Personalization has become a priority for loyalty teams as brands look for ways to make customer experiences more relevant and strengthen individual relationships. With more customer data, increasingly sophisticated technology, and new AI capabilities, organizations have more opportunities than ever to understand customers and tailor how they engage with them.
But having the ability to personalize does not necessarily mean customers will experience a brand as more personal. The challenge is determining which customer signals actually matter, turning those insights into consistent experiences, and expanding personalization beyond offers and promotions to create interactions that demonstrate genuine understanding of the customer.
Loyalty360 asked leaders from Loyalty Partner Solutions, ITA Group, Baesman, Braze, and Kobie what prevents personalization from scaling, how brands can identify and activate the right customer signals, and what it will take to build more meaningful personalized experiences as technology continues to evolve.
Contributors
- Jochen Lehner, Head of Marketing, Loyalty Partner Solutions
- Max Kenkel, Sr. Manager - Customer Loyalty Solutions, ITA Group
- Sydney Shapiro, Strategic Account Executive, CRM & Loyalty, Baesman
- Ishan Sharma, Principal Creative Strategist, Braze
- Hayley Hanel, Sr. Manager, Strategic Consulting, Kobie
Why Personalization Struggles to Scale
Personalization can be relatively straightforward to demonstrate through an individual campaign or use case. The greater challenge is turning those successes into a capability that operates consistently across customers, channels, and touchpoints.
“Most personalization efforts fail because brands try to solve for perfect personalization before mastering the fundamentals. Disconnected data, unclear ownership, and overly complex technology stacks make it difficult to operationalize,” said Sydney Shapiro, Strategic Account Executive, CRM & Loyalty at Baesman.
Rather than attempting to build the most sophisticated personalization strategy immediately, Shapiro recommends starting with a few high-impact use cases, establishing strong data governance, and creating decisioning frameworks that can evolve over time.
The challenge also extends beyond technology. Scaling personalization requires coordination across teams that may have different priorities, resources, and definitions of success.
“According to Kobie's 2026 Heart of Loyalty research, when practitioners were asked why recognition doesn't scale (the highest-impact personalization lever), 40% cited resource constraints and 42% pointed to operational complexity,” said Hayley Hanel, Sr. Manager, Strategic Consulting at Kobie. She adds, “Most companies still have customer data, marketing execution, analytics, and customer experience teams working toward different priorities with different measures of success. That's where momentum tends to stall.”
Clear ownership and greater alignment across those functions can help brands move personalization from isolated campaigns to a capability that works across the broader customer experience. But even with those foundations in place, brands still need the ability to act on customer insights when and where they matter.
“Timing and execution matter just as much as data: the relevant message, offer, or service must reach the customer at the right moment and remain consistent across channels,” said Jochen Lehner, Head of Marketing at Loyalty Partner Solutions.
For brands working to scale personalization, the goal may be less about achieving one-to-one personalization everywhere and more about making relevant experiences repeatable. Unified data, clear ownership, cross-functional alignment, and consistent execution can provide the foundation to start with focused use cases and expand what works.
Finding the Customer Signals That Actually Matter
Brands have access to more customer data than ever before, but more information does not necessarily lead to better personalization. The greater opportunity is determining which signals provide meaningful insight into customer needs, behaviors, and motivations.
“The most valuable data is what enables brands to understand their customers as people, not just their transactions. The signals that tell you how they engage, when they show up, who they are, and why they keep coming back are those that enable truly effective loyalty personalization,” said Ishan Sharma, Principal Creative Strategist at Braze.
Transactional data can reveal what customers purchase, while engagement patterns, preferences, interests, and motivations provide additional context about the relationship. Some of the strongest signals may come directly from customers themselves.
“Zero-party data remains the most valuable signal. When a customer directly tells you something about themselves, whether it's a preference, interest, need, or motivation, that information carries far more weight than an inferred assumption,” said Hanel.
Kobie’s research found that 71% of consumers are willing to share information through smaller, repeated interactions such as quizzes, polls, and preference centers, compared with 55% who are willing to complete a comprehensive profile all at once. That gives loyalty programs an opportunity to progressively learn about members throughout the relationship rather than attempting to build a complete profile immediately.
However, even the right customer signals create limited value without a clear strategy for putting them to work.
“Success comes from how effectively you use the information you have, aligning it with your loyalty, marketing, and brand strategies, then executing consistently,” said Max Kenkel, Sr. Manager - Customer Loyalty Solutions at ITA Group.
For loyalty leaders, the goal may be less about building the largest possible customer profile and more about identifying the information that can meaningfully improve an experience. Knowing which signals matter, and where they can be activated, creates a more practical path toward personalization that customers can recognize and value.
Personalization Beyond the Offer
Personalization in loyalty has often centered on delivering the right offer or reward to the right customer. As those capabilities become more common, however, brands have an opportunity to think more broadly about what makes an experience actually feel personal.
“What differentiates is consideration – a surprise that delights, a convenience that makes life easier, a moment of recognition, a story worth telling a friend, an experience worth sharing. That’s the difference between a transactional program and a personalized one,” said Sharma.
Those moments do not necessarily need to come through a loyalty platform or digital channel. Employees interacting directly with customers can also play an important role, particularly when they have the information and tools to recognize individual needs and preferences.
“Arm the frontline. An engaged and activated frontline is going to be the face of your brand to most customers. Leverage them. Train them. Empower them to get to know customers and deliver moments of emotional connection at the POS of sale and in store. And give them tools to quickly recall customer info,” said Kenkel.
Together, those approaches expand personalization beyond determining which promotion a customer should receive. Recognition, convenience, service, and meaningful human interactions can demonstrate that a brand understands the individual behind the transaction and gives customers a reason to continue the relationship.
Preparing Personalization for What Comes Next
As personalization capabilities advance, brands will have more opportunities to automate decisions and tailor experiences at an individual level. AI will accelerate that shift, but greater automation will also make governance and human judgment increasingly important.
“Automation should be treated as an assistant, not a manager,” said Sharma. “This is a rare moment in marketing history where human creativity has some of the greatest potential it’s ever had – because for the first time, we have the tools to bring more ambitious customer experience ideas to life.”
Technology can give loyalty teams greater speed and efficiency while allowing people to focus on the strategy, creativity, and customer understanding that make personalization meaningful. But as AI takes on a larger role in decisioning, brands will also need clear guardrails around where automation can act independently and where human oversight should remain.