Hello [insert your name]! So, you want to know more about personalization and the role it can play in positive customer service experiences? You’re not alone. Personalization has increasingly become a top priority for business—whether B2B or B2C and across industries.
A Forrester analyst characterizes the trend as “companies’ obsession with personalization.”1 And why shouldn’t business be obsessed? The firm’s research suggests excellent customer experience (CX) can help companies grow revenue three times faster. For example, its 2022 report found that mass market auto manufacturers could improve CX by 1 point to generate more than $1 billion in additional revenue.2
Similarly, McKinsey has suggested companies that excel at personalization generate 40 percent more revenue by tailoring their offerings and outreach to the right person at the right time. In fact, in their view, “consumers don’t just want personalization, they demand it.”
personalization
With so many choices for products and services, and the abundance of channels on which to get information, engage with a brand, and buy, the buyer wants to feel known by your business.
Companies already know they are competing on customer service. But, looking at it on a more granular level, your business is competing on personalization of customer service. In one U.S. Chamber of Commerce report, 67% of customers changed switched brands—not because of product price or features—but due to a perceived lack of personalization in the customer experience.4
All this leads to the obvious question: what is personalization? Some will think it is as simple as using a customers’ name when addressing the reason for their call for support. That doesn’t hurt—we know you felt more special when you read that first line, right?—but effective personalization is more complicated than that.
Personalization leverages data to understand each person’s specific interests, demographics, and buying behavior. It involves tailoring experiences across multiple touch points including websites, mobile and web apps, call centers, online chat, and in store.5
In the B2B space, critical data points include details like industry, company size, revenue, and technology stack. For B2C, age, gender, location, and socio-economic status help organizations to understand customers and how to serve them differently.
In both instances, where a user is located (geolocation), how users arrive at your message (source and type of device), and when they are interacting with your business (both time of day and where in their buying journey) can also help you to tailor customer experiences.
Before we get into the important strategies to enhance your personalization techniques, the next section quickly outlines the advantages of making the effort.
48% of customers who switch brands are looking for better service. — Salesforce6
The Importance of Personalized Experiences in Customer Service
Customer service is one of the key business areas where you can build relationships with each customer. With personalization, you can deliver top-notch customer experiences that differentiate your business from the competition. But that’s just one benefit of personalized experiences. This section shares several other advantages.
- Enhance Customer Satisfaction
Tailoring each customer service interaction to the individual’s experience can help your business convey empathy and appreciation. Using available data to truly understand that person’s pain points and objectives can help make the customer service interaction more efficient and effective. - Increase Customer Loyalty and Retention
Personalized customer experiences can help build trust. When your customer service leaves people feeling understood on a personal level, they are more likely to feel valued and appreciated. This can foster brand loyalty and reduce your customer attrition rates. In fact, empathizing with the customer’s situation and providing genuine support and service could move your customers from brand loyalists to vocal brand advocates. - Improve Conversion Rates and Sales
By personalizing customer service, you begin to develop a more emotional connection with the customer. This can lead them to make referrals (which lets you leverage the power of word of mouth), buy from your business more consistently, and increase their spending with you overall. - Provide Deeper Customer Insights
Actively listening to your customers improves their experience of your business. It also helps you to gather feedback and identify areas for continuous improvement. Collecting and analyzing data about customers can support your personalization efforts while also informing data-driven decisions to enhance products, services, and overall customer experience. The benefits extend to your customers’ well-being as well. A personalized experience helps people feel that they have more control of their customer service conversation. This can help reduce customers’ feelings of stress and defeat, and helps them feel more empowered. Now, let’s turn to actual strategies that can help you achieve personalization in customer service
Deep Dive: Personalization in Financial Services
Most credit unions pride themselves on more personalized service than you might get at a big bank. It’s not only that it’s easier, and quicker to get one-on-one service at a credit union. They also try to make their members feel like they are more than an account number. By doing so, they invite people into a more collaborative and positive financial environment.
How to Achieve Personalization in Customer Service
Personalization in customer service offers benefits to both your company and your customers. Fortunately, there are many ways you can optimize customer service to be more personalized. Transforming your customer service strategies with just one of these suggestions can help. Imagine the impact of orchestrating a strategy that draws on several of these ideas at once.
1: Be Proactive
Use live chat or in-app messaging to help customers and provide personalized service. You could automate rules triggered by customer behaviors on your website so that someone who follows a set navigation is offered a particular download or another person who spends a long time in one place is asked if they have questions.
- Strategy in action: Customer service chatbots can help customers help themselves. Many appreciate the ability to troubleshoot on their own, avoiding time spent on hold waiting for a live agent.
2: Use Your Data
In this digital age your business has access to an abundance of data about customers. Collect and integrate inputs from customer relationship management (CRM) software, social media interactions, browsing behavior, customer feedback, and more. By bringing various sources of data together, you can create a holistic view of the customer.
- Strategy in action: Amazon uses its behavior and customer review data to make its People also Buy suggestions. Or Starbucks uses past order preferences to help customers quickly order their favorites.
Key Consideration: Prioritize Privacy
As businesses strive to provide personalized experiences, they must also preserve customer privacy. Customers are increasingly aware of the risks associated with sharing their information. You’ll need to find a balance between respecting people’s privacy and learning the details necessary to personalize service. Keep these best practices in mind:
-
-
- Communicate with customers about what data you collect, why, and how it is used.
- Give customers control over their data and allow them to provide or withdraw their explicit and informed consent at any time
- Don’t use customer information for any purposes beyond the boundaries of their consent.
-
3: Create Customer Segments
Segmentation takes all the data you’ve compiled and breaks your customers into smaller, more manageable groups. Dividing your buyers into smaller groups based on their actions or preferences can help you understand those customers at a personal level. Identifying what resonates with a particular segment can help you improve customer service and nurture happier customers.7
- Strategy in action: By segmenting your customers, you can target your interactions. A financial institution, for example, could offer added information about retirement planning, college savings, wealth management etc. based on customer segmentation.
4: Humanize Your Interactions
On the heels of recommendations to collect, analyze, and segment data, it can’t hurt to remind you of the importance of humanizing your interactions with customers. This can be as simple as using slang and emoticons in chat interactions. You might also encourage your employees to connect with customers on a human level, working to make the people they are serving feel respected, heard, and understood. Empowering your people to go “off script” and giving them the flexibility (and time) to provide their own recommendations and solutions can also enable the human element.
- Strategy in action: Zappos is known for its excellent customer service partially because it has empowered its agents to make customer-centric decisions. The employee can go above and beyond, on their own, without having to follow the book or involve managers.8
5: Think omnichannel
Successful personalization is there for the individual at the right time in the right place. Take a multi-channel approach to customer service and adapt your interactions dynamically to the customer behavior and context. Ensuring consistency across all your customer touch points can also improve the customer’s satisfaction.
- Strategy in action: Customers don’t want to explain their issue over and again. With an omnichannel approach, the interaction might begin on social media, move to text messages, and end up with a phone call but as each channel is integrated, the customer support specialist can seamlessly manage the conversation.
Deep Dive: Personalization in Healthcare
A healthcare organization that provides personalized support across multiple channels (based on customer history and preferences) using intelligent routing and predictive support models can help patients feel cared for, which can improve health outcomes. That’s because the patient experiences personalized customer service is more likely to take their medications, follow the prescribed treatment plan, and actively participate in their healthcare.9
6: Consider Context
You want to get to know your prospective customer to provide that personalized experience. But at the beginning of their buyer’s journey, prospects don’t typically want to provide their personal data. Still, later in their lifecycle they are more likely to appreciate the personal touch you can bring to your interactions.
- Strategy in action: A potential buyer who wants to confirm which plan is right for their company size might want to interact anonymously with a chatbot. However, once that prospect has decided your business is one of their top contenders, they will expect more individualized service that reflects their pain points and knowledge of their industry.
7: Listen and Learn
Implement surveys, reviews, feedback forms, and Voice of the Customer (VoC) programs to gather customer insights and continuously improve personalized experiences. Keep in mind, though, that you can easily undermine your own efforts if you only ask and don’t listen and learn. Act on what you discover from customer feedback to dynamically adjust your personalization tactics.
- Strategy in action: Your organization might send out a survey after customer service engagements. If they rank your business poorly, engage with them further to find out what went wrong. This helps your organization improve its processes while also demonstrating that you care about the customer’s experience.
Each of these strategies to improve your personalization recognizes one essential truth: not all customers are the same. The more specific you can be, the stronger the relationships you can build. That’s where technological advances, like the ones we discuss next, are making a real difference—providing the level of detail you need to show everyone the best customer service for their particular needs.
Future of Personalization in Customer Service
Personalization is recognized by business leaders as a growth driver. In Twilio’s State of Personalization Report, 89% of decision-makers described personalization as “invaluable to their business’ success in the next three years.” Some 73 percent also agreed that artificial intelligence (AI) would fundamentally change connections with customers.10 To meet evolving customer expectations, your organization will need to keep up with the latest in intelligent, responsive, and customer-centric service models.
AI and machine learning (ML) enable organizations to process massive amounts of data in real-time to enhance customer service. Powerful predictive analytics also help organizations to analyze past customer behaviors and enable more proactive service or offers of solutions. This supports real-time virtual support as well as human agents who may even rely on AI to detect customer sentiment and effectively incorporate emotional intelligence into the customer experience.
Technological changes will likely see growing customer expectations of service availability “right here, right now.” Fortunately, the growing sophistication of chatbots and virtual assistants will help provide instant solutions. This technology will only become more capable of understanding context and nuances in customer interactions. Advances in voice and natural language processing (NLP) can also play a significant role in making these interactions more natural and responsive.
From personalization, expect the customer service industry (and others) to move toward hyper-personalization. Integrating customer, contextual, and behavioral data in real-time leveraging the power of AI, ML, and predictive analytics enables a more meaningful and individualized service experience.11
Customer service experience is everything today, and that’s can only grow more true in the future. Organizations need to not only improve their personalization efforts today, but also stay attuned to new solutions that will continue to shape how meaningful interactions are made.
Conclusion
The cliche “To know me is to love me” gets a fresh spin with personalization. When an organization shows it knows its customers, the customer feels the love. As a result, tailoring experiences to the individual needs and preferences of customers can enhance customer satisfaction, loyalty, and retention, leading to increased sales and brand advocacy.
Looking forward, businesses must prepare for an era where hyper-personalization becomes the norm. With continuous advancements in AI, machine learning, and predictive analytics, the capacity to understand and meet customer needs will reach unprecedented levels.
Companies should embrace solutions that provide them with new insights and feedback with which to refine their strategies and embrace innovations that allow for real-time data integration and analysis. Together these tools can enable the highly individualized service experiences that enhance customer satisfaction and drive loyalty in an increasingly competitive marketplace.
Ready to build deeper relationships with your most important connections? Learn how Sogolytics can help you uncover preferences, explore opportunities, and build loyalty. Connect with us today and let’s get acquainted. 🙂
