How to Deliver a Personalized Customer Experience, Fueled by Data

After a year of acceleration in digital experiences, customers expect quick service. And no, we aren’t talking about quick shipping, we’ve dealt with that expectation for years. Customers want to get answers to their questions quickly and through more digital means, like social messaging and live chat. The way a customer reaches out to businesses is not the same, so we have to continue to adapt. But how?

An added complexity to this expectation is that these fast-paced conversations are that more customer information should be readily available, so that customers don’t have to repeat themselves and they can have a better shopping experience. Personalization and saved customer information within chat messages helps provide value to customers, as well as helps gain their trust.

Because of the pandemic, the share of digital enabled products has accelerated by seven years, according to McKinsey. This has an impact on those customer experience expectations. Are the tools your team is using staying in the past or keeping up with the future?

Customers no longer have to rely simply on a toll-free phone number or an email address to reach a brand. Now, it’s easier than ever, with private messaging on each different social media app, website chat, and more expanding channels by the day. However, with so many potential touchpoints, it can be difficult for a business to consolidate personal identities and continue conversations where they left off, with the right info every time.

More communication channels for customers can sometimes make personalization and meeting their specific needs more difficult. Yet, providing best-in-class (and personal) customer service provides companies with a competitive advantage. Bridging that gap is the goal for the new business landscape, help turn your customers into brand advocates by helping them feel like they are part of a meaningful conversation while their needs are being met.

This article will cover why personalization matters, the power of psychology when it comes to providing proactive choices to customers, as well as the three things you need to know to have an effective personalized customer experience strategy.

Customers can find what they need from many different competing brands, like yours. What makes a customer want to go back to a brand is if they felt valued as part of that experience. When a business is successful in selling a product and making their customer feel heard, they create a customer who is going to have a lifelong value. Whether that be through multiple transactions over time or positive word of mouth, it’s important to keep a customer for as long as possible and help cater to their wants and needs.

Businesses that underestimate the power of personalization and treat their customers like a disposable commodity miss out on this opportunity to make more profit per person. Many companies use their marketing budget predominately on customer acquisition, yet repeat customers have a 60-70% chance of converting.

After spending time acquiring a customer, the easiest way to lose them is by providing a poor service experience to them. 54% of customers say they have an increased expectation on customer experience than a year ago, Microsoft says.

When businesses respect their customers and keep tabs on their needs, customer service conversations, their preferred way to talk to your brand, and their previous purchases in one unified system — they succeed.

Customer retention adds to this pool of customer data. Retention through personalization should be your #1 goal in helping you address your customer’s evolving needs. Providing relevant information back to them to deliver that personalized interaction to turn customers into the influential advocates behind your brand.

Did you know that repeat customers spend a higher average cart size than new customers? Keep their trust and grow your profits.

People in your everyday life want to be seen and heard, right? So do your customers. Help them feel that through personalized customer experiences, based on their needs. Psychologically, it bonds the customer and the brand. And personally, don’t you feel more seen and have more trust for people in your life that listen to you and help you when you ask? It’s the same thing with a customer, except a customer won’t give you a second chance like a friend or family member will after you make a mistake.

Have you ever been to a busy eCommerce site that held hundreds of options for a simple shirt? Decision fatigue is the phenomenon where people have a harder time making smart choices (and may give up altogether on making a choice) after already making many decisions during their busy workday. Their brains feel depleted of decision-making energy.

Because of that, dealing with a long list of shirts may be harder for them to manage than usual and they could abandon their cart to look more “when they have the energy” to go through the pages of options. They are more likely to convert when there is a smaller set of options.

Don’t let your customers get overwhelmed by your inventory and instead provide them with personalized curated options based on their historical purchase, browsing behavior or chat activities to help narrow the choices, make it easier for your customer to convert by avoiding inflating the decision process, and increasing your average cart size.

Examples of this personalization include:

• Customers who like this, also like that

• Curated for you

• New releases picked for you

• Based on your favorites, we recommend

• Based on your purchases, you are eligible for this offer

• Complete the look with this added accessory

No customer wants to be treated like a number, they expect your attention and customized service, so be ready to add extra touches to the customer experience wherever you can.

For your business to be able to personalize their experience, you need to have your customer data on-hand, like:

• What they’ve bought from your business (including address info)

• What conversations they’ve already had with you

• Their preferred engagement methods

• What questions often come up about the products they’ve purchased

• Whether or not they have answered a customer service survey before (and what that response said)

To be able to facilitate this workload with your customer service chat agents, you need to set them up with success through the right tools and strategies. Don’t try to do this the manual way by having your customer service team open up multiple platforms and search for customer names before replying to messages. Having these different platforms open at once and cross-referencing information while your customer impatiently waits increases the amount of time each agent spends with a customer and provides a higher chance for error.

Instead, help bring together a holistic view of your customer and help your chat agents be efficient with these three CX organization steps.

• 1. Understand Your Customer

• 2. Talk to Customers on Their Favourite Channel

• 3. Make Artificial Intelligence Your Best Friend

We’ll go into all three in detail next.

Knowing your customer is the most important step in business, always. When you have a tool that brings all the customer information together, that helps your agents provide the best service that they can.

When all information is available at once, including those past conversations, delivery information, and past order history – customer’s that chat in don’t have to repeat their information. Then all customer service requests are efficient and helpful, addressing customer concerns and questions and setting a positive impression.

Being able to add in customer data into the chat for personalized information helps customers have a convenient chat experience and gives your business an edge. Don’t be a brand that treats each chat with a customer as a one-off request, asking for the same information over and over again, adding more aggravation to a customer that needs help with a problem.

Here are some ways to provide a more personalized chat with your customer:

• Have order history available no matter where the customer is chatting from

• Give the relevant support team visibility into the chat history of the customer

• Provide dynamic responses based on real-time contextual data

• Have chats seamlessly routed to the relevant agent based on their individual needs, without having the customer repeat information

Omnichannel marketing is not a buzz phrase, it’s a way to meet your customers where they are, no matter where that is. Unified messaging channels is the future of your customer service team, creating seamless conversations.

Is your company available to be reached over email, Instagram DM, Twitter DM, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and web chat? Your customer could be in all of the above. The question is, where is it most convenient for them to talk to you? The answer depends on the customer, so you need to be ready.

With 48% of consumers surveyed saying they have used social media to share a positive customer experience, it’s important you keep their positive impression with each interaction and grow your online word of mouth.

Successful companies help meet their customers where it makes most sense for that individual customer. One day, someone could email you, and the next moment they could send you a message via Facebook Inbox regarding the same matter. While one of your team members is trying to address the inquiry from the email, an agent from another team got assigned to the new Facebook conversation, giving confusion to your customer if they have different experiences or resolutions to their case, especially in instances where the customer needs to follow up on a later date.

Consolidating the chat history is key to creating a convenient experience for your customers. Do not treat your customer like you are operating in a silo, that’s how you will miss the chance to create a positive experience.

Help your chat agents improve through smart analytics on how they resolve customer concerns quickly with one platform, rather than comparing data from multiple platforms.

Automation does not equal a robotic and impersonal experience. A.I is not meant to replace your support team or to take away the human touch. In fact, modern CX solution allows human and bot to work collaboratively, an AI-assisted messaging solution can make it easier for your support team to work more efficiently.

Using automation makes it more accessible for chat agents to access the information they need, giving them more time for problem solving and building rapport with your customers. Depending on the topic of the message, the conversation can dynamically be routed to the right team with the expertise to solve the problem. This helps prevent customer frustration from having to be re-routed in the middle of explaining the problem.

Leading brands such as Petron Malaysia has achieved 83% CSAT score and 91% of the enquiries handled automatically with the help of conversational A.I and machine learning technology. This clears the queue for more complicated needs to the right chat agent with the bandwidth to handle such requests.

Advance contextual A.I features also enable brands to proactively send messages to their customers with information they need based on previous conversations. This helps your brand gain additional income and lifetime value for each customer, building the loyalty of your VIP customers.

In business, relationships are everything and every relationship starts with a conversation. Visitors do not come to your website to fill up contact form, they would prefer to speak to someone who can help out with their questions about your products and services.

Take the conversation with your customers further by helping your CX team address concerns at scale and with a personal touch. With so many customers engaging over social messaging as their main communication tool, using automated systems through AiChat will save your team time, increase your customer retention, and help you keep up with the evolving digital state of business.

If increased conversions, streamlined processes, and automation sound like the next step in your brand, AiChat can help. To begin automating this valuable lifecycle CX strategy, discover our AI-powered Conversational Customer Experience platform by requesting a demo today.