Modern customers expect better customer service than in the past. They not only want quality products, but also expect fast and smooth end-to-end shopping experience. Businesses need to adapt customer service strategies to meet these expectations or risk losing customers.

A survey of 1,000 Singaporean respondents has shown that 70% of Singaporean consumers want a personalized digital customer experience and would be more likely to buy again from brands which treat them like an individual, rather than like every other customer.

Personalization can even be called a “hygiene factor”: customers take it for granted, but if a retailer gets it wrong, customers may depart for a competitor. On the other hand, tailoring your customer experiences to individual customers' wants and needs leads to increased sales.

Let's look at six practices businesses of any sizes can adopt to personalize customer service at scale with an AI Chatbot.

First interaction is where you can foster trust and build relationship with your customers from the get-go. Make it a point to greet your customers by name and introduce yourself at the start of your conversation on all communication channels.

Image: Marina Bay Sands chatbot greets customers on first-name basis

A chatbot that addresses the customers by name leaves a deeper impression than one that does not. This allows customer to feel acknowledged and intimately cared for. You can also track brand interactions to gain deeper behavior insights to better engage and tailor your offerings to your customers. Although this is a simple and effective tactic, many companies are missing out on this opportunity.

Do you know? Most customers avoid human support unless they have complex issues. Frost & Sullivan research supports this, uncovering that 81% of customers prefer finding answers to their queries without reaching out directly to a company. Just 5% would rather interact with a human agent.

People's preference is a type of demand, and a good businessman knows how to utilize that. If your customers want a non-interactive information platform, you should deliver it. Build a knowledge base or utilise a well-organized FAQ page to make it easier for the customers to search for information they need themselves. Leverage a chatbot to automate frequently asked questions. That way, people won't even need to search for the questions on FAQ or Forum pages. It may seem like a fancy optional investment but in reality, it's more cost-effective than hiring more service staff in the long term. An AI Chatbot can help human agents with offloading repetitive inquiries and provide answer suggestions during a live chat support. Your staff will become more efficient by focusing on solving complex situations.

Meet Tania, an AI chatbot designed for Petron Malaysia, powered by AiChat that offers excellent self-service functions. With millions of fuel customers in Malaysia fueling up at Petron Service Stations, there was just one problem they were constantly dealing with: to better manage and answer the influx of customer queries on website and Facebook comments. To address the challenge, Tania and her cat, Pat was built to provide timely and accurate responses 24/7 and deflect the repetitive questions all through a seamless online experience.

Image: Tania – Dual-language Petron chatbot provides customers with excellent self-served tool to learn more about their loyalty program, oil recommendations and find Petron stations

Tania speaks English and local Bahasa Malaysia and even Manglish (English with Malaysian Slangs) while exhibiting rich product knowledge by serving up product information like the benefits of Petron petrol and recommending the right engine oils for your car. Not just that, Tania also educates customers on the Petron Miles card registration methods and helps with the membership registration process. Moreover, Petron disrupted the industry by being the first ever petrol service station to launch a dual-language Virtual Assistant.

Engaging with your customers in meaningful ways can result in a powerful customer experience. But building a great experience requires more than engagement; it requires strategy and re-evaluation, too.

By surveying and asking for feedback, you can take your customer experience to the next level.

This allows your brand to collect valuable information directly from your customers to understand what they want or need. It also helps to re-engage your customers and create an opportunity for the customers to share their experience and preferences.

Image: Customer satisfaction survey run by Petron conversational service chatbot

With a smart AI chatbot solution, brands can design customer surveys to send out after a guided user flow, or a live chat session to capture customer’s feedback. This helps to track and quantify your customer service rating over time, creating internal benchmarks for improved customer experience and loyalty. On the internet, words spread like wildfire so shutting off from customer opinions and deleting negative reviews no longer works in modern business environment. In contrast, open communication is often your best retention strategy.

Have you been in situations where you, being a customer, have to repeat yourself after your issue is passed around different levels or departments to get it solved? It is unlikely you feel very happy about that experience and continue using their service in the future. To minimise the times this can occur, equip and empower your staff with a good CRM system that allows them to immediately find customer preferences and historical interactions like purchases, payment made at a glance. It saves time and streamlines the experience so your customers can walk away without any frustration.

An advanced conversational experience platform like AiChat can provide 360 overview of customers data from chat sentiment analysis to customer interests in all messaging channels like Messenger, Whatsapp, Instagram and Web – All in a single dashboard.

Some customers may feel wary about interacting with an automated bot rather than a live person. But by giving your chatbot some personality and a brand voice, you can create a more human-like experience for your customers.

Meet Bzbot – a snarky, know-it-all AI character developed by AiChat for Mediacorp’s Mind Blown! educational series for pre-teens.

Image: Cheeky responses by Bzbot - MediaCorp Chatbot

He is sardonically funny because it absolutely cannot read human cues or characters. It believes strongly in sharing information and educating the less-informed but is impatient with humans who he sees as slow and dim-witted – adding to his personal mission of wanting to share as much as he can with them.

Like computer game characters who can engage with players, BzBot utilises between 4-6 different responses that are cycled through so users feel as if it is a living entity who reacts differently each time they engage with it. One can feel Bzbot’s personality shone through his peculiar manner of speech.

Offering more communication methods to your customer means giving your brand more exposure on different platforms. Most people have their own preferences and do not have accounts on multiple communication platforms. Thus, if you do not provide the flexibility to choose or switch platforms seamlessly, you will inevitably risk losing a portion of potential customers or creating frustrating experience.

Besides providing cross-platform support, an omni-channel CX platform is no longer a luxury but necessity in your toolkit. Customer service tools are constantly evolving through utilizing new behavior patterns. Your brand will fall behind if you plan on sticking to the same old systems.

Integrating personalization into your customer service experience not only drives engagement, but also leads to a deeper relationship with your customers.

Interested in learning more about how we can help to design a personalised AI Chatbot? Book a discovery call with us today.