Personalisation Isn't About Selling More. It's About Serving Better

Chapter headingChapter subheadingIn this exclusive Executive Interview, Virginie Faucon, Chief Marketing Officer, shares how AXA Health International is rethinking personalisation through the lens of customer service, first-party data, and responsible AI.Contents

Thank you for reading Infographics | Landing Page Template

3-4 November 2026 | Hilton Kensington | London

Personalisation Isn't About Selling More. It's About Serving Better

Executive Interview with Virginie Faucon

Chief Marketing Officer

AXA Health International

INTRODUCTION

In this exclusive interview, Virginie Faucon, Chief Marketing Officer at AXA Health International, shares her perspective on what effective personalisation really means in 2026.

From building customer trust and strengthening first-party data strategies to measuring commercial value and designing service-led experiences, she explores how organisations can move beyond technology-led thinking and create personalisation that feels relevant, responsible, and genuinely customer-centric.

What is your definition of personalisation?

For me, personalisation isn't about inserting someone's first name or preferences into an email.

Real personalisation is about relevance at the right moment. It means understanding that a 35-year-old digital nomad newly based in Singapore has fundamentally different anxieties and healthcare questions than a family of four relocating to Riyadh for a corporate assignment.

At AXA Health International, we serve customers in 176 countries across vastly different life stages, cultural contexts, and healthcare systems.

Personalisation, for us, means showing up with the right information, the right reassurance, and the right product option. It's anticipatory empathy, scaled.

But it goes further than that; I also think that true personalisation is “choice” and “curation”. It’s not about guessing what a customer may want to see or hear based on what we know about them…and often getting it wrong as people’s choices, tastes, and preferences change and are complex. It’s about enabling choice and flexibility.

For instance, in our world, designing more modular health products so that people can build personalised plans tailored to their needs and change them when their needs evolve.

Customers expect personalised experiences but are increasingly concerned about privacy. How are you balancing relevance with trust?

This is a central tension for us currently in marketing. For us at AXA Health International, trust isn't a nice-to-have – it's the entire product. Our customers are sharing deeply sensitive health information with us. If they don't trust us with their data,

they won't trust us with their health.

The way we balance this is through transparency and genuine value exchange. We only collect what we need, we're explicit about how we use it, and we make it easy for customers to control their preferences.

If a customer in their first year abroad receives a timely, relevant guide to navigating healthcare in their new country, they feel cared for, not tracked. That's the distinction. Personalisation earns trust when it serves the customer first.

What is the biggest misconception organisations have about AI-powered personalisation today?

That AI is a solution you implement, rather than a capability you build. I see organisations spending enormous budgets on AI platforms and then wondering why personalisation still feels generic six months later.

The technology is rarely the bottleneck. The bottleneck is almost always data quality, organisational alignment, and, critically, a clear understanding of what decision you actually want the AI to make on your behalf.

For example, 25% of our claims arrive in languages other than English. We've been trialling AI-powered translation to ensure those customers get the same fast, accurate service as everyone else.

That's a specific, scoped problem where AI adds real value. In my view, it’s best to start narrow, prove value, and scale only what works.

Trust isn't a nice-to-have – it's the entire product

Virginie Faucon, CMO, AXA Health International

What are the biggest barriers preventing organisations from delivering personalisation at scale?

First, data fragmentation. Most organisations I’ve worked in have suffered from the same data issue: customer data living in silos across CRM, policy admin systems, claims platforms, email tools, and digital channels. Without a unified 360 customer view, you're personalising in the dark.

Second, organisational structure. Personalisation at scale requires marketing, data, product, and customer experience teams to operate with genuine alignment. But in most businesses, these teams have different KPIs, different tooling, and sometimes competing incentives.

Third, and this one is underestimated, is a lack of scalable content. Even if you know exactly what to say to each customer segment, do you have the right content to say it, and can you produce it at scale and quickly enough?

Generating relevant, compliant, multilingual content across dozens of markets has always been a massive production challenge for us that AI is starting to help with.

How can brands better use first-party data to create meaningful customer experiences?

The most powerful thing we can do with what our customers tell us, explicitly or behaviourally, is to remove friction from their lives.

A customer who searches for ‘mental health support in Hong Kong' is telling us something important. The personalised response isn't to show them a banner ad; it's to proactively surface our Mind Health service, connect them with a psychologist in their time zone, and make that process as seamless as possible.

We've been building towards this model: treating first-party signals as triggers for service moments, not just comms moments.

In my view, that shift in mindset, from ‘how do we use data to sell more?’ 'how do we use data to serve better?' – is a true differentiator.

What role does real-time decisioning play in the future of customer engagement?

It's fast becoming the baseline expectation, no longer a differentiator. The generation of customers entering the international health insurance market as expatriates and digital nomads today have grown up with brands like Netflix, Spotify, and Amazon.

Experiences that adapt to them in real time without any conscious effort on their part. They have very little patience.

For us, real-time decisioning is most powerful at moments of vulnerability. For instance, when a customer is admitted to a hospital abroad, when a claim is delayed, when they've just arrived in a new country and are trying to understand their cover, or when they need urgent repatriation.

Those are the moments where a timely, personalised intervention creates genuine value and loyalty. It’s about human moments rather than system events.

How do you measure whether personalisation is actually delivering commercial value?

The challenge is attribution. How do you isolate the impact of a personalised onboarding journey on retention when there are several other variables at play?

In my view, the approach is to get very disciplined about measurement frameworks before we launch any personalisation initiative.

To define leading indicators, such as engagement, NPS, self-service rates, and claim submission completion; to run controlled experiments and to look at cohort level.

What did we do differently for customers who renewed versus those who lapsed, and can we trace meaningful differences in their experience?

What should marketing, CRM, and eCommerce leaders prioritise over the next 12 months to remain competitive?

First, get your data in order. No personalisation strategy survives contact with fragmented, inconsistent customer data. Invest in the unglamorous plumbing before you invest in the AI layer on top.

Second, design for mobile-first, service-first journeys. Our customers are globally mobile; they are managing their health while crossing borders, often on a phone, sometimes in a language that isn't their first. Every CRM touchpoint, every digital experience, needs to work in that context.

Third, build human escalation into every automated journey. AI and personalisation at scale are only as good as the handoff to a human being when things get complex or emotionally charged.

In healthcare especially, there is always a moment where a customer needs a real person.

Virginie Faucon

Chief Marketing Officer

AXA Health International

What made you decide to join the Marketing Personalisation Summit 2026?

"I think we're at an inflexion point. There's enormous hype around AI, personalisation, and real-time engagement. And there are genuine opportunities and progress made, but there's also a lot of activity that's sophisticated-looking without being genuinely useful for customers.

At AXA Health International, we're operating in a category where the stakes are real. If we personalise poorly, if we send irrelevant communications, if we fail to anticipate a customer's needs when they're unwell abroad, we don't just lose a customer – we let someone down at a genuinely difficult moment in their life.

I'm keen to have that conversation in a room full of peers who are grappling with the same challenges rather than pretend we've all figured it out. I want to come to this summit to have the unfiltered conversations: what's actually working, where are we still falling short, and how do we hold each other accountable to a higher standard?"

3-4 November 2026 | Hilton Kensington | London

These are exactly the conversations that will continue at the Marketing Personalisation Summit, 3-4 November 2026, Hilton Kensington, London. Bringing together senior marketing, CRM, digital, customer experience, and eCommerce leaders, the summit provides a unique opportunity to explore how leading organisations are balancing AI-powered innovation with privacy, trust, and measurable commercial outcomes.

DOWNLOAD THE AGENDA

BECOME A SPONSOR