Glossary
A system that adjusts what a customer sees — content, offers, recommendations — based on their behavior and profile data, updated continuously rather than on a periodic batch schedule.
Why It Matters
Batch personalization (updated nightly, say) means a customer's experience always lags a day behind their actual behavior — the recommendation still reflects what they did yesterday, not what they're doing right now. Real-time systems close that gap, which is often the difference between personalization that feels genuinely responsive and personalization that feels stale.
This is part of our Customer Ecosystems capability — the layer that gives a brand one consistent view of a customer across every channel they use.
See the full Customer Ecosystems capabilityIs real-time personalization always worth the added complexity over batch processing?
Not always — for use cases where behavior doesn't change minute-to-minute, batch updates are simpler and cheaper to run. Real-time matters most where recency of behavior directly affects what's relevant to show next.
What data does a system like this typically use?
Current session behavior (what someone just viewed or clicked), combined with their historical profile from a customer data platform, to decide what to surface next.