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Personalization and Customization are both in trend. They are responsible for enhancing customer experience, driving a brand’s sales, and powering businesses. Both of these terms are often mistaken to be alike. But they are very opposite of each other.
Let’s try and understand the difference between personalization and customization in a bit of detail.
What is Personalization?
Personalization means ‘for the user’. In terms of digital products, personalization is a method of showing content or products relevant to its users based on their interests and needs. Products or items are changed or modified by the system, depending upon the individual’s data, insights, profiles, and likes. Many times these options are left to the consumer to decide the level and type of personalization they would prefer. It could be a matter of sensitivity as well but mostly looked at as a premium good to have.
What is Customization?
Customization means ‘by the user’. Customization is the process of allowing a consumer to make changes to a product or an item based on their preferences and desires. Consumers can modify the products manually according to their needs. No type of data analytics or insights is involved here. Customization can be personal but usually addresses a larger band of user groups.
What is the difference between Personalization and Customization?
Personalization and Customization are crucial for establishing a successful business. The main difference between these two lies as to who is ‘responsible for the control’. In personalization, websites recommend content or products based on user’s likes, dislikes, interests, and the data gathered by them to meet expectations. The application or the system performs all the activities and not the user. It has always been present there.
Whereas, in customization, the users can replace or change the contents or products themselves. They take an additional step to filter or stop seeing the content irrelevant to them.
Personalization requires extra costs for maintaining its features and meeting their demands. Customization needs a higher budget to keep up to date with its interaction cost.
What are the benefits of Personalization and Customization?
Personalization and Customization in a digital product experience could offer a variety of services to develop a business and help in its growth. It can be advantageous in the long run. Avenues can easily be provided to customize or personalize digital consumer services. Below is a list of the benefits provided by them.
- Scaling your business and increase in sales
Many organizations are always on the lookout for techniques that enables them to grow their business and drive more sales. They always want to keep on improving and stand out from their competition. Both personalization and customization provide features and services to track customers’ data, insights, and attributes. Improved custom services are often appreciated by the end users and help enroll more subscriptions at a premium. Product marketing uses it to promote higher value and a red carpet , 5 star experience to its customers.
- Meeting everyone’s tailor-made requirements with auto customization
These features offer experiences based on the well analyzed requirements and needs of the customers. Search engines like Google and Bing have services like Google News and Bing News. Both of these news sites can recommend news based on what an individual has read. The readers do not have to go through the tiresome and monotonous process of looking at content irrelevant to them. They can even customize their news feed by choosing options beneficial for them. These trends of auto customization based on interactions, browsing and consumer’s digital behavior have been hugely popular with online media, streaming service, ecommerce and other digital businesses.
- Building customer loyalty
Brands need to maintain a good relationship with their customers and offer them an enriching experience, gamifications , rewards and followers. Personalization and Customization can connect with their target audience and provide a unique experience. It helps improve conversion, higher number of followers, engagement and thereby help generate more revenue.
Personalization and Customization are equally essential for growing a business. Both of these methods target the end-users differently, but their main goal is to satisfy the needs and demands of their customers and with the digital products and services these have shown positive improvement in engaging with the customers across all touchpoints of either services.
With omniscopy, learn from the existing old site and service as to what your customers are really doing vs what you heard from some reports. Omniscopy helps narrow and pinpoint exact pain points where customization or personalization or both could be a value add to your digital strategy with minimal investment and then track these further in your updated digital product launch, site redesign or whatever the focus you might have for your digital business.