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Eric Channing Brown, VP of Corporate Marketing

‘Me’ Culture Survey Reveals Nuances of Customer Preferences Around Speed & Personalization

By Eric Channing Brown, VP of Corporate MarketingSeptember 18, 2018

Personalization. Digitization. Real-time interactions. Our culture is rapidly shifting to a focus on immediacy and intimacy at levels we didn’t even imagine just a few years ago.

But what does this mean for business and what does it mean for your enterprise in particular?

Companies have started investing heavily in customer experience initiatives, but many are still failing to deliver, mainly because they aren’t engaging their customers in personalized ways from early on in their journey.

When it comes to delivering on customer experience initiatives, it helps to know exactly what your audience’s expectations are and how buyers prioritize the various ways an enterprise can provide faster, more personalized service and/or products.

That’s why DataStax decided to go out and ask a large group of international adults exactly what their thoughts are around personalization and real-time interactions. How long are they willing to wait? How much are they willing to pay?

Among the survey’s findings:

  • Most international adults will spend more money for faster service.
  • More than half of US adults will share personal data with a company that personalizes its services/products for them.
  • More than half of international adults trust a digital source (rather than a significant other!) for product recommendations.
  • US millennials are willing to pay 40% more for data than other generations.

We call this the ‘Me’ Culture: a culture that starts and ends with an individual’s immediate needs and desires, and in which enterprises must learn to proactively engage customers and prospects with offers and content that appeal uniquely to them—without being too aggressive or turning them off (a delicate balance).

There also appear to be differences in people’s willingness to pay more for faster service or for higher personalization depending on the type of service or product that is being offered, and depending on the person’s nationality and age group.

Knowing what’s going on in your prospective customer’s head is step one to winning them over. In the ‘Me’ Culture, people want faster, more personalized service, yes, but the reality is far more nuanced than this, and our survey has managed to capture some of these key nuances.

Get the full survey results here. And to learn more about how DataStax can help your company improve customer experience, go here.


