7 Ways to Personalize Your Customer Experience

The customer comes first. 

At least, that’s what most brands like to tell themselves, right? But while they might excel at centering their customer in their services, not every brand is prioritizing their customer at every step of the journey, even if they think they are. 

Customer experience personalization means providing thoughtful customer interactions at every single touchpoint, from their first browse of your website, to their online or over-the-phone queries, to their shipping experience, to their followup concerns and questions, and beyond. 

How to Personalize Your Customer Experience

Providing a personalized customer experience is key to differentiating your business in today’s competitive marketplace, and should include not only your sales processes, but your communication and support processes, too.

Here are seven ways you can personalize your customer experience to build stronger customer loyalty and earn more five-star reviews:

1. Give customers more ways to contact you.

Modern customers want and expect greater accessibility in their customer service experiences. They want to be able to pick up their smartphone in a crowded place and interact with an agent without ever dialing a number, or to send their account information via text instead of reading it out loud.

A personalized customer experience is one that meets customers wherever they are and on whatever channel is most convenient for them, including live chat, SMS, and social platforms, or a traditional phone call.

2. Train your employees to be customer-facing.

Customer service calls can become heated easily, particularly when your call volume is large and a customer is already frustrated. And while that frustration is usually not the customer service rep’s fault, making sure reps are better equipped to respond to a variety of customer emotions is one of the best things you can do to improve your service and personalize your customers’ experience. 

When customer queries are always offloaded to stiff, robotic virtual agents, it can make customers feel like they aren’t being heard. Personalization of customer service means leveraging automation appropriately so that it aids your live agents, not replaces them.

3. Leverage artificial intelligence. 

Personalized customer experiences are one part quality and one part efficiency. So while it is important to have consumer-facing representatives who are trained to problem solve and help every customer feel seen, it’s also important to eliminate pain points and bottlenecks where the customer experience gets needlessly held up. 

Incorporating artificial intelligence into the customer journey can create efficiency for smaller tasks that makes the customer experience smoother and quicker for customers in a hurry. AI can also do more than quicken processes. Using an intelligent CCaaS platform, you can leverage AI to collect insightful data points that help your real life representatives learn more about the customer (like customer sentiment) before they even interact with your brand.

4. Offer self-service options.

Customers like to be able to get assistance easily when they need it, but they also like being able to figure things out for themselves, because it can be faster and more convenient for them. 

You can incorporate more personalization into your customer experience by providing more opportunities for self-service. This might look like:

- Building out an FAQ page with step by step instructions on how to solve common problems;

-Offering an online portal where customers can pay their balance, update personal information, and change appointments; 

-Posting video tutorials on your social media and YouTube channels.  

5. Ask for customer feedback.

Feedback is such a valuable and quick way to hear straight from your customer about what things you should be doing differently to provide a better experience. Collecting feedback gives you a better understanding of what your users want and need as well as how to meet those needs. Gather and assess feedback via SMS, social media platforms, email surveys, and IVR surveys to provide a better experience.

6. Invest in a powerful Customer Relations System. 

The best tool you can invest in for your agents as well as your customers is a customer relations management (or CRM) system that uses real-time data, like call history and customer information, to inform every interaction. Intelligent CRMs can do all of the data gathering and sorting that gives you greater context about each customer and each potential customer, so the journey is personalized before it ever even starts.

7. Regularly evaluate your systems and processes.

Customer needs and habits, much like technology, are ever-changing. A brand that prioritizes customer experience personalization is consistently evaluating their current systems and processes for weak spots or areas in need of improvement. Regularly assessing touchpoint interactions and customer feedback can help your business grow and adapt in ways that make the customer journey richer and even more rewarding, and that keeps customers coming back for more.