Primarily personalization is used to present information and functions customized to the customer's requirements. The term is often used in the context of CRM. It is necessary to provide the customer with the best possible service. Personalization is an especially important part and mustn't be left out in any CRM-strategy. The object is to generate loyal customers as it is more cost efficient to keep existing customers than to acquire new ones. Regular customers also normally buy more and more frequently.

Part of the quality of service is to make it as simple as possible for the customer to search for and collect information. Modern websites are often flooded with information and it is difficult to find the need one. With personalization only the information he searched for is offered to the customer.

On the one hand personalization results in higher quality of service as the information can be tailored to the customer as well as the internet presence and the functionality. At the same time customer profiles can be used for special activities of the company. The customer's interests can be taken into account - customers interested in certain types of product can be informed about new items, ... Other examples are information about new books matching his interests on the starting page (just like amazon.com) or direct-marketing-campaigns.

Another aspect of personalization is the collecting of valuable information about the company and its reputation within its customers as well as the quality of marketing. The question can be answered what regular customers have in common and what distinguishes them from non-regular customers. Interests of the customer can be evaluated - what's he specially interested in - what not? It can be found out which products can be sold free of trouble and which cause lots of questions or even service-requests. The process of deciding to purchase can be seen from within, can be tracked and influenced to a certain degree.

The basic requirement for using personalization is a CMS. To react individually to certain profiles and customers the website mustn't be static. A company's internet presence is basically a part of its information- and document-pool. Information presented on a web-site is part of the entire information existing in the company and certainly part of the marketing material. Exactly this information-pool-management and flexible display is one of the core functions of a CMS which allows the presentation of personalized content. Another aspect is that a professional CMS stores documents by categories. Hence the product page includes meta-information which is used to match information and customer's interests (profile). For example a customer especially interested in HiFi high-end products will mainly be provided with information about this area.

The Corinis CCM (CMS Professional Version or higher) includes all functions necessary for personalization.

Basically there are two types of personalization:

- explicit and
- implicit personalization

In case of explicit personalization the user creates his own profile, defines his interests and combines on his personal page information about his interests. With implicit personalization information about the user is collected indirectly. That means that his behaviour (either purchasing or browsing) is analysed. Mostly a combination of both types will lead to best results.