Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

That shift to creepy can happen even faster when the purchases in question were made online. There’s a strange distortion in how customers think about E-Commerce and privacy. Because they’re sitting at home when they order, even though “the computer” obviously knows everything the customer has ever bought and makes recommendations based on that, the experience feels more private.

Meanwhile, an associate—an actual human being—who appears to know that much can feel at best off-putting and at worst threatening to some customers.

Once associates are armed with large quantities of CRM information, will they need a workshop in “how not to be creepy?” It might be as simple as making sure that purchase history doesn’t lead to an associate saying “I see you bought” but instead just using the purchases as background knowledge to advance the current sale.

However, that may not be enough. When a sales associate knows next to nothing about a customer, the most successful salespeople are often the most aggressive. Their suggestions may be scattershot, but it feels like a process of zeroing in on what the customer is looking for. Take that highly aggressive sales associate and add a detailed sales history—and maybe a few personal details—however, and there’s nothing scattershot about the result. It can quickly become invasive.

Those highly aggressive, highly successful (ordinarily) associates may be exactly the people you don’t want to hire once you’ve put this type of technology in their hands.

And what happens when a customer’s preferred associate isn’t available? In an interesting touch, the Neiman Marcus app enables customers to check the schedules of associates to see when they’re working. (That potential for creepiness goes both ways.) But if the associate isn’t working or is busy with another customer, another associate will have to pick up the slack.

In a simpler time, that substitute associate would have known nothing at all about the customer except her name. Now the sub knows far too much about the customer’s purchase history but may not be able to instantly decipher any notes the preferred associate made about how to handle the customer.

That means the sub may have to exercise a very disciplined ignorance about the customer, letting her explain (again) what she prefers. In theory, that’s unnecessary, and it will likely stretch out the time required to make the sale. Managers will have to get used to that—and exercise their own self-discipline to let a technology-enhanced sale feel more natural to the customer.

There’s an irony to all this: The goal of all this CRM technology is to give a modern chain store the personal feel of a small shop where the proprietor knows every customer by name, face and history. That feel is a throwback to a time when customers had a lot less privacy, at least when it came to purchase histories. The irony is that reviving that atmosphere is going to take a lot more discretion and care when it comes to CRM and privacy.