In a world where customers expect attention that is personal, precise and immediate, Hyper-Personalization is turning from an innovative approach into the new standard. It means deep personalization, built on data and artificial intelligence, designed to offer individually tailored experiences at the highest level – at every customer touchpoint.
At the executive roundtable led by 7I’s together with Tiff and CommBox, held in October 2025,
we examined personalization in service from several different angles
The journey from personal service in the branch to personalized service in digital
Customer service used to rest on a personal relationship with a representative at the branch – a banker, a doctor, an insurance agent or a salesperson. Personal familiarity, a face-to-face conversation, and reading needs out of human interaction were the basis of the service experience. As Asaf Eldar, Head of the Retail Division at Discount Bank, described it,
“Walking into the bank and seeing a familiar face gave me a different feeling… It will be hard to reproduce the depth of emotion people felt – it probably creates far more chemistry than I can imagine.”
Over the years, and mainly on the back of accelerating digitization – including COVID and the war – service moved to central contact centers, apps and websites. The central challenge: how do you preserve that personal, empathetic feeling when the service is delivered remotely and automatically?
Today, leading organizations are building Hyper-Personalization capabilities – deep personalization based on data, AI, and precise identification of the customer’s needs in real time. The goal: to bring the personal feeling back, this time with technology.
Why does this matter now?
Customers are already there. They are used to tailored service from platforms such as NETFLIX – 80% of viewing on Netflix is the result of personalization – and the same holds for digital platforms like Amazon and Google.
Customers expect the organization to recognize them, understand their needs, and offer them the right thing, at the right time, in the right channel. As Asaf Eldar put it, “in the end people want an answer to the need they have right now”
A 2025 Medallia survey covering the preferences of 23,000 customers found that 61% of consumers are willing to pay more for a personalized experience, while only about 25% of consumers have experienced a very high level of personalization
“Personalization is a question of resolution”
Eldar highlighted the gap between what organizations imagine and what customers actually need, and warned against shallow personalization built on nothing more than basic customer details.
Udi Asulin, Head of the Telephone Service Operation at Maccabi Healthcare Services (a large Israeli HMO), described the launch of specialized contact centers serving different populations. On the face of it that could have cost operational efficiency, but in practice it produced a 10% drop in repeat calls. In his words,
“If we do not know how to connect to the customer’s needs, to make the service accessible to them using the information we already hold – then it is not really personal, and we will never get to hyper.”
We also learned that if you are going to personalize, it had better be accurate. 61% of consumers say that “reliable information” is the single most important element of the customer experience (Qualtrics 2025)
Shai Ben Moshe, Head of the Customers, Sales and Service Division at Bank Hapoalim, stressed the importance of precision in personalization:
“If we offer a customer something that does not suit them – it annoys them, and it produces the opposite result.”
53% of consumers say they will cut their spending on a brand after an unsatisfactory experience (Qualtrics 2025)
We learned that it is worth examining and sharpening the line between personal service and the customer’s privacy.
Udi Asulin of Maccabi noted that customers mostly expect us to use the information we hold, while medical confidentiality of course does not allow it, and that creates a gap between expectations and data protection. Nir Lautman, Chief Customer Officer at Clal Finance and Insurance described how they chose instead to surprise customers in places with no connection to insurance at all – happy moments, such as sending a gift to a new mother.
Lautman (Clal) shared that in insurance, knowing the customer is the basis for pricing the premium. Recently it has become possible to raise the resolution using data, understand the customer’s individual needs, and build products that fit them – Clal BEHAVE in motor insurance, for example, which uses driving monitoring to let customers who drive carefully pay less.
Aliza Gavra CDO and CX at – MAX, described how a location-based service they offered customers was read by those customers as “Big Brother”, and after reviewing the reaction they decided to withdraw it.
Elad Mizrahi, CEO of Tiff described the rollout of bots together with CommBox and stressed the importance of process continuity around anything that starts in a bot. Consistently examining customer intent and the actions the bot failed to close, while carrying all the information forward into the rest of the journey, is a necessary condition for building customer trust in personalization that no human is running.
We are all only at the beginning this is the time to dream
Even the leading organizations are at the early stages of implementing Hyper-Personalization. This is a long journey, and it takes patience, trial and error. As Asaf Eldar noted,
“The war was a catalyst for a great many technology processes – it cleared the blockages and accelerated projects that had been planned for six months and closed in two weeks.”
According to the 7I’s 2025 survey, among the 40 companies taking part in the roundtable, 50% of organizations in Israel already include personalization in their strategy, only half of those have put a budget behind it, and fewer still have aligned the organization’s targets to it.
Karni Kaplan, an expert in operations and technology for the Contact Center, noted in her talk that although the expectation had been that AI’s impact would show up as efficiency gains in staffed service, adoption of AI tools in customer service stands at just 24%
Technology is a condition, but not a sufficient one
Advanced technology infrastructure and AI capabilities are indeed required, but the drive has to come from the organization itself.
The change involves adjustments to the organizational structure, to service and sales processes, to metrics and to culture. Udi Asulin, for example, described how Maccabi Healthcare Services mapped its customer journeys in detail together with the medical division, which led to a significant improvement in the availability of physiotherapy services.
Aliza Gavra stressed the importance of organizational structure:
“There is genuinely a role like that in the structure – a customer experience manager – whose job is to listen, to understand, and to give the right thing.”
Quality data is the foundation for everything
Without a strong, clean, up-to-date database there is no way to produce personalization. Aliza Gavra (MAX) reminds us that data is the fuel that drives the engine, and that quality data is the foundation for everything. Without it, she argues, there is no real personalization. Aliza also reinforced the need to fit the customer experience to the different identities of the same customer, and the importance of measuring digital channel adoption accurately.
According to the 7I’s June 2025 survey, 88% of organizations report that they are not exploiting the full potential of their data for personalization.
We asked participants what can be learned from their experience – how do you start well?
- Dream big, start small – do not wait for the perfect solution. Start with small, measured steps that create immediate value. Asaf Eldar’s advice: “better to give the customer something than to try to build the whole dream.”
- Identify the high-value populations and events – focus on the cases where Hyper-Personalization will create real benefit for the customer and for the organization. Clal Insurance, for example, developed a product that monitors customers’ driving behavior and offers them a premium tailored to it.
- Work at the organizational level as well – cultural change is a condition for success. Personalization is not only technology – it is a new way of thinking. As Asaf Eldar noted, “as Israelis we need to know our customers – to know they are looking for protektzia, the inside track – and turn that into personalization.”
After an interesting day, we concluded…
Hyper-Personalization is not just a buzzword – it is a deep shift in thinking. Organizations that can balance technology, data and human sensitivity will lead the market. The executives who took part stressed one point: this is a journey that demands vision, flexibility and a genuine ability to listen to the customer.
