Personalizing Your Customer Service with 6 Strategies
Personalizing Your Customer Service with 6 Strategies
Customers want brands to respond to their queries, fast and in a personalized way, with the expected response time to be minutes and seconds. Gone are the days when companies could afford to reply in 24-48 hours. Here is personalizing your customer service with six strategies.
Your customers don’t always want a “wow” experience. Even a response “I’ll get back to you with an answer” shows that their query is being addressed. What matters is genuine and helpful customer service.
Today, negative customer feedback can prove fatal for a brand; you do not want to bring that doom upon yourself, as the brand owner. A study by Statista found that more than half of the customers stopped doing business with a company due to poor buying experience. If the customer experience isn’t your strategy, you’re doing it wrong. Because, the majority of buyers rate experience as important as price and quality, reported by PwC.
Here are the six benefits and strategies for brands to create personalized experiences for their customers across multiple channels.
Personalizing Customer Service
#1. Builds trust.
A customer insights survey shows that 35% of customers are more inclined to purchase an item from a particular brand solely on their trust of the same. People are more likely to buy from a brand they know rather than the unknown ones. Even when the other option is better, customers prefer to stay loyal to the brand they have known, and that’s where you can make a difference. They appreciate customized messages or offers specifically curated for them because it gives them a sense of belonging.
Knowing what your customer wants and empathizing with their pain points helps you to see how your product fits in their lives. Delivering value is the most fundamental way to establish trust among them and gives you an upper hand over your competitors.
#2. Higher conversion rates.
Personalization means understanding the customers’ needs at a deeper level, beyond addressing them with their name in the email’s subject line. As per Salesforce, more than 50% of customers expect offers from brands to be personalized. Unfortunately, the same percentage feel that the marketing messages they receive are not as relevant as they want them to be.
Customizing content, offers, and customer service to engage leads who are interested in your offerings is a great way to convert them into customers.
#3. Higher customer retention.
A report by Adobe reiterates the importance of marketing to existing customers. When 40% of eCommerce revenue is generated by only 8% of repeat customers, how would you keep the modern shopper loyal to the brand? Especially when they are bombarded everywhere by advertisements and content. Use personalization to improve customer retention. Studies show a direct correlation between personalization and customer satisfaction, thereby helping in customer retention.
Read further to know the three ways you can personalize your customer support:
#4. Localization.
If you’re aiming to attract an international audience, your brand messaging would have to be customized to the local markets. Global brands such as McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, BMW, Mercedes, and Apple to technology companies such as Slack have fine-tuned their offerings. Most brands now have competitive pricing, product lines, and customer service according to local preferences and buying behaviors.
According to Common Sense Advisory (CSA), 74% of customers are more likely to buy again from a brand that offers post-sale support in their native language. When a company expands its business across locations and into different countries, the content, messaging, style of communication, and non-textual elements such as images and icons will differ.
Localization is a comprehensive process of offering customer support in the native language that takes into consideration the cultural nuances of that region. Nuances could take the form of localizing the website, app, content, communication over the call, email, social media, and knowledge base.
Native translators understand the local slangs, grammar, synonyms, language, traditions, and translate, keeping the wit, sarcasm, and meaning intact. Machines, on the other hand, perform a literal translation, which can be incorrect. For example, Priceline found that Americans do not prefer talking to support staff who have a British accent. In fact, in Britain itself, Welsh prefer talking to Welsh support reps and Scots to someone who uses their language.
The most successful companies are those whose support is as diverse as the customer communities they serve.
#5. Personalized Videos.
Videos produce more conversions than any other form of content because they are short, easy to understand, improve brand recall, and are more engaging than text. Along with this, videos receive 1,200% more shares than text and images combined.
23% of consumers, especially millennials in the US, prefer a face-to-face interaction to mitigate service issues, according to a report by American Express. For products with complicated working, personalized videos can be used for customer support. They are videos customized for individual viewers. You can personalize the logo, thumbnail, support staff’s contact information and photo, and the website URL on these videos.
Video personalization platforms such as Hippo Video, Idomoo and Rocketium allow you to send the same video over and over again, by inserting personalized elements. The same video goes to thousands of people, yet making them feel as if it was made for them. You can use them for product demos, on-boarding, explanatory videos solving the customer queries, and to introduce the staff who would be handling that client. You can personalize renewal reminders, promotions, and product feature release announcements.
#6. Live chat.
Having a live chat feature on the website facilitates immediate response to queries or issues raised by a customer.
With consumers expecting answers within 10 minutes, live chat has the highest customer satisfaction rate of 92%, as compared to emails and phone calls, found Zendesk and HubSpot. Combine it with a personalized interaction with them, and you increase your chances of making a sale and winning a customer for life.
Via live chat, you can convey empathy, use wit, and add a personalized touch in solving the customer queries. While chatbots can help in answering the basic questions, give the user the option of talking to the support staff when the issue is elevated or when the bot fails to grasp the context.
Additionally, chat analytics provide companies with insightful information on the performance of their customer service representatives and common issues faced by prospective customers. That can help in tailoring future interactions accordingly.
Wrapping up: Adding a personal touch to customer interactions builds brand loyalty. Happy customers are the best brand ambassadors. And customers crave for a personalized response to their issues. The tools and strategies shared here will help you engage with your customers, solve their queries, and compel them to make a purchase.
What efforts do you make to offer personalized customer support?
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