When it comes to improving the customer experience or customer satisfacThis service helps userstion, personalized customer service comes at the top of the list. Gone are the days when you could draw customers with the same advertisements and approach.
Nowadays, you need a unique and personalized approach for each customer to persuade them to buy your product or subscribe to your service.
In this blog cum guide, we will learn what a personalized customer service is and how to deliver a personalized experience. We’ll wrap up the blog with some personalized customer service examples and related FAQs.
What is Personalized Customer Service?
As the name suggests, personalized customer service is a customer service approach that focuses on providing personalized service to each customer based on their profile. Customers are segmented by companies based on a variety of characteristics, including:
- Geographic (Region, Country)
- Demographic (Age, Gender, Occupation)
- Psychographic (Social class, Lifestyle)
- Behavioral (Purchase frequency, Loyalty)
Once customers are segmented or added to a specific group, a personalized strategy is developed for each of them, and they are approached with the same.
Each personalized consumer experience strategy may have the same or different goals. It could be either to raise brand awareness, increase customer engagement or improve conversation rates.
How Can You Provide Personalized Customer Service?
To deliver personalized customer service, you must plan and implement some out-of-the-box techniques or employ a personalized approach for each segment. Traditional customer service approaches will no longer work.
Nevertheless, customer service personalization is not a challenging task. All you need to do is thoroughly understand your customers and design strategies accordingly.
In addition to devising a well-defined strategy for each customer or segment, you will need to invest in modern customer support tools and communication technologies that will assist you in better organizing, streamlining, and automating business operations.
For example, you can use a virtual phone system like CallHippo to establish a continuous, direct line of communication with your customers. The software will let you select a local phone number of any country or region worldwide, as well as make and send messages at affordable rates.
However, in addition to the technologies, you must ensure that you follow the best practices for personalized customer service listed in the following section.
13 Best Ways to Deliver a Personalized Customer Service
The following is a 13-step plan or 13 tips for delivering a personalized customer service. Each tip is extremely useful and has the potential to take customer satisfaction to a whole new level if appropriately implemented.
1. Consumer Profiling
The first step toward improving customer experience is to understand your customers. It is essential that you comprehend your customers’ needs, purchasing power, customer journey, and consumer expectations. To conduct a thorough analysis of your customers, all teams must collaborate and strategize together.
You can also use advanced customer support tools to understand your customers better. For this process, you can even conduct IVR surveys and analyze historical data. When you’ve finished profiling each consumer, proceed to the next step– consumer segmentation.
2. Customer Segmentation
Customer segmentation is the process of classifying customers into various categories based on characteristics such as demographic, psychographic, behavioral, and geographic factors. Based on customer segmentation, you can plan products, marketing campaigns, and other activities.
Customer segmentation also allows you to better understand market trends and customer expectations. Based on this information, you can make products that are tailored to the needs of your customers. This will certainly help you offer personalized customer service.
3. Invest In The Right Technologies
You must remember that we live in a tech-driven world where everything is dependent on or surrounded by technology. The same is true for businesses. So, if you want to personalize the customer experience, you must use modern consumer technologies that are designed to serve this purpose such as CRM (Customer Relationship Management) tool.
The tools will not only help you automate, streamline, and organize the process and data, but they will also provide you with in-depth insights into your customers. Moreover, tools will also assist you in lowering operational costs.
For example, ControlHippo SaaS spend management app helps you detect and remove duplicate SaaS apps.
Social media plays a very critical role not only in offering personal customer service but also in brand building. Nowadays, customers often take to social media to express their dissatisfaction with a product or service. For this reason, it has become critical for businesses to establish a social media presence across multiple channels.
In addition to addressing customer complaints, social media allows you to market your products and stay in constant contact with your customers. All of these advantages of social media presence will certainly assist you create personalised customer experiences besides providing quick resolutions to irritated customers.
5. Train Your Representatives
You may have the most advanced customer support technologies as well as a strong social media presence. However, it is pointless if your employees are not properly trained or lack the necessary skills.
This means that it is critical that you train each customer support agent about the processes, guidelines, and tools that empower them to provide personalized customer service.
Each agent must have a customer-first attitude and be willing to go the extra mile when necessary. They must be quick to understand and analyze the customer’s issue in order to provide the best possible solution in the shortest amount of time. And, to keep your agents sharp and skilled, you should run training programs regularly.
6. Emphasis On First Call Resolution (FCR)
No customer wants to call you over and over for the same problem. They expect companies to provide a resolution on the first call. First Call Resolution is a call center metric that measures the number of customer inquiries that are resolved on the first call with the agent.
There is no doubt that a first-call resolution will make your customers happy. And in order to improve the first-call resolution rate, representatives must be well-versed in the product/s, the process/es, and how to provide personalized customer service.
7. Show Empathy
Empathy is one of the most effective ways to demonstrate to your customers that you genuinely understand and care about their concerns. It develops an emotional bond between you– the representatives and the customers. There are several ways to express sympathy:Practice active listening
- Practice active listening
- Let the customer vent out
- Be optimistic– don’t use negative words
- Be mindful of your tone
- Take ownership
- Offer quick solution
- Keep them posted about the progress
Following these small details when communicating with customers will certainly enhance their experience. Furthermore, a happy customer is more likely to become a loyal customer in the long run and choose you over your competitors again and again.
8. Real-time Customer Data Analysis
Another way to provide personalized customer service is to thoroughly analyze real-time customer data and gain insights into their purchasing habits, interests, customer journey, and spending power, among other things. Based on all of these valuable insights, you can create a personalized service roadmap for each group or segment.
Furthermore, the analytics will enable you to identify any flaws or gaps in the process, allowing you to take the necessary steps and steer the efforts in the right direction. You can compare monthly or weekly data to see what has improved and what needs to be improved.
Overall, thorough customer data analysis will assist you in making your approaches more customer-centric.
9. Tailored Offerings
Once you’ve segmented your customers, analyzed the relevant data and figured out what they like or what their needs are, you can offer them a customized product or a personal customer service that perfectly satisfies their requirements.
Assume you are a trip organizer company that organizes trips that include travel, food, and lodging. However, you receive an inquiry from a group of 50 college students who want to book a package that includes sightseeing in the surrounding areas as well. In this case, it would be wise to tailor your package and include sightseeing.
10. Reward Loyal Customers
You must reward your loyal customers time-to-time for their long-term relations with your brand. These customers are brand ambassadors for your company, promoting your products to their friends and family without charging a penny!
For this reason, it is expected that you reward them for their loyalty and unsought support for your brand.
One way to thank cult customers is to provide them with a personalized product or service. You can offer them special discounts, anniversary gifts, run loyalty programs, or other personalized customer service based on their relationship with you. Your small gesture will undoubtedly mean a lot to them.
11. Create a Self-service Knowledge Base
Many customers are capable of resolving issues on their own if given the necessary guidance. This can be achieved through a self-service knowledge base. A self-service knowledge base is a well-organized database of information about the company’s products and services.
It typically includes a product guide, a how-to guide, tutorials, FAQs, and so on.
Creating a knowledge base benefits both customers and organizations. Because when the customers can solve the problems on their own, the customer support team will have to handle fewer queries.
12. Regular Idea Sharing With Employees
Listening to your employees is another important way to make your personalized customer service more directed and customer-centric. After all, employees are the ones who work on the front lines or have direct contact with customers all day long. They have firsthand knowledge of what customers expect from the company.
For all of these reasons, you must hold regular meetings with employees to solicit feedback and ideas on overall operations and to make products/services more customer-friendly. Also, as a manager, you must never hesitate to welcome ands implement good ideas from employee.
13. Gather & Analyze Customer Feedback
The 13th step in delivering personalized customer service is collecting and analyzing customer feedback. Customers, just like employees, are direct beneficiaries or users of your services/products. Indeed, they have the most in-depth understanding of what they want or what other customers may be looking for in a product.
You should try out various ways to collect customer feedback. You can, for example, give them vouchers or offer a discount on future purchases. Once the feedback has been collected, all of your teams can sit down and analyze it to determine what needs to be improved.
Overall, analyzing customer feedback is a great way to understand customers’ likes and dislikes.
5 Best Examples of Personalized Customer Service
Here are five examples of personalized customer service where brands went above and beyond to provide a customized experience to customers.
sourceIn 2011, Coca-Cola, a soft drink manufacturer, collaborated with Ogilvy, a well-known advertising firm, to launch a unique marketing campaign called “Share a Coke” in Australia. The campaign’s goal was to develop a personal relationship with modern consumers.
The traditional Coca-Cola bottle wrapping was replaced with the phrase “Share a Coke with,” followed by a person’s name. Millions of bottles were printed with the top 250 names from each country. Needless to say, the campaign was a huge success. The campaign was later expanded to over 80 countries.
2. Nike: Nike By You
SourceNike By You is a service offered by Nike, allowing customers to personalize and design their own Nike merchandise. Customers can create custom-designed shoes that are tailored to their specific feet and style.
You can select your favorite color and texture from the palette, as well as graphics and materials that express your personality and 3 different mesh options that add a natural touch to your shoes. You can also include a personal message on the heel. The campaign is very popular among sneakerheads.
3. The Starbucks Mobile App
SourceFor good reasons, the Starbucks app is one of the most downloaded restaurant apps. The app has a very intuitive user interface and a well-organized purchase flow that allows you to quickly select your favorite product. Moreover, the app remembers customers’ favorite drinks and preferences based on previous orders or purchase history.
Besides that, the app rewards customers with perks and freebies based on their preferences and previous activity. Starbucks has also used AI technology in a novel way. They use an AI algorithm to send over 400,000 variants of personalized messages to customers, elevating personalized customer service to new heights.
4. Grammarly Weekly Reports
SourceTo offer its users personalized customer service, Grammarly– a typing assistant, sends weekly reports to users on how their writing has improved, using all the data it collected during the period. This service helps users understand how their professional ghostwriting service has improved and where it needs to improve.
The report includes information such as how many words the user wrote that week, how many mistakes they made, and how frequently they made mistakes. In addition, the reports also highlight potential areas for improvement.
5. Wealthfront
SourceWealthfront– an automated investment service firm based in California developed a mobile app that makes the investment as personalized as possible. When the user login to the app, the app asks you multiple questions about your income, financial goals, risk levels, and so on, in order to customize your investment portfolio.
Based on their preferences and information shared, customers will be recommended the right products and receive financial advice. In addition, to take the personalized customer service concept a step further, the app also diversifies your investment with an automated portfolio.
These are five examples of personalized customer service. We hope that these examples help you better understand how personalization works and how you should plan for it in your company.
Frequently Asked Questions
The key advantages of personalized customer service include increased customer retention, higherr customer loyalty, improved brand loyalty, quality customer service, and overall success.
To create a customer personalization strategy, follow these steps:
- Step 1: First and foremost, understand your customers.
- Step 2: Segment them according to their characteristics.
- Step 3: Develop and implement tailored strategies for each group.
Personalization is the process of developing different tailored strategies for each group based on characteristics such as demographic, psychographic, behavioral, and geographic factors.
To personalize customer communication:
- Practice active listening.
- Address the customer by name.
- Maintain a positive and calm tone.
- Offer a solution as soon as possible.
- Keep the customer informed of the case's progress.
You can use personalization to reward loyal customers, provide quick resolutions, personalize offerings, run loyalty programs, and so on. All of these small efforts will undoubtedly increase customer loyalty.
Personalized customer service is a marketing technique that helps companies to tailor their interactions with each customer, customize their offerings, and personalized customer service.
Updated : January 12, 2024
Paras Kela is an experienced tech writer with over 7 years of background in IT. He specializes in simplifying complex technical concepts, such as SaaS solutions, for easy understanding. Throughout his career, Paras has produced more than 200 high-quality blogs on various tech-related topics. When he is not working, he enjoys gardening, watching movies, and spending quality time with his loved ones.
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