Recommendations as personalized marketing: insights from customer experiences

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is an exploratory study of customers’ “lived” experiences of commercial recommendation services to better understand customer expectations for personalization with recommendation agents. Recommendation agents programmed to “learn” customer preferences and make personalized recommendations of products and services are considered a useful tool for targeting customers individually. Some leading service firms have developed proprietary recommender systems in the hope that personalized recommendations could engage customers, increase satisfaction and sharpen their competitive edge. However, personalized recommendations do not always deliver customer satisfaction. More often, they lead to dissatisfaction, annoyance or irritation. Design/methodology/approach – The critical incident technique is used to analyze customer satisfactory or dissatisfactory incidents collected from online group discussion participants and bloggers to develop a classification scheme. Findings – A clas...

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