumers, we discovered that 36 percent still shop exclusively in-store, while 34 percent shop both in-store and online. In contrast, only 4 percent shop exclusively online.

Whether it’s trying on a piece of clothing, receiving custom recommendations, or avoiding the hassle of online returns, one thing remains clear: the biggest drivers of customer trust and loyalty are knowledgeable store associates providing great service.

As our survey results show, five of the top 10 responses highlighted the importance of accessible, knowledgeable and helpful employees. They’re the ones who can transform a personalized shopping journey into a truly humanized experience.

Balancing the Need for Human Touch with Digital Efficiency

Besides craving humanized retail experiences, today’s consumers also have high expectations for speedy and convenient services. However, it’s not economically feasible to hire enough employees to make every interaction a human interaction.

Instead, what you can do is turn to technological solutions that augment human employees by removing simple, repetitive tasks from their workflow.

Intelligent virtual assistants, for example, can handle simple inquiries so that your agents can focus on more complex tasks, such as building customer relationships. Instead of replacing human employees, such digital solutions can enhance human capabilities and shift interactions from transactional personalization to a more empathic exchange that can build genuine connections between brands and customers.

When implemented correctly, technology can drive great experiences for both the customers and employees. Verint specialized, AI-powered bots are designed to focus on a given task to deliver real business outcomes.

Retailers who effectively blend a human touch with intelligent solutions to deliver a seamless CX are expected to be the biggest winners in 2025.

Here are a few examples of how retailers have used digital technology to deliver a more personalized experience without an uncomfortable, “I’m being watched” perception.

• Digital appointment booking can enable more personalized interactions and help keep customers engaged. That’s how a leading travel agency increased vacation bookings by five percent, with a 48 percent higher conversion rate for booked appointments than walk-ins alone. This premium customer experience encouraged customers to return to the store and tell their friends about their positive experience, highly improving loyalty and word of mouth.

• Another retailer was able to engage with more customers in store with digital queue management. Not only were customers directed to the right store associate for help, but the wait times were reduced by half, improving NPS by 40 percent and doubling staff productivity.

• Collecting and acting on customer feedback is another great way to create truly personalized retail experiences. A retail brand identified key problems with its BOPIS (buy online, pick up in-store) service by gathering valuable customer feedback. This enabled the brand to prioritize actions for ongoing CX improvements, leading to a 17-point increase in NPS and a 72 percent increase in BOPIS orders.

• Struggling to keep up with the increased demand, a large ecommerce business reimagined how customers can engage with its contact center. Using channel automation, the company now provides seamless customer conversations across channels, reducing their response time from up to 10 days to an impressive 24 minutes.

Drive Customer Loyalty Further in 2025

Given these high customer expectations, retailers are best served by using all the tools they can to maintain positive relationships with their customers. Because a single bad experience can drive your shoppers away from your brand, building long-lasting customer loyalty is crucial for retaining customers and driving sales.

Achieving this involves balancing humanized experiences with efficient digital solutions.

If you’d like to hear more about how to optimize the human touch both in-store and online, join us at NRF’25: Retail’s Big Show National Retail Federation on January 11-14, 2025, in New York City. Verint’s retail solutions for CX and customer engagement can help you see your brand through the eyes of your customers to increase sales, CX and loyalty.

Schedule time to speak to a Verint expert on-site. We hope to see you there!