GUIDE + INFOGRAPHIC9 Ways to Personalize Customer Communications with CCM
by MHC Team | October 13th, 2025
Over the past decade, we’ve seen some dramatic changes in the way businesses communicate with customers. The days of one-size-fits-all messaging have given way to improved customer communications personalized to meet the needs of specific audiences. In the past year, we’ve seen artificial intelligence (AI) reshape business communications in ways that wouldn’t have seemed possible not long ago.
Looking ahead to 2026, customer communications will become even more tailored as businesses use personalization to build stronger customer relationships. AI tools are enabling organizations to tailor messaging to customers’ individual needs. Omnichannel communications, real-time data analysis, and other tech-driven advancements are driving a new era of hyper-personalization. Read on to learn how personalized communications will shape your business in the coming year.
Table of Contents
- What Are Personalized Communications?
- Why Are They Important to Customers?
- Why Customers Expect Personalized Experiences In 2025 and Beyond
- AI Is Powering the Future of Personalization
- What Are the Risks of a Non-Personalized Customer Experience? (+ Video)
- Why Is It Important for Businesses to Personalize Customer Communications?
- The Key Benefits of Personalized Communications
- How To Begin Personalizing Customer Communication
- Automate Personalized Communication with CCM Software
- How to Personalize Customer Communications Using the MHC CCM Platform
- 9 Ways to Personalize Customer Communications with MHC Infographic
Key Takeaways
- Personalization means targeting communications to meet a particular customer’s needs and preferences.
- Customers respond to personalization because it makes them feel that businesses see them as people rather than anonymous numbers.
- At least 80% of consumers are more likely to buy from a business with a personalized experience.
- Non-personalized communications can alienate customers by making them feel like interchangeable commodities rather than individuals.
- Personalized communications drive customer loyalty, generate valuable customer data, and deliver a strong return on investment.
- Observing customers, collecting data, and conducting thorough consumer behavior research are important steps to beginning your personalization journey.
- An automated CCM solution with artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning capability is the most reliable path to personalized communication.
What Are Personalized Communications?
Personalized customer communications are targeted to meet the specific needs of a particular customer. That may include communications crafted from scratch for a given customer, but it more frequently refers to an existing piece of messaging or content that has been tailored to target the business needs and general preferences of a specific audience.
A full 80% of consumers say they are more likely to buy from businesses that offer a personalized experience, making this one of the most important and rapidly evolving areas of modern customer communications.
While personalization will look different for every organization and every customer base, there are some frequently used examples that can be applied to nearly any industry and business model.
On the customer side,
the benefits of personalized communications include:
- Personalized product recommendations
In the retail or e-commerce space, personalized recommendations such as “customers also buy” and “suggested based on your interests” areas let customers know that you understand their unique tastes and preferences. - Personalized address
More than 60% of customers feel that businesses see them only as numbers. Addressing customers using their names and preferred pronouns goes a long way toward making them feel seen and valued by your company. - Memberships and exclusive access
A personalized CCM strategy allows you to engage customers with special promotions and memberships in exclusive clubs. That might include offering special deals for “Preferred Customers” or encouraging customers to collect points toward future rewards. - Personalized offers
Your CCM system makes it easy to automatically trigger personalized communications such as reminders of upcoming refills and renewals, special offers for birthdays and other significant dates, promotions for customers who haven’t purchased in a certain timeframe, and much more.
On the business side,
the benefits of personalized communications include:
- Messaging based on customer journeys
Segmenting customers into groups based on their stage in the customer journey is an effective tool for letting customers know that you’re engaged with their experience, whether they’re still considering a purchase or are already loyal to your brand. - A/B testing
Being able to test different forms of content and messaging on different segments of your audience allows your business to scale and adapt communications to boost their effectiveness. - Messaging based on geolocation
Segmenting communications to target customers in specific geographic locations allows your business to tailor messaging based on seasonal changes, proximity to physical stores, annual events, and other location-specific factors. - Targeted live chats and in-app messages
Tracking customer journeys can put an organization in a unique position to offer assistance and guidance at times when customers need it most. Chatbots and in-app messaging that are triggered by specific customer actions can play a big role in guiding customers to finalize a purchase.
Why Are Personalized Communications Important to Customers?
Customers prefer personalized interactions with businesses for a very simple reason: personalization treats them like people. No one likes being thought of as just another number in the system, or as only a potential sale.
Personalized communications make customers feel valued and let them know that your business is dedicated to addressing their specific needs and preferences.
As an example, let’s consider personalized communications for financial companies. Say you’re in the market for a new bank. After doing some online research and requesting more information, you receive emails from two competing banks.
The first one is a generic form email that lists some of the bank’s popular services, includes a mission statement, and provides links to its general customer service team.
The second one addresses you by name, provides details specific to the services you’ve been searching for, and offers links to team members who deal in those particular areas.
If you’re like most customers, the second approach is going to make a bigger impact. To get a little more specific, customers prefer to receive personalized communication because it:
- Demonstrates that your business is able to provide exactly the services, products, and experience that they are looking for.
- Lets them know that you understand their needs and can anticipate what they want before they even ask for it.
- Indicates that you will respond quickly and accurately when they have questions in the future.
- Spares them unwanted messaging about topics that aren’t relevant to their interests.
- Makes them feel seen and cared about in an environment that can often feel cold and impersonal.
Why Customers Expect Personalized Experiences In 2025 and Beyond
Sometimes technological advances are a two-way street. As it has become easier for businesses to tailor their messaging to specific customer groups, customers have also come to expect a strong degree of personalization from businesses. McKinsey research even shows that 76% of customers say they get frustrated by communications that aren’t personalized.
- That demand has only intensified since the COVID-19 pandemic drove a boom in online commerce. In order to differentiate themselves from competitors, businesses have adopted more personalized approaches to reaching customers.
- Over the past decade, many consumers have become accustomed to personalization. While concerns about data privacy remain, nearly 70% of customers say they are comfortable with businesses targeting them with personalized communication as long as their data isn’t being sold. In fact, 56% of consumers become repeat customers of businesses that offer personalized communications. That is especially true of younger consumers, with nearly half of Gen Z shoppers saying they are less likely to make a purchase from a business that does not personalize its communications.
- That could mean a shopping site making recommendations based on their past purchases, a company newsletter that gives special focus to one of their areas of interest, or a landing page tailored to their specific demographic.
- Omnichannel communications also create greater opportunities for personalization. For example, a retail business might use a different tone while promoting a product via Instagram than it would to promote the same product via email.
- And of course artificial intelligence (AI) has already transformed customer communications and will continue to do so. With more than 900 million people worldwide using AI, including 82% of businesses, AI-powered personalization is already becoming the standard for customer communications. Investing in AI-powered automation tools is no longer just a good idea – it’s a necessity.
AI Is Powering the Future of Personalization
Even as AI becomes a standard operating tool, some business leaders are still unsure about how to use it most effectively. Using AI tools gives your business access to a new level of detail in personalized communications. Customizing the sentiment, tone, length, and language of each communication to match specific customers’ preferences goes a long way toward establishing a trusting relationship. With 61% of customers saying they feel businesses see them as merely a number, a personalized experience can be a huge differentiator.
Currently, 60% of customers say that personalized experiences are more likely to gain their repeat business. CCM software assisted by AI technology gives businesses an unprecedented opportunity to tap into real-time data insights. That allows organizations to recommend products and services tailored to their specific interests and needs. It also makes it easy to deliver communications via any channel they prefer, and even across different channels at the same time.
CCM VIDEO
What Are the Risks of a Non-Personalized Customer Experience?
An organization that relies mainly on generic or non-personalized communications puts itself at risk of alienating customers who feel like their needs are not being listened to.
When a customer receives a message referring to experiences that don’t reflect their own, or whose tone and language doesn’t the way they prefer to be addressed, they may begin to feel that the business does not care about them as an individual. That leaves a wide opening for competitors who do care about personalizing their communications to swoop in and take that customer’s business.
Watch this short video for an illustration of just how frustrating it can be for customers to deal with a communications system that fails to recognize their specific needs, and how easily a business that doesn’t respond to those needs can lose a valuable customer.
Why Is It Important for Businesses to Personalize Customer Communications?
As convincing as those figures are, there is also ample evidence that many businesses are unprepared to meet the demand for personalization. Surveys reveal that 85% of companies have yet to fully implement their strategies for personalized communications.
That’s good news for the 15% of businesses that have instituted personalization, as they have a unique opportunity to position themselves ahead of their competition.
Getting an extra edge isn’t the only reason for a business to increase its personalization efforts. While there are endless arguments in favor of personalizing customer communications, three key areas stand out:
Customer loyalty
Customers who receive personalized treatment are much more likely to keep coming back for more. According to McKinsey studies, more than 75% of consumers say that personalized messaging is a key factor in both choosing a brand and in making future purchases from that brand.That kind of brand loyalty also contributes to word-of-mouth advertising, as 89% of consumers are likely to share positive customer experiences with their friends and family.
Customer loyalty
Customers who receive personalized treatment are much more likely to keep coming back for more. According to McKinsey studies, more than 75% of consumers say that personalized messaging is a key factor in both choosing a brand and in making future purchases from that brand.That kind of brand loyalty also contributes to word-of-mouth advertising, as 89% of consumers are likely to share positive customer experiences with their friends and family.
Return on investment
While some organizations may bristle at the initial cost of investing in a more personalized customer communications strategy, the statistics suggest that this is one of the most sound investments a business can make.70% of marketers whose businesses employ advanced personalization practices report a striking ROI of 200%. The increase in customer engagement, positive word-of-mouth, and repeat business easily justifies the initial investment in personalization.
How To Begin Personalizing Customer Communication
Whether you’re creating personalized communications for financial services, retail marketing, manufacturing, or any other field of business, providing your CCM system with useful data is crucial. Consumer behavior research offers essential insights that help organizations understand who their customers are and what they need from personalized communications software. Examples of data collection best practices include:
- Observe Customers and Collect Data
Data collection can be a delicate balance between your needs to gather info and your customers’ need for privacy. Fortunately, many customers are eager to provide feedback and data in exchange for a more personalized experience. Along with tracking customer interactions and basic user data, take a proactive approach to data collection with surveys, polls, and interactive forms that allow users to provide their own information. - Conduct Consumer Behavior Research
Once you’ve collected the necessary customer data, you’ll need to know what to do with it. An automated CCM system with AI capability makes it simple to interpret data that helps determine which metrics and key performance indicators (KPI) you need to focus on. Understanding the ways customers truly interact with your business allows you to generate customer journey maps from beginning to end and adjust your operations accordingly. - Create Customer Personas
Once you have an idea of what customers want and how they interact with your business, you can build out personas that help you understand how best to communicate with them. For example, a financial services business or other financial institutions might create separate personas for customers mainly interested in saving for retirement and customers interested in growing their portfolios aggressively. - Segment Data and Target Communications
After creating customer personas, your next step is to segment the data you have collected and personalize your communications accordingly. For example, the retirement-minded persona may prefer email communications with a more formal tone. The aggressive investor, on the other hand, may prefer concise messages delivered via SMS or social media. Segmenting data provides a clear picture of how to best personalize your messaging for each.
The Benefits of Personalized Communications
Organizations today can’t meet the ever-changing individual needs of each of their customers without personalized communications. The customer’s perception and expectations of a service or product have rapidly evolved in recent years – digital transformation or artificial intelligence are just few already common practices companies employ in order to keep up with all of these changes.
Customer communications are no longer seen as simply transactions. Companies must deliver them on the terms the clients have set, in order to make them feel connected and loyal to their brand. Here are nine essential benefits that come with personalizing communication, and tailoring them to your customers’ needs:
- Live up to the customers’ expectations by offering them a tailor-made experience.
- Make each customer feel important and build a genuine connection.
- Reduce call center demands by offering interactive self-service.
- Enable customers to voice their concerns and adapt services and products accordingly.
- Increase engagement by adding a human touch to communications.
- Make communications more efficient for customers by using interactive documents.
- Personalized communications encourage engagement, boosting sales rates and revenue.
- Empower customers to build their own self-customized interactions with your company.
- Increase retention by giving personalized offers to loyal customers, motivating them to stay.
What is Hyper-Personalization?
As technology allows more and more precise data analysis, CCM personalization continues to get more and more targeted. That’s why hyper-personalization has become a major focus for many businesses.
Hyper-personalized communications use real-time data, predictive analytics, and artificial intelligence to personalize content and create messaging tailored to the preferences of a specific customer or target audience.
You can see an example of hyper-personalization at work in most streaming services. When you listen to a song on a streaming music app, that app’s algorithms identify similar artists and songs that can then be filtered into personalized recommendations, app-generated playlists, and notifications about upcoming performances in your area.
That type of extremely personalized communication can be applied to a wide range of businesses, from making product recommendations for retail shoppers to tailoring investment plans for financial services customers As these communications become more widespread, a CCM solution that can provide deep, AI-driven analysis will become a must-have.
Discover how to drive hyper-personalization in customer communications with CCM >
Automate Personalized Communication with CCM Software
No matter how strong your products and services are, you will struggle to reach your audience if you don’t have an equally strong communication plan.
Customers want to know they are seen and their concerns are heard. They want to communicate with you via the channels they know and like best. They want to trust that their personal data will be managed safely and privately.
MHC NorthStar CCM is an automated customer communications management (CCM) software solution that delivers fast, personalized communication to the customers you need to reach.
MHC NorthStar CCM brings together automation, artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning to provide fast, accurate communications across any channel, with messaging tailored to the specific needs of each customer.
How to Personalize Customer Communications Using the MHC CCM Platform
MHC automation provides a single, modular platform with all-in-one capabilities to maintain customer preferences, track and consider past interactions, empower customers with digital experience layers, and communicate with customers on their terms. MHC’s groundbreaking AI Assist tools are taking communications even further, allowing new levels of personalization and responsiveness.
- Use a Complete CCM Solution Powered by AI – Use one comprehensive customer communications management solution, rather than a hodgepodge of different solutions tackling individual issues, all trying to work together to create personalized communications. Using several platforms is both inefficient and more expensive, and it is far more difficult to align brand tone across several channels. In the past year, AI tools have made it far easier to consolidate communications into a single, user-friendly dashboard with deep visibility into your CCM process.
- Adapt the Style and Tone to the Customer – Provide personalized communications by allowing customers to select their preferred template format for statements, bills, and other data-rich communications. Ensure visually impaired customers receive accessible documents. Using AI assistance, your business can generate real-time insights into customer preferences and behaviors. That allows you to easily correspond with customers in the formal or casual tone they prefer, in a sentiment that matches their goals and a language they understand best.
- Follow the Customer Journey – Engage customers with true omnichannel communications. Enable customers to select the communication method(s) they desire: traditional print, a host of electronic delivery channels, or a combination of the two. Deliver, in real-time, the same communication optimized for each specific device (phone, tablet, PC) that may access it. Empower customers with interactive forms and documents on any device.
- Use Information from Multiple Data Sources – All customers expect to receive personalized communication, but their preferences and needs are very different. Use MHC’s software to seamlessly pull information from multiple data sources – not only contact information, but also transactional information and complex data. Take personalization to the next level and offer customers extensive data tailored to their individual needs.
- Adapt to Customer Behavior – Are your customers more likely to respond to a targeted email or an SMS message? Is one segment of your audience more likely to conduct business via a smartphone, while another segment prefers operating from a desktop computer? Understanding the needs and preferences of individual groups and adjusting your messaging accordingly can yield major benefits.
- Communicate in the Customer’s Language – To tend to the needs of an international client base, organizations must be able to communicate with customers in their own language. AI tools allow your CCM team to instantly translate messaging to meet your customers’ preferences, all with no disruption to your workflow. Send communications in the language each customer prefers, regardless of character set or format (e.g. Arabic). Cross the language barrier to offer a personalized experience to all customers.
- Adapt to the Customer – Make Documents Personal – A personal touch creates a deeper connection with your customers. Communications that refer to customers by name or reference their stage in the customer journey make an impact that more generic communications can’t. Using customer data to personalize details such as these can go a long way in building lasting relationships. The hyper-personalization opportunities delivered by AI assistance enables you to connect with customers on an entirely different level.
- Create Responsive Documents – Not all documents are ideal for every platform. A document or landing page designed only for display on a desktop computer can be frustrating for customers who conduct business mainly via their mobile devices, and vice versa. Document design should be responsive and adaptable to every platform your customer use to access your business.
- Use Interactive Documents – Leverage simple documents to provide a digital experience. Deliver comprehensive data in a digital format and make it interactive so that customers can choose what they want to access. Interactive documents and forms can help companies improve customer engagement and build personalized communications for customers.
Take a look at our engaging and informative infographic highlighting the 9 steps of building personalized communications with MHC’s customer communication management solution.
Personalize Customer Communications with MHC NorthStar CCM
As technology evolves and consumers have more and more options for interacting with your business, using CCM software to personalize customer communications is increasingly a must. Personalization drives customer engagement and satisfaction while providing your business with deep insights and valuable data. Research shows that personalization is both expected and desired by today’s consumers. That makes it a necessity for any competitive business.
Ready to see first-hand how MHC NorthStar can revolutionize your CCM strategy and help you communicate on a more personalized level? Contact us today to schedule a demonstration. Our in-house experts will be in touch to learn more about your organization’s unique needs and goals. We will tailor a solution specifically designed to communicate with your customers in the most effective and efficient way possible.
Team MHC
Team MHC consists of a multitude of roles, functions, and expertise within MHC. With extensive combined experience in accounts payable and customer communication management, Team MHC has a unique insight into how to empo wer people using solutions that streamline processes while enhancing customer communication. Working alongside field experts in various industries and company sizes, Team MHC has garnered impressive thought leadership knowledge that we are excited to share with our readers. Including Aragon’s 2022 Women in Tech winner Gina Armada, CTO Dan Ward, VPs of Finance and Customer Service, and other talent that runs the spectrum of technology ability, Team MHC offers a mastery of skills to benefit our customers and prospects alike.
CCM Buyer's Guide
Is your legacy CCM holding you back? This guide highlights essential capabilities you should prioritize during your evaluation.
With expectations for customer communications growing more complex, outdated CCM systems struggle to keep up— making it challenging to meet today’s regulatory, operational, and customer expectations. Download this guide to kickstart your evaluation of modern CCM solutions!