Brands are built on the success of their customer service, and where this used to be primarily in response to complaints, companies are learning to take personalised, empathetic customer care right to the heart of everything they do. This comes at the right time because customer expectations for hyper-personalised service from businesses continue to increase.
Winning the trust and loyalty of customers depends on how well businesses across every industry utilise their customer data and empower their teams to make every digital and physical engagement matter.
We are here to help you explore the art of customer service and engagement. We understand the importance of creating a more unified, intelligent data ecosystem to spark innovation across customer service teams. As your customers’ needs evolve, we can partner with you to turn every customer interaction into an opportunity to deliver, and delight.
Gaining a customer for life happens when organisations make every interaction matter. Whether that is reacting efficiently to a customer query, complaint, or need, or proactively taking steps to offer a new product or service. The key is to personalise the experience through a deeper understanding of your customers, and to create personalised journeys and lasting brand loyalty.
Demand for this bespoke treatment has increased. Today’s expectations are for hyper-personalisation across all channels of engagement between the customer and organisation. This move towards an omnichannel model has increased the scope of new ways in which companies can reach customers.
Where should a business start in this vast landscape of customer touchpoints to craft a personalisation strategy that leads to customer loyalty? Having worked with hundreds, if not thousands, of customers on this very journey, read on to see our take:
It takes 12 positive customer experiences to negate the poor impression left behind from a single unpleasant experience. There is no margin for error when it comes to delivering customer care. A crowded marketplace of competitors, coupled with the number of digital channels open to consumers to voice their opinions and experiences with brands (both positive and negative) means that a single missed opportunity to make a customer happy can have a significant impact on your brand reputation.
Employees use data to personalise the experience of the customer. The goal is to make every customer feel that the service they are receiving is 100 percent customised to them. However, this is not always achievable due to time and budget constraints.
Instead, a crucial step is to analyse your own data estate. From your customer relationship management (CRM) system to social channels and customer engagement (CE) platforms. Integrating this data for analysis with a Customer Data Platform (CDP) can help to surface rich insight by creating a single customer view that generates individualised personas.
Predicting customer behaviours using these data-driven personas allow businesses to segment their customers more effectively and better align customer engagement strategies.
The ways that customers engage with your business continue to expand. This offers a huge opportunity to benefit from the increased customer data flowing into your business.
Unifying this data into a consolidated customer profile that can carry across any customer touchpoint is fundamental to business personalisation efforts. As a result, conversations are more targeted and relevant. In addition, customer service agents gain a greater understanding of the events leading up to a customer interaction if this unified omnichannel profile is accessible and properly collated.
AI adoption for customer service has been widespread. However, its full potential to drive personalisation lies beyond the simple Q&A functionality that has become a popular standard.
Conversational AI’s ability to learn about customer interests and preferences, and then re-engage with personalised product recommendations at key stages of the buying process has become a key personalisation capability for companies to adopt.
The more simplistic virtual assistant functionality also has its place. For example, where customers need to action more simple tasks, such as getting an update on an order status. These systems complement the more complex analytical use cases. AI should be thought of as augmenting existing processes that extend the consistency of your company identity.
There is a fine line to tread between providing a customer with a bespoke service and appearing to be compromising their privacy. Location-based personalisation techniques such as offers/greetings sent to apps on consumers’ phones when they pass by a store can come off as invasive.
At the same time, be as transparent as possible when it comes to informing consumers about how and why their data is used. Regulations like GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) have helped created industry standards for this. However, companies can always look to bolster trust with their own in-house messaging and policy statements.
The capabilities of AI and data analytics are crucial to developing the insights necessary for understanding customers, building profiles, and offering bespoke offers and interactions.
However, businesses should not over-rely on these automated capabilities. The moments that matter are often those of one-on-one human connection. Take time to establish a comprehensive culture of communication that is agile to change. This is essential to empower your customer service agents with the empathetic skills they need to help find resolutions for customers that are personal and valued.
The ways that personalisation will be felt across customer service will continue to evolve. Either from ongoing trends of increasing digital touchpoints or unexpected factors. Being agile to change is key.
