3 Proven Steps to Personalized Customer Service (It’s easy... really!)

Has anybody spoken to you about personalization recently? 

Because it keeps coming up in my conversations… 

It’s a topic on a lot of people’s minds, and apparently, it’s something that 90% of digital businesses are currently investing in. 

The question I get all the time is… what, in practice, does personalization actually mean in customer service and the contact center?

If you go ahead and Google it, you will find some very tame examples. 

There are a ton of articles explaining why your agents should use customers’ names, be friendly, give them their full attention… 

Yikes.

Any customer service team that needs that advice is already in trouble!

And besides – that’s not personalized! 

At best, you could say it’s ‘personal’.

Let’s check out Starbucks to get to grips with the difference. 

Starbucks does personal *and* personalized 

Picture yourself at the counter of your local Starbucks. Let’s say you go there every day.  

Here’s what you know will happen. The barista will:

1. Use your name 
2. Be friendly 
3. Give you their full attention

Does that make it a personalized service?

Not at all. 

Because they’re going to do that for everyone! It makes the experiences feel a little more personal, sure, but it’s a far cry from personalization. 

However...

Starbucks does offer personalization when it comes to their app. 

If you've ever used the app you’ll know about the custom recommendations, the queueless payment option and the profile which remembers your usual order. 

That’s the difference. 

Personal service means service personnel who are polite to you. 

Personalized service means using data to fit services to your specific needs and preferences. 

There are 3 steps to achieving personalized customer service 

Here’s the really important part: how to make this happen in the contact center setting. 

There are three steps. If you can figure these out (and they’re pretty easy) you can provide personalized service tomorrow.

#1 Recognize customers when they contact you

These days you can call anyone – even your 87 year old grandmother – and they’ll know it's you because their phone displays your name. 

Simple. Very, very simple. 

But does that happen when you call your internet service provider? Your electricity company? Your insurance provider?

Probably not. Instead, you have to play 20 questions or hunt down a customer reference number from an old email. 

This really annoys me - and it really annoys most people! 

Over 70% of consumers expect your business to know who is calling.  

They also expect you to have instant insight into their previous purchases and interactions. 

How are you going to make this happen?

This is a basic integration challenge – you need your tools to talk to one another. 

Personally, I always recommend API integration between:

• Tools like telephony, messaging or conversational AI
• The systems that store the useful data, like your call center CRM or Helpdesk

Joining up these systems is easy really, and is the quickest way to ensure that you ‘recognize’ customers when they get in touch. 

Even better, doing this means you can offer services based on what you already know about each customer. 

‘When your customers feel heard and listened to, they feel connected to your brand as an individual, so they’re more likely to advocate on your behalf. And those customers turned cheerleaders will be using their megaphone to champion the great experience they’ve had with your company.’

Shep Hyken

#2 Send your customers to the right places

The next step is to make sure that you can route each customer to the right resource, first time, every time. 

Funnily enough, contact routing is an area of customer service where performance is actually declining over time (thanks to multichannel service!)

Something approaching one-third of total contact volume concerns an issue that went unresolved in a previous conversation. 

The number is even higher when you factor in customers who get shunted from one channel to another. 

It is *absolutely* in everyone’s best interest to handle contact routing more effectively. 

How are you going to make this happen?

In point #1 we talked about recognizing your customers. 

Now we’re going to build on that. 

Let’s say your contact center can recognize customers like the best Starbucks baristas in the business. 

Now you just need to put your accumulated customer data to use when deciding which services to offer them. 

Your secret ingredient will be automated and customizable contact flows. 

Yes, you need a particular set of call tools to make that happen. 

But once you have them, you can automatically base decision making on factors like language preference, purchase history and customer lifetime value, and lead every contact in the right direction. 

Crucially, you can continue to refine those flows as your channel mix changes and complexity grows over time. 

‘Customer journeys can be complex. Typically, the initial design is never 100 percent right. Therefore, the work of designing cannot stop at the end of the designated design phase.’

McKinsey Customer Experience Compendium

#3 Preempt your customers’ needs

So – at this point you’ve learnt to recognize your customers and direct them based on the available data. 

You might want to pat yourself on the back here – you have achieved personalized service. 

But there’s another step, and this is where all the really big value is. 

Preemptive customer service can be a tricky topic to get your head around but it’s very relevant to personalized service. 

It’s really the gold standard for service personalization if you can help customers with their issues before they reach out to you. 

How are you going to make this happen?

Here’s the funny thing about service personalization… it’s not really about individual customers. 

Weird, right? 

To put it another way – you could never create a 100% unique experience for each customer. 

What you can do is create a lot of options and make sure that every customer gets the best fit. 

Therefore – when it comes to preemptive service, you only need to look for the major contact drivers and think about how to pre-solve those issues. 

AT & T has a good example of this.  

Their billing structure confuses a lot of new customers and was generating a lot of calls to the contact center. 

Ultimately, the company realized that the most cost-effective solution was to create video content explaining the bill structure, and send that out to every new customer.

Their customers saw this as a thoughtful and well-timed intervention. 

AT&T saw it as a way to reduce call volume by 10% and save millions of dollars.  

And they’re both right!

But fundamentally...

Achieving any of this is pretty easy… if you have the tools to automate and customize your services. 

You can discover more about those tools in our free eBook: ‘How to Automate Anything in the Contact Center’.