It’d be difficult to find a brand these days that says it doesn’t want to deliver a more personalized experience to its customers, given that it is a widely accepted and essential strategy for many to drive revenue, foster loyalty, and stay ahead of the competition.

However, while many brands think they are doing a great job and have a clear understanding of their customers, many personalization efforts often feel clunky, out of touch, and can leave customers underwhelmed or with a feeling that the brands they are interacting with just don’t understand them.

This is backed up by research. According to Twilio’s State of Customer Engagement Report, while 82% of business leaders say they deeply understand their customers, just 45% of consumers agree.

The problem is that many personalization efforts are based on customer segmentation, static profile data, and past transaction history rather than one that includes a more real-time and dynamic understanding of each customer’s current situation and needs.

As a result, they ignore context. However, to truly matter and deliver on its promise, personalization has to be contextual. It has to be able to deliver messages and information that is relevant to who the customers are, where they are, what they are doing, when they are doing it, and why they are doing it in the here and now.

Moving Beyond Static Profiles to Real-Time Understanding

Traditional rules-based systems struggle with this level of sophistication, as they largely rely on static profiles and past purchase history.

To accomplish this requires a system that fuses traditional data sources like customer information and transaction history with transient, situational, and behavioral data—like device used, location, time of day, weather, and even immediate interaction history.

When combined with advanced AI and machine learning models that constantly learn, adapt, and can predict the customer’s next most likely need or action, then you have a system that can deliver contextual intelligence.

This was one of the big themes of the recent Twilio SIGNAL event in London, where discussions on the promise of AI-powered personalization when coupled together with communications and contextual data were held.

This represents a significant leap forward in the personalization of customer experiences, moving beyond static profiles and past purchase history to real-time, dynamic understanding of the customer’s current situation, needs, and emotional state.

What Chelsea FC Teaches Us About Global-Scale Personalization

Twilio CEO Khozema Shipchandler, in his keynote, brought this to life when he talked about the partnership that they have recently entered into with Chelsea FC to help them improve their fan experience by delivering more contextual and personalized experiences for their global fan base of 615 million.

My ears pricked up at this point. Not because I’m a Chelsea fan. In truth, I have mixed feelings about Chelsea, given that I am a fan of Brighton & Hove Albion, another English Premier League (EPL) team. But I am a football fan, and a fan of personalized experiences delivered well.

So, to find out more, I sat down with Chris Koehler, CMO at Twilio.

I started out by asking him to describe the challenge, and he summed up the scale and scope of it perfectly when he said:

“The majority of Chelsea’s fans will never step foot inside Stamford Bridge. So, how do you engage an audience of that size and that magnitude to keep them feeling like they are part of the club?”

For context, Stamford Bridge stadium, Chelsea’s home ground, has a capacity of just over 40,000, and Chelsea has 500 official supporters clubs based in over 100 countries around the world.

According to Koehler, while Chelsea is already creating a ton of engagement around content, leveraging Twilio’s customer data platform product, Segment, will allow them to gain deeper insights into their entire global fanbase by better understanding how all of the different types of fans interact across both in-person and online touchpoints.

That understanding, in turn, will allow them to provide more contextual and personalized experiences, enabling both domestic and international supporters to feel closer to the club.

In practice, that could mean anything from rewarding fans for their engagement by offering promotions when they enter the stadium, to personalizing the content they see with their favorite Chelsea player, to providing recommendations on where they can watch today’s match with other local Chelsea fans, wherever they are in the world.

Moving to a more contextual intelligence-driven approach to personalization, for Chelsea or any other brand, shifts the conversation from how many messages are we sending to customers to how are we building lifelong relationships?

According to Koehler, “when customers see the value, and when every message a brand sends feels personalized, relevant, and contextual, then customers will engage more.”

He continued, claiming that the key to success is “to provide value at every juncture and to keep in mind that you are building from today’s relationship, which is transactional, to a future one that is relational.”

That’s sage advice from Koehler, and brands would do well to remember it when they consider evolving or transforming their personalization strategy.