The holy grail of personalization: what we heard at eTail Palm Springs

Last week, 2,700 eCommerce and retail leaders gathered at the JW Marriott Desert Springs in Palm Springs for eTail Palm Springs 2025. The agenda covered a lot of ground — AI-powered retail strategies, shifting consumer expectations, operational pressures — but one theme kept surfacing in sessions and side conversations alike: personalization. Everyone's talking about it. Fewer brands have actually cracked it.

Gladly was proud to be part of it. On February 24th, our VP of Sales, Emilio DiZazzo, joined a panel for "The Holy Grail of Personalization: Crafting Truly Individualized Customer Experiences.” Joining him were Alvaro De La Rocha (CMO, Bespoke Post), Tess Kornfield (VP of Product and Data Science, ThredUp), Angela Lane (Senior Manager, ecommerce, Omega), and Andrew Luxem (Former Senior Director, CRM, Bed Bath & Beyond).

What the panel actually said

Three themes came up repeatedly across the conversation.

First: a first name on an email isn't personalization. Several panelists pushed back on the surface-level version of individualization that's become table stakes in ecommerce. Real personalization means understanding a customer's full history, their preferences, their expectations — and reflecting that across every touchpoint, not just one channel.

Second: the brands seeing results aren't necessarily the ones with the most data — they're the ones actually connecting it. ThredUp's data science capabilities and Bespoke Post's subscription model came up as examples. The common thread was execution: data shared across teams, across channels, across the customer lifecycle.

Third: scale doesn't have to mean standardization. Whether the context is a luxury brand like Omega or a high-volume retailer, the panel agreed that individualized service at scale is achievable — but it requires infrastructure, team alignment, and genuine organizational commitment to the customer.

What this means for CX

The conversation at eTail points to a gap most brands aren't measuring. Our own research — from the 2026 Customer Expectations Report — found that 88% of consumers felt their last service issue was resolved, but only 22% said they'd prefer that company after the interaction. Resolution and loyalty are not the same thing.

That gap is exactly what the panel was circling. Brands can close tickets without earning trust. They can resolve issues without making customers feel known. The difference comes down to how CX is designed — whether the goal is to deflect and close, or to engage and build.

At Gladly, we built around a different assumption: that every customer interaction is a chance to build relationship equity, not just resolve a case. That means giving every agent full customer context — not a ticket ID — so the experience actually reflects who that person is. The panelists' point about data execution resonates directly with how we think about architecture. Connecting data isn't a technical nice-to-have; it's the prerequisite for any personalization that holds up at scale.