Putting the Person back in Personalisation: How Service Design Can Bridge the Gap

Is it me or is personalisation is the buzzword of the moment? From targeted ads to AI-driven recommendations, every company is striving to personalise its offerings to enhance customer experience. But here's the thing: personalisation is often confused with what it truly means to be personal.

What exactly do I mean?

For me, the distinction is critical. Personal means a service or product that’s specific to an individual - addressing unique needs and solving specific problems, or helping achieve a desired outcome. Personalisation, on the other hand, often feels more like an algorithm-driven attempt to group similar profiles, often based on superficial characteristics. While personalisation is intended to improve experiences, it frequently adds friction or frustration by making interactions feel impersonal and overly sales-driven.

Can Service Design help create truly Personal Experiences?

I believe that the best experiences are built on a deep understanding of an individual user’s journey. Service design goes beyond surface-level personalisation and looks holistically at how services or products are curated and how people interact with them, identifying pain points, motivations, and needs at every touchpoint.

This approach allows us to craft personal experiences, not just personalised ones. Instead of relying on data to push out generic recommendations or offers, service design helps create and deliver meaningful interactions that feel unique. For example, instead of sending a person a series of automated emails because they fit a certain demographic profile, a well-designed service would recognise the context of that customer’s engagement and deliver relevant information in a human-centred way.

The Frustration of Personalisation

It’s important to acknowledge that personalisation - when done poorly - can actually add friction or frustration to an experience. Despite its intent to streamline, it often has the opposite effect.

• Over-targeting and Intrusiveness: We’ve all been there - after browsing for something online, we’re bombarded with ads and emails. Personalisation algorithms decide we’re in the market for something, and suddenly we’re being over-targeted. This can create an invasive feeling that puts the customer off rather than drawing them in. According to a Gartner report, 38% of consumers disengage from brands because of overly aggressive marketing tactics.
• One-size-fits-all Personalisation: Personalisation often treats individuals as part of a broader persona or group rather than as unique individuals. As a result, experiences designed to feel tailored can fall flat because they don’t reflect the person’s actual needs or context. The paradox here is that the more brands try to personalise at scale, the less personal it feels.

Where Service Design Adds Value

Service design can transform these friction points by focusing on the individual’s real experience rather than relying solely on algorithmic insights. It allows us to ask critical questions like:

• What is the customer trying to achieve at this point in their journey?
• Where are the pain points that personalisation could be addressing but isn’t?
• How can we create an interaction that feels human, relevant, and valuable?

By designing services that respond to an individuals needs in real-time, we can reduce the reliance on mass personalisation tactics that may miss the mark. This creates a genuinely personal experience - one that’s specific to the individual and provides real value.

Evidence of Personalisation’s Value - and Its Limits

Personalisation certainly has its strengths. Research shows that personalised experiences can boost engagement and satisfaction. A recent Epsilon study found that 80% of consumers are more likely to do business with companies offering personalised experiences. Tailored email campaigns, product recommendations, and targeted content can increase conversion rates - Experian found that personalised emails can increase click-through rates by 14%.

But here’s where we need to be cautious: the same studies show that poorly executed personalisation frustrates customers, leading to what I call personalisation fatigue. A SmarterHQ report found that while 72% of consumers engage with personalised messaging when it’s relevant, irrelevant or excessive personalisation pushes them away - but do the benefits outweigh the frustrations when the numbers are finally crunched?

This is where service design steps in to refine the approach. Personalisation, when used in isolation, is often disconnected from the broader individuals experience. But through service design, we can map out the journey, identify touchpoints where personalisation adds real value, and balance those moments with authentic, human-centred experiences.

Finding the Balance: When Is Personalisation Enough?

So, when does personalisation cross the line from helpful to intrusive? For me, it’s about creating experiences that are relevant and timely - not constant. It’s about making sure that personalisation serves the customer’s needs, rather than the company’s sales targets. And most importantly, it’s about ensuring that we’re solving real problems, not just marketing to personas.

By combining the insights of personalisation with the deep understanding that service design provides, we can create experiences that feel personal - without overwhelming customers. For example, rather than using personalisation to bombard a customer with recommendations based on past purchases, we could use service design to understand when they actually need support and provide timely, valuable solutions.

Moving Toward Truly Personal Experiences

So my thoughts... where AI and digital tools dominate customer interactions, the opportunity to design truly personal experiences is greater than ever. As we integrate personalisation into our strategies, we must also consider how service design and a human-centred approach can reduce friction, frustration, remove impersonal elements, and create experiences that genuinely matter.

For me, this is the next frontier of customer experience. Personalisation is a tool, but real value comes when we combine it with a deep understanding of the customer journey and design services that make the experience personal, meaningful, and frictionless.

Try these practical steps to take a Service Design to make experiences more personal:

• Map the Customer Journey in Detail

Start by creating a comprehensive customer journey map that highlights every interaction point a customer has with your service. Use qualitative research like interviews and observations to understand their motivations, pain points, and emotional states at each stage. This helps in identifying moments where personalisation can add real value by responding to their actual needs - rather than pushing irrelevant content.

• Contextualise Personalisation with Real-Time Insights

Rather than relying solely on static data (like past purchases or demographics - although this is still important to factor in), leverage real-time context to personalise interactions. For example, if a customer is navigating your website looking for help, prioritise guiding them to the right solution based on their current activity - not just a product recommendation based on past behaviour. This allows you to deliver more relevant, timely, and personal experience.

• Prototype and Test Human-Centred Solutions

Service design is all about iteration. Use prototypes to test different personalised experiences with real users. Gather feedback and refine the experience to ensure that it feels personal and valuable, rather than generic or invasive. Focus on creating interactions that solve specific customer problems in a meaningful way, while avoiding the “one-size-fits-all” approach to personalisation.

I hope you have enjoyed this article,

Keep doing amazing things,

Ben