Personalization has become synonymous with high quality customer care. In an age where data is in abundance, customers expect brands with which they do business to be able to put that information to good use and tailor experience to their preferences. Similarly, brands recognize the value in building relationships – and revenue – by delivering personalized service. It not only gives customers additional value from the relationship, but it also increases additional revenue opportunities through increased brand loyalty and targeted engagements.
Know your customers’ history
Every time customers engage with your business, they provide valuable insight into their needs and experiences. Whether that’s a live interaction with a customer service agent, a visit to the website, an IVR engagement, in-person experience, or anything else, they are leaving traces that you can leverage to understand not only their experiences, but the needs of your customer base as a whole.
This is particularly important for customer service organizations, who have an opportunity to simplify interactions and reduce time to resolution by knowing and understanding the full customer journey, including products they have purchased, whether they started by trying to resolve issues by self-service IVR and were unsuccessful, or if they have had to place repeated calls regarding the same problem. Integrating all your engagement channels and customer records will help deliver information to support teams in order to successfully address customer needs efficiently.
Give customers options
Today’s customers have many communication channels to choose from, and they use many of them in their daily lives. While they may have preferences when it comes to customer service, various situations are likely to dictate their choices at any given time. It’s imperative to give customers easy access to multiple channels of engagement, to have staff trained across those channels, and integrate those channels into a holistic customer view within your CRM and contact center platforms to ensure continuity of experience. Be sure to also make access to live support easy from automated self-service options like IVR. Be sure to make access to live support easy from within automated self-service systems like IVR or web-based options to avoid customer frustration and a poor experience.
Gather feedback
Part of understanding the customer experience is soliciting feedback. It’s also a way to personalize interactions based on customers’ experiences and purchases to build a tighter relationship and let them know their feedback is valued. There are many ways and times customers are likely to provide thoughts on their experiences, providing key intelligence on not only individual experiences but broader trends across broader customer segments. Online (email) and IVR campaigns are two common and easy ways to collect customer feedback about their general brand experiences, product feedback, customer service evaluations, or other areas of importance. Many businesses ask customers if they would be willing to answer a few short questions at the end of their calls with live agents, placing them into IVR-based surveys once their issues have been resolved.
Provide proactive Engagement
Identifying patterns in customer behavior allows businesses to proactively engage customers or even resolve issues before they are even aware of them. Using customer journey data, from web visits to purchase histories to customer service calls can draw out sources of recurring problems related to products, customer service, marketing information, or any other areas of the customer journey. If you’re able identify potential problems and communicate that along with resolution plans to customers before they have to contact your customer support, you can eliminate any frustration and negative perception from the customer. In fact, you are likely to turn a potential negative into a positive experience.
Ensure a great self-service experience
Today’s customers – particularly the millennial generation that has recently become the largest single workforce population group – prefer to solve problems on their own before contacting customer support. Knowing that, have a variety of well-designed self-service options is critical to meeting that demand. IVR and web self-service tools not only allow empowers customers to find answers on their own, but it frees customer support teams to help those that truly need it – those with more complicated or recurring problems, or who may not have access to self-service tools. Today’s IVR systems are powered by speech recognition engines that are able to effectively route callers to solutions quickly and easily and can make self-service a highly efficient process for many issues.
