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A Guide to Improving Your Customer Service in 2024
Why do companies need to personalise their customer service?
1. Inspire Brand Loyalty
91% of consumers are more likely to shop with brands that recognise, remember, and provide relevant offers and recommendations (Accenture).
When customers receive personalised service, they feel connected to the company. Having a perceived personal relationship will encourage customers to continue patronising at the company. The good experience they receive builds brand loyalty as they have lesser incentive to switch to other substitutes.
Hence, personalising customer service acts as a potent lock in strategy to build a large customer base, allowing companies to increase their revenue and sustainability of their business.
2. Increase Customer Satisfaction
Customers want businesses to understand their individual requirements and expectations, while 66% feel they are often treated like numbers (Salesforce).
Since the pandemic, customers have started having higher expectations of customer service. Customers are no longer satisfied with receiving generic advice and they are starting to face newer challenges given the advent of AI introducing new products and services.
Being able to receive personalised guidance has become the forefront of customers’ expectations. Hence, providing this will elevate the quality of customer service and significantly boost customer satisfaction.
3. A Happier Working Environment
Customer service agents bear the brunt of customers’ complaints and frustrations despite most things not being their fault. Being constantly exposed to these negative emotions over time can really emotionally drain customer service agents.
As mentioned above, when measures are put in place to personalise customer service, customer satisfaction increases. This results in a lowered number of disgruntled customers as they are receiving tailored assistance which more effectively solves their problem.
As a result, customer service agents will be in a happier and healthier working environment, enabling them to be more productive. This creates a continuous cycle whereby both parties are happy.
Now that we understand why it is important to personalise customer service, let’s explore how we can implement this.
How to Personalise Your Customer Service?
1. Avoid working in silos, centralise resources and information
Working in silos has its benefits. It allows each department or group to more effectively focus on a certain set of tasks, develop specialised skill sets and more easily build synergy.
However, it hinders the process of information and data sharing. This causes inconsistencies across silos as not everyone has perfect information and the full picture.
Therefore, while breaking down this silos system may result in some initial inefficiencies, the long run benefits are abundant. By allowing for centralisation of resources and information, the company can get a more accurate big picture view on all aspects of the business including customers’ tastes, preferences and expectations.
Identifying weaknesses is the first step to improving. This greatly streamlines the process of spotting areas that can be further enhanced, allowing for more efficient use of resources and data to drive personalisation efforts.
2. Data Collection and Analytics through CRM platforms
After implementing systems to facilitate the sharing and centralisation of data, the next step is to ensure that we properly collect and use the data. Collecting essential data such as common queries and complaints customers have, purchase history, branch frequented etc, play an integral role in analytics on companies’ respective CRM platforms.
Post data collection, how such data is analysed plays an imperative role in whether insights can be obtained. Poor data organisation and analytic approach can render such data useless no matter how much there is. Hence, there must be a clear intent and objective when it comes to data analysis.
For example, in order to understand which demographic of customers current customer services solutions are not reaching out to sufficiently, data can be organised and segmented based on customer demographics to facilitate more accurate analysis and better insights which leads to improved decision making.
3. AI and Machine Learning
As AI makes its way into every industry in our economy, many companies are learning how to properly leverage this powerful tool. The customer service industry is no exception
To enhance analytics processes that were mentioned above, companies can employ machine learning algorithms to predict customer behaviour and preferences. Over time, with more data, validation and troubleshooting, predictions can be made more accurately.
As ChatGPT takes the world by storm, generative AI chatbots have become a potent solution for crafting responses specifically tailored to the prompt given. Hence, this serves as an appropriate tool for the customer service industry to adopt.
4. Omnichannel Experience for Customers
More and more customers (69 percent) want a personalised and consistent customer experience across multiple channels, both physical and digital (Segment).
In our fast-paced society, there is an increasing demand for convenience. Customers desire to receive assistance from anywhere at any time through everything. Being able to do things quickly without putting a dent in one’s schedule is an extremely marketable quality that customer service systems can boast.
Hence, being able to avail multiple platforms to customers, all while integrating them into a single platform, allows a company’s customer service to be far more wide reaching.
In addition, since it is integrated into a single system, all the information and data is inherently centralised. This allows customer service agents to provide more personal and consistent assistance to the customer, without the customer having to go through processes multiple times.
Conclusion
To conclude, personal customer service revolves around a two key ideas:
- Centralisation of Information
- Adoption of technology
To keep abreast of the competition, companies must find a way to implement a system that encompasses these two ideas. Fortunately, here at Voncierge, we have just what you are looking for.
Click here to find out more about how Voncierge can personalise your customer service.
