Building a brand involves a lot of things. You need to advertise and market efficiently, sell great products, and network with other businesses. The experience your customers gain from interacting with your store is also just as important if not more important.
One great way to ensure your customers remain satisfied is to personalize your customer service process to fit the needs of the customers.
This article provides six strategies on how you can take a traditional customer service approach and make it better by personalizing it.
What Is Personalised Customer Service?
Personalization, if you have ever been in any marketing or business class, you must have heard about this. It is the act of providing your customers with an experience that makes them feel special and satisfied throughout their contact with you.
Building on this, personalized customer service is just you giving your customers a tailored experience when it comes to solving customer problems and answering queries.
Most times, when people think of this subject — personalized customer service, what comes to mind is using the first names of customers when answering calls or replying to chats. While this is true, personalized customer service involves a lot more.
It includes building and customizing your customer’s experience to make every contact they have with you as smooth as possible. You utilise customer data to give them a unique and personalised experience which is guaranteed to provide more satisfaction to them and make them feel important and valued.
Why Personalised Customer Service Is Important?
Who does not like being treated specially? Well, 90% of the customers who were asked this question in a study answered that they would prefer to buy from businesses that make them feel special through personalized customer service.
A huge number said they were willing to pay for a more expensive product just to be given a better customer service experience.
Companies and online stores can use personalization to see to it that the common expectations, wants and preferences of an average customer are met leading to happy and satisfied customers with little to no complaints.
This can help build brand loyalty and even increase customer retention rates since your previous customers will want to come back for more of the experience and serve as brand ambassadors for your store as they spread the uniqueness of your store through word of mouth.
Great customer service can be a great way to distinguish yourself from the sea of online stores that probably sell the same products as you. You can even convince customers who are still on the fence or people just doing some online window shopping to buy from you.
Six Ways To Personalise Your Customer Service
1.Create Various Channels Of Communication For Customers
Our modern and digital world has given us various means of interacting with each other and businesses alike. So, if you put all your eggs in one basket and offer only one means of contacting you, you are playing a very dangerous game.
While some customers have no problem waiting for their turn on customer care calls, or on live chats others may not have this time, preferring to leave a message on social media or an email you can reply to later.
An omnichannel customer service team is great to have because in the event a customer contacts you through various channels, you already have info on this client allowing you to provide customized answers and solutions to their queries based on their previous queries.
You just cannot predict which channel your customer will be using to reach you so it will be best to have a variety of options your customers can choose from. This can give your customers a feeling of being valued since they don’t need to go through any hassle to reach you.
Doing this will require you to hire and train a set of customer service managers to attend to each of these channels.
An omnichannel customer service team is great to have because in the event a customer contacts you through various channels, you already have info on this client allowing you to provide customized answers and solutions to their queries based on their previous queries.
2.Track Your Customers Data
Using the data you collect from your customers is an essential part of customizing their customer experience.
Do your research and find data collection and analysis tools. Then, collect information like the customer’s demographic, preferences, purchasing ability( income), and website behavior. These will give you a clear picture of the customer’s online purchasing habits.
You can use surveys and forms, customer reviews, and others to get an idea of how your customers think and what they want.
Investing in a good and cheap CRM will be very important for this. This will put the essential customer data into one central location. You can then create dashboards and segments from this data, separating the customers according to certain criteria.
Using their data, look for the questions they ask the most and provide answers to them. Then push those questions and answers to your website. This will be your customer’s first touchpoint with your campaign.
3.Ensure Your Website Is User-Friendly And Customer-Personalized
Your website is one of the major points of contact your customers will have with you. It is where they will scan through your catalog of products and make a decision on whether to purchase or not.
So, your website is a great opportunity to customize and personalize the customer service experience.
The secret to doing this is understanding customer behavior. You need to ask yourself: What is the common path an average customer will take when going through your website? Once you know that, you can use this data to customize their experience.
You can do this by displaying products they have already purchased previously, maybe with a bonus or discount this time, or displaying products that go along with the product they purchased.
Integrating live chat software into your website is also a best practice when it comes to personalizing your website. This way, when customers have an issue or query regarding the website, they can quickly get it solved right in the warehouse.
This feature can be made more personalized by including other features that can help the customer share the problem with the customer service manager in real-time. Features like screen sharing and co-browsing are great examples of this.
4.Encourage Your Customers To Provide You Feedback
Apart from the data you gather from your customers, you also need to know how they feel whenever they interact with your brand, the pain points they face in your store, and what they think you can do better.
What better way to do this than asking your customers for feedback? The great thing about this is that it gives your customers a firsthand experience of how much you care for them. When you tackle the problems they highlight, they feel heard.
Here is a simple guide to do this:
- Use surveys to garner feedback from your customers once they are done purchasing a product or have spent a significant amount of time on your website.
- Do NOT use the word ‘survey’ when taking the feedback. Call it a questionnaire or just say ‘Help Me Grow’. This will make it more approachable and less a formal thing so it does not feel like they are trying to complain but more that they want to help you do better.
- Show a progress bar for your forms so they know how far they have gone.
- Keep the forms as brief as possible, asking just two or three questions. If you want to ask questions that will require a lot of typing, you can provide a speech-to-text to help them do this faster.
Now that you have all the feedback you need, the important part is to find a way to implement these changes as fast as possible to show your customers that they are not wasting your time providing you with suggestions.
5.Use Artificial Intelligence And Chatbots
Neither you nor your employees can always be around to reply to customer issues. You could be on break or it could be at night. This though is no concern for your customers as they could have a query at any time and not providing answers fast enough could reduce their brand loyalty for you.
Enter A.I. and chatbots. These tools are a great way to provide real-time support to customers at any time of the day, even if you are not available.
AI-powered chatbots go a step beyond just providing pre-recorded answers to customers, they can also help them navigate the website to where they want to be. They can also reserve a slot for customers to get attended to immediately when a service manager is available.
By the time the customer service manager is on seat, the A.I chatbot would have collected all the information they will need to attend to the customer thereby saving time.
6.Humanize Your Brand
Last but not the least, make your brand and customer service reps approachable by making them more human.
You can do this by adding fake pictures and maybe fake names of your service reps on your website’s live chat. This will protect your service rep identity while making it easier for customers to communicate since they have a subconscious sense that they are speaking with another human rather than a bot.
You can also give your service reps a certain level of freedom when it comes to interacting with customers. Instead of reading from a script and sounding cold, train them to listen carefully and warmly provide answers so the customers will feel at ease.
You could even use emojis in your reply. Unless their queries are super serious, your service reps can include funny emojis to create a calm conversing environment where customers are more likely to provide more information since they feel no pressure to talk perfectly or act formally.
Conclusion
Personalizing your customer’s experience when it comes to answering their queries and questions is a great way to build customer loyalty.
It might take a while to know how to appropriately do this but with patience and determination, you will do it.
Just make sure your customers feel calm when they approach you, use their data to gain a deeper understanding of their common queries, and make sure you implement corrections from feedback.
All this will culminate in a happy customer who is willing to come back for more and even bring friends along.
Thank you for your sharing. I am worried that I lack creative ideas. It is your article that makes me full of hope. Thank you.