By Adrien Boillat

As business leaders come to recognise the strategic imperative of customisation, a crucial question emerges: how can they move from intention to execution without undermining profitability? While personalisation is an appealing promise, implementing it requires a profound transformation not only of offerings, but also of structures, processes and managerial mindsets.

The strategic prerequisites

Any personalisation initiative rests on one essential condition: strategic clarity. Before investing in tools, processes or skills, the business owner must examine the foundations of the approach in order to ensure its viability and consistency.

First, it is necessary to identify the customer segments for which personalisation will create the most value: not all of them justify the same level of investment. Next, the company must determine the dimensions along which personalisation will provide a distinctive competitive advantage. Personalising does not mean adapting everything for everyone: a company may choose to tailor its product offering while keeping customer service standardised, or the reverse. Finally, it is essential to assess the resources the company is willing to commit over the long term. Customisation is not a one-off project: it implies a lasting transformation of the operating model.

Customisation is not added onto an existing organisation, it reconfigures it

Once these foundations are in place, implementing customisation rests on three interdependent pillars, none of which can be neglected.

• Governance is the first pillar: who steers the strategy when the data falls under marketing, technology depends on IT and commercial objectives are the responsibility of sales? Without clear cross-functional governance, initiatives become fragmented, data remains siloed and efforts cancel each other out.

• Data forms the second pillar: the company must equip itself with a unified platform capable of aggregating interaction histories in order to provide each employee with a complete, up-to-date view.

• Culture, finally, is the third pillar, and arguably the hardest to build. The aim is to embed across the entire organisation the conviction that personalisation is a strategic lever. This requires promoting adaptive behaviours, integrating dedicated performance indicators and maintaining constant managerial communication about the purpose of this transformation.

However, even before mobilising these three pillars, it is essential to recognise that an ambitious rollout does not necessarily require a large-scale deployment. There is a middle path, less spectacular but just as effective: a gradual approach. Faced with the often prohibitive costs of full personalisation, this approach consists in starting with a narrow scope, a critical touchpoint such as onboarding or after-sales service, in order to generate visible results while limiting risk. Each initiative then becomes an experiment: you test, measure and adjust. This iterative logic encourages team buy-in and avoids heavy investment in unsuitable solutions.

It is clear that the shift from a standardisation logic to a personalisation logic is neither a passing fad nor a whim of increasingly demanding customers. It reflects a structural evolution in expectations and technological possibilities. The question is therefore no longer whether your company should commit to this path, but at what pace and with which priorities. The tools exist, the methodologies are proven and the benefits have been demonstrated. What remains is to take the leap, with lucidity and determination.

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