Customer Experience University - Winning Loyalty & Engagement One Customer at a Time
Jul 10, 2026 · 11 min · 8 segments
Everyone now owns the same AI personalization tools — so personalization can no longer be your loyalty strategy. In this episode, Joseph Michelli separates loyalty from retention and makes the data…
Joseph MichelliHost
When a website greets you by name, recommends the exact running shoe you were just looking at, remembers your size, your last order, and the fact that you like Tuesday delivery, do you feel loved or do you feel handled? Be honest, because most of what we call personalization in 2026 lands squarely in the second bucket.
It's competent, it's convenient, and it's increasingly identical to what the brand across the street is doing because the brand across the street licensed the same recommendation engine from the same vendor.
Every one of them convinced that knowing your data is the same thing as knowing you.
And the gap between those two things, between knowing your data and knowing you, is where the next decade of customer loyalty is going to be won or lost.
When a website greets you by name, recommends the exact running shoe you were just looking at, remembers your size, your last order, and the fact that you like Tuesday delivery, do you feel loved or do you feel handled? Be honest, because most of what we call personalization in 2026 lands squarely in the second bucket.
It's competent, it's convenient, and it's increasingly identical to what the brand across the street is doing because the brand across the street licensed the same recommendation engine from the same vendor.
Every one of them convinced that knowing your data is the same thing as knowing you.
And the gap between those two things, between knowing your data and knowing you, is where the next decade of customer loyalty is going to be won or lost.
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