Firms use personalization in order to influence the customer experience through numerous
touch points. This influence has positive and negative consequences, which have further strong
impact on the customer responses and overall success of the firm’s communication with the
customer. Personalization and customer experience have the common path of their development
and share the fields of applications; however, scientific literature is currently fragmented and
analyzes the narrow aspects of either personalization or customer experience. This conceptual
article investigates personalization with the focus on the overall customer experience journey and
its use for the estimation of customer responses and touch points’ utilization. The need for this
focus is based on the necessity of the firm to understand customer responses to personalization
as well as the factors appearing at pre-purchase, purchase and post-purchase stages of
customer decision making. The theoretical novelty of the paper embraces positive and negative
consequences of personalization for identification of future empirical research directions.
These conclusions include the impact of anthropomorphization through embedded automated
interactive messaging, history-based and group-based recommendation systems as well as the
impact of increased touch points and influence of informational vulnerability on customer trust,
click-through intentions and reactance. Managerial contributions relate to the suggestions on
possible actions required to either enforce particular effects with positive outcomes for customer
experience or diminish negative ones in terms of technological facilitation, measurement
possibilities and enhancement of information transparency.