When you are a small business looking for growth, you need to keep customer experience at the forefront of your mind. The best method of growing your business is by always striving to provide impeccable customer service.
If you want to build lasting customer relationships, you should learn how to optimize and personalize interactions across all touchpoints. This is the fastest road to a better customer experience.
What is a personalized customer experience?
One of the best ways your customer experience helps your business grow is by building its reputation. This reputation can serve your business by attracting potential new customers and keeping your current customer base loyal.
But what is personalized customer service? Personalized service is service that considers each customer and their individual needs, preferences, and backgrounds. It means keeping all these factors in mind when interacting with customers at every stage of the customer journey.
Personalizing your customer experience is important for ensuring your customers feel heard and valued by your business. Moreover, you can optimize customer journey pathways more easily once you start tailoring customer experiences according to specific profiles.
Why is personalized customer service important?
Now that you know, “What is personalized customer service?” you need to understand why it matters. There are a few crucial reasons that every business owner should strive to deliver customer service personalization, including the following.
1. Enhanced Customer Satisfaction
Most importantly, a personalized digital experience will improve customer satisfaction. Customers will feel more important as well as more valued when you use personalization. This combination ensures that they are happier with their experience.
That high level of customer satisfaction comes with its benefits, from customer loyalty to more positive reviews. Loyal customers can also be turned into brand advocates, who help improve brand reputation and drive business growth.
2. Improved Customer Retention
As mentioned, satisfied customers are more likely to be loyal to your brand. That translates into customer retention. Customer retention also comes from the fact that personalization increases trust in your brand, as customers believe that you understand them and their unique pain points. For reference, 76% of customers say they are more likely to buy from a company with personalization.
Remember that customer retention increases your sales and the lifetime value of your customer. It also costs less to retain a customer than it does to convert a new one, improving your ROI.
3. Increased Customer Engagement
A personalized digital experience also improves engagement and can help boost conversion rates. One report even found that the click rate was 139% higher for personalized emails over static messages.
That engagement furthers customer loyalty and retention, which directly affects your business’s bottom line. It also encourages more positive reviews and word-of-mouth recommendations. The increased engagement helps you keep your current customers and acquire new ones.
How to Personalize Customer Experience: 12 Effective Ways
As a business owner, you’ll be happy to hear that it is fairly straightforward to personalize the customer experience. The following are some effective ways to do so.
1. Create Customer Profiles
Since it is not a one-size-fits-all strategy, detailed customer profiles are crucial to customer experience personalization. These will let you better understand each customer as an individual, or at least segment your customers.
The process for creating an individual customer profile for personalization is nearly identical to developing customer personas. Look at your customers’ demographic information, pain points, goals, and backgrounds. Then, create profiles of sample customers. Create as many customer profiles as you need to cover the majority of your customer base.
2. Develop a Customer-Centric Culture
Creating a customer experience personalization strategy requires putting your customers first. The smart way to do this is to develop a customer-centric culture or vision. From your company culture to your business processes to your customer support training, make sure that you focus on the expectations of your customers. If you don’t know your customers’ expectations, ask them by collecting feedback.
As you create your customer-centric culture, consider what elements of personalization you want. At the very least, most companies want to include customers’ names. But you may also want to think about their behavior on the website, location, demographics, purchase history, and on-site search history.
3. Collect Customer Feedback
Collect feedback on more than just your customers’ expectations. You also want feedback about their experience with your customer service processes, including features they like and don’t like. As with any other feedback, you can use this information to figure out what you should retain and what areas require improvement. Combined with the right tools and metrics, you can use this feedback to strategically improve the customer experience.
When you ask customers for feedback and data, let them know why. This transparency will prevent it from feeling as if you are breaching your customers’ privacy. Instead, they will understand that you are getting to know them and building a relationship.
4. Collect Employee Feedback
Also, collect feedback from your employees. To start, your service agents know your customers best, as your team members directly interact with them daily. As such, they will offer insights and valuable data points into potential problems customers experience.
Employees can also offer insight into whether your customer-centric processes work well. They will be able to highlight challenges in the process, such as where more training is required or when they need additional tools.
5. Train Your Customer Service Team
You can’t just decide to have a customer-centric culture or take the other actions on this list. You need to train your employees to follow those processes. Take the time to train all customer-facing team members in how to be customer-centric.
Start by avoiding inflexible scripts. Scripts can be useful at times, but any smart business owner will give their service team flexibility. Otherwise, a script will seem robotic and impersonal. Encourage your team to use the script as guidelines and adjust it based on customers and circumstances. Alternatively, you can offer talking points instead of a script.
Encourage your team to treat customer interactions like conversations with friends and family. Make sure customer service agents know to use a customer’s history with your business to add context to conversations and create positive interactions.
6. Offer Omnichannel Communication Options
Every customer is different, so savvy businesses offer multiple communication options. Offer face-to-face interactions in-store, conversations over the phone, email, texting, social media, webchat, and any other communication channel your customers want. The key here is to offer customer service personalization that lets your customers choose their preferred channel.
Don’t forget to include social media in your omnichannel service approach, as a growing number of customers prefer to communicate on this platform.
7. Leverage Technology
Technology offers plenty of personalized customer experience examples. For example, you can use technology to make your website a conversation starter via webchat. You can even see Webchat in action on your site. Webchat lets you deliver a personalized experience right from the start, as you can chat one-on-one with your website visitors. The best technology will even let you move the conversation to text, personalizing the experience by letting customers choose what platform to chat on.
Another example of leveraging technology is using a CRM built for small businesses. Podium, for example, shows all past interactions with each customer, from conversations to purchases to payment methods chosen. This gives you the context needed to make a conversation more personalized and show customers you care about their needs.
8. Collect and Analyze Customer Data
Between your CRM, website tracking, and other software, you likely collect a fair amount of customer data. Take the time to evaluate what data you are already collecting and what else could be useful. Look for automation tools that will gather additional data and customer insights. Then, put the data to good use.
Importantly, work to exclude bad data. Focus on properly-collected data and keep it centralized for easy access, comparisons, and analysis.
Thanks to data, you no longer have to guess what your customers experience. From preferred communication channels to wait times to what point in the sales funnel customers contact you, every bit of information provides valuable insights.
9. Offer Unique Solutions and Choices
We already mentioned offering choices in terms of communication channels. But you can also personalize the customer experience with other choices and solutions. If it is relevant to your product or service, offer a level of customization. The ability to design a solution that directly fits customers’ needs will dramatically improve their experience and satisfaction.
Offering unique or custom solutions and choices is easier in some industries. Landscapers, for example, can easily customize the types of lawn treatment they apply or the plants they use to achieve a customer’s desired aesthetic.
But don’t feel discouraged if your business is in other niches, like retail. Any product or service can be customized to some extent. At the very least, you can offer customized packages of your products with discounts applied. Or the choice of several shopping experiences, such as a quiz to narrow down clothing options.
10. Get to Know Your Customers
For the best personalization strategy, get to know your customers. Learning about their interests, hobbies, and challenges will make them feel valued. Every additional fact you know about your customer offers another method of personalization.
Getting to know your customers also lets you build personal connections with them, boosting engagement and customer loyalty. When customers feel they have a strong relationship with your brand, they are much less likely to churn.
At the most basic level, train your customer service team to use customers’ first names in interactions. Your CRM system should offer this information in all communications.
11. Make Loyal Customers Feel Like VIPs
Personalization is all about making your customers feel valued and worthy of special attention. You can increase this feeling by offering a loyalty program or another type of VIP experience. Offer long-standing customers perks such as discounts, exclusive access to new products, or free shipping. This is a nice way to show your appreciation for their business while adding personalization and increasing customer loyalty and lifetime value.
Remember that this doesn’t require a formal loyalty program. You can just get in the habit of regularly emailing and texting your best customers with special offers. Make it known that these offers are exclusive and are a way to show your appreciation for their loyalty.
12. Consider Self-Service Experience
Many business owners make the mistake of only personalizing the customer experience when it involves interactions with their team. But what about self-service customers? Some modern customers prefer to find information themselves, such as via an FAQ page, step-by-step guide, or explainer video. Appeal to these customers by offering this information on your e-commerce site.
Think of this as just another aspect of personalization. After all, you already offer multiple channels to clients who directly interact with your team. Self-service is just another channel.
5 Personalized Customer Service Examples
Looking at personalized customer experience examples will give you a better idea of how to incorporate the above tips into your business.
1. Amazon
Amazon is not only a household name, but it is an excellent example of personalization. Specifically, Amazon excels at using data to customize your shopping experience. Even better, small businesses can do many of the same things that this major online retailer does, just on a smaller scale.
To start, Amazon makes product recommendations based on customers’ purchase history. These appear when you log onto the website as well as in targeted emails with special offers.
Additional features, such as Amazon Prime Wardrobe and Amazon Music, take offering personalized recommendations to the next level.
Amazon’s Prime subscription is another example of personalization. It gives customers the VIP services they want, such as exclusive deals and free shipping.
2. Disney
Disney’s MagicBand and the accompanying MyMagic+ wristband show you what a personalized experience can look like when there are additional resources at your disposal.
This works in-person at restaurants at Walt Disney World. The MagicBand contains all relevant customer information, letting hosts greet guests by name at the restaurant. Meanwhile, the signal from the wristband lets the kitchen know when to start preparing the guest’s pre-programmed order. Then, the receiver at the restaurant’s table lets servers know when they are seated and ready to receive their order.
While your small business is unlikely to be able to implement a similar program, you can look for ways to deliver similar results. For example, it highlights the importance of greeting customers by name and delivering a fast, seamless customer experience.
3. Starbucks
Starbucks is another big name that takes full advantage of resources to personalize customer experiences. It uses AI to personalize recommendations for coffee, food, and other beverages. It also uses a chatbot to handle simple customer service queries.
The Starbucks Rewards program is yet another example of personalization, letting customers earn stars they can redeem for freebies.
4. Uber
With its app redesign earlier this year, Uber took customer personalization to the next level. It starts by improving the customer experience. But more importantly, “Saved Places” lets you easily save common destinations, such as your home or work. The app also suggests previous destinations and even ride types.
5. Zappos
Zappos combines a VIP experience with getting to know its customers. The company asks customers about hobbies and interests as well as other preferences. From there, Zappos customizes communication to maximize engagement and deliver that feeling of personalization.
On top of that, long-time Zappos customers get exclusive access when new products launch. They also receive special discounts.
Take Customer Service and Experience to the Next Level
Podium lets you leverage technology to take customer service and experience to the next level. This all-in-one solution offers numerous features that let you personalize customer experiences with ease.
Inbox makes customer communication faster and easier by letting you offer an omnichannel experience with ease. You can offer communication across all of your customers’ preferred channels, and handle all messages in a single location. This reduces the time it takes for your team to respond, leading to the fast response times customers want.
Of course, when you save time, you also lower costs. Podium even integrates phones, so you can turn more customer calls into revenue.
Personalized Customer Experience FAQs
1. What is personalized customer service?
Personalized customer service is providing a tailored customer experience for each customer based on their background and specific needs.
2. How do you provide personalized customer experience?
You can create a personalized customer experience with customer profiles, a customer-centric culture, customer feedback, technology, omnichannel communication, customer data, customized solutions, and employee training.
3. What tools can help you provide a personalized customer experience?
CRMs and communication tools can help you provide a personalized customer experience. Podium offers both of these in an all-in-one solution.
