6 ways to provide a more personalised customer service

Suppose you’re an entrepreneur operating a big enterprise, whether B2B or B2C, having people with the right expertise to deal with your customers is key.

On the other hand, your business might be a retail business where you can use one-on-one mechanisms to enhance your customer service. It’s not just the obligation of your staff to level up their customer service skills, but that consumers expect friendly and personalised interaction with your business.  

You need to come up with several cost-effective ways, both online and offline, that your business can leverage. You can stand out from the rest of your competitors by implementing effective personalised customer service. This has the potential to set your brand apart. Satisfied customers may become your brand ambassadors, which may broaden your customer base. 

This article explores six tactics that you can use to accord your customers a personalised service:

1. Give a personalised website experience

You’ve probably been focusing on the traditional physical ways of providing a good customer service experience to your customers. The experience that your customers receive while using your website is part of their collective experience. Ensure that you incorporate good features on the website to improve their interaction with your brand.  

It’s believed that effective website personalisation has the potential to increase your revenues. Some mechanisms that you can use are special messages, custom overlay, and displays targeting specific users.  

You can also automate your site with tools that collect data of your customers and analyse their shopping behaviours. With this data, you can personalize the web experience for your customers with instant firmographic data. To know some tools that you can use on your website, you can read this article. The data you receive from these tools helps you improve on customer targeting, retarget certain qualified accounts, and carry out personalised campaigns by status, industry, stage, among others.  

2. Use your customer’s name

You might have observed this tactic from business owners operating a shop in your neighbourhood. They seem to know their customers by name. They will call you by name as they serve you.

When you address someone by their name, they feel important, which psychologically empowers their ego. It’s also a powerful way to capture the attention of your customer as everyone will naturally respond to their name.  

Recent research indicated that more than 70% of customers expect a personalised experience when dealing with a business, and it’s believed that many people want to return where the person who attended them can remember their name. Ensure that you use the name of your customers whenever communicating to them, whether through email, chat, automated communications, or the phone. 

Today’s technology can help you automate emails to your customers, including their names. Your website can be programmed to greet account holders the moment they visit your site. Make addressing your customers by name a key factor in customer service.  

3. Pay attention to feedback

Feedback is pivotal to the success of any business. Feedback can be in the form of product reviews, direct email, or direct calls. Using the feedback you get from your customers, you can improve your services, products, and the ways you use to serve your clients. Requesting or receiving feedback shows your customer that you welcome their opinion and you’re ready to address any issues raised.  

It’s not enough to just receive feedback, but you should go the extra mile of implementing the suggestions given. After receiving feedback from customers, you can take the following actions: 

• Reply to the feedback using a personalised response.  
• If the feedback is genuine, implement the relevant changes in your company.  
• Reach out to the customer and inform them of the changes you’ve made.  

4. Start a loyalty program

The majority of business owners agree that retaining loyal customers is cheaper than acquiring new ones. With 75% of consumers agreeing that they favour companies that offer rewards, a loyalty program can be a very smart idea. Loyalty programs can be simple ideas such as giving offers such as ‘Buy three pizzas, get one free!’ You may also opt to appreciate regular customers with a dessert. You can improve loyalty campaigns by use of digital loyalty programs. 

Digital loyalty programs can help you achieve more than just giving rewards. You can use these programs to collect data concerning customer behaviour and use it to carry out personalised marketing to your customers. For instance, based on the buying patterns of the customer, you can launch tailored marketing campaigns.  

5. Be an omnichannel business

To be omnichannel means that you should be aware of your customers’ history of interaction with your business across all communication channels you have. According to the Harvard Business Review, omnichannel customers spend up to 10% more than single-channel customers. 

What you need to be aware of is their preferences, purchase history, and issues experienced in the past. When a customer launches a complaint, keep a log that helps you to follow through with their problem. It’s frustrating to the customer to reach out to your business with the same issue, and each representative has no idea that the issue was raised before.  

Keeping the details of your customer’s history helps your business to give them attention with personalised service that may make them feel valued. Nine out of 10 consumers report wanting an omnichannel experience. By using customer relationship management (CRM) services available for any size of business, you can manage to be omnichannel. 

6. Empower your agents with more freedom

Many companies have elaborate customer service policies, standards, and templates. As much as these measures are good, they may be bottlenecks to the effectiveness of your customer service agents. Each customer issue is unique, and your agents may need to employ a human touch rather than strict policies. In several instances, company policies may turn customer service interaction to be standardized, dry, and very impersonal.  

Giving your agents the freedom to be authentic helps your business be able to provide a better personalised customer service experience. This doesn’t mean that your agents have a full range of freedom. You can still flexibly uphold the rules and policies. 

Conclusion

Because of the competition that exists in today’s market, there are many alternatives for your customers. One of the effective ways to retain your customers is by implementing the tactics given in this article to conduct exceptional personalised customer service. Ensure that your communications address your customers by name, provide a personalised website experience, have a loyalty program, and give your agents more freedom.