What makes a good experience? The answer is — it depends. A person’s unique expectations are actively affected by internal and external impressions, such as deeply rooted personal values and emotions or external triggers and events. Sometimes, we might want a quick and easy answer to a problem, whereas other times, we look for detailed, in-depth solutions. Regardless of the situation, most humans seek an experience tailored to their unique needs and demands. Research has shown that 80% of customers value the experience an organization provides just as much as its products or services and that 71% of customers base their purchase decision on how good the customer service experience is.1 So, how do you ensure your organization provides positive CX to every customer, every time, to drive business growth and value?
In this blog, we’ll dive into why personalization is important, why it’s a vital component of driving positive CX in today’s modern contact center environment, and strategies to quickly improve personalization for your service desk.
Why is personalization important?
Below are research statistics showcasing why contact center personalization is essential to driving a positive customer experience.
- 73% of customers expect better personalization than ever before, while 80% value the experience provided just as much as its products or services, highlighting the competitive advantage of providing personalized CX.2
- Driving consistent positive customer experiences helps promote brand loyalty and trust, where 90% of highly satisfied customers report they’re highly likely to recommend and purchase from an organization again, effortlessly increasing revenue potential for any business.3
- Historical crises, such as the 2008 recession and the Coronavirus in 2019, created drastic changes in consumer behaviors. Research shows that CX leaders are more resilient to market changes and can see 3x higher shareholder returns than CX laggards.4
- If presented with excellent customer service, 75% of customers are willing to forgive an organization's mistakes, confirming how positively CX helps retain customers and drive long-term revenue growth.5
A step-by-step guide to personalized customer experience (CX)
Business leaders who want to drive positive customer experiences must create a transformational CX strategy that helps bring personalization to every corner of the service desk. To develop an effective strategy, each step of the process should align with the four pillars of successful customer experience. These four pillars highlight the importance of understanding customer needs and leveraging advanced service technology to meet expectations.
1. Understanding the customer
Delivering true personalization starts with understanding your customer’s unique needs and providing a tailored solution to their problem. In a modern CX environment, this goes beyond simply listening to what a customer says and chiming in with an “I understand” or “It sounds like XYZ.” Advanced solutions, such as AI-powered speech analytics and sentiment analysis, enable contact centers to automatically detect emotional responses, keywords, and triggers throughout an interaction to proactively adjust the customer journey to better support evolving expectations. Guided by these insights, agents can provide more relevant issue resolution, while supervisors can optimize workflows and processes to better meet expectations. Nevertheless, it’s crucial to remember that any AI technology is only as effective as the data it has access to. To truly embrace the power of sentiment analysis, the solution must be seamlessly connected to the contact center and customer management systems, which brings us to step #2 of the CX guide.
2. Simplifying the access to relevant information
While 73% of customers expect better personalization, 81% also expect this service to be delivered faster than ever.6 It’s crucial for the service desk to have all information readily available to deliver tailored and quick issue resolution. A unified CCaaS experience approach, connecting the front-office (contact center) with the back-office (such as ServiceNow), helps empower the service desk with in-the-moment information required to better understand customer needs. With detailed information about the customer — their name, age, geo-location, years as a customer, historical interactions, open tickets, etc. — it becomes easier to understand their unique needs, relate to their problems, and deliver more empathetic and personalized engagements. Additionally, thanks to recent technological advancements, contact center AI can automatically help agents locate crucial information, such as caller details, cases, or knowledge articles, and provide real-time recommended issue resolution to drive improved personalization and service speed with minimal manual work.
3. Enhancing performance with AI
Today’s customers want proactive service, forcing organizations to evaluate each customer's unique behaviors and preferences at each moment in time. In a recent survey, 53% of customers state they expect organizations to anticipate their needs before a ticket is filed, while a staggering 65% expect organizations to also adapt the service experience based on changing needs and wants.7 With many service organizations already struggling with high call volumes, long wait times, overworked agents, and limited data visibility, delivering this level of tailored service is impossible without technological assistance. A self-service solution, such as Conversational AI, can help provide tailored issue resolution for simple or common requests, giving time back to contact center agents to focus on more complex tasks at hand. Built with Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning, Conversational AI can understand spoken language and provide human-like responses. Integrated with ServiceNow, the solution leverages historical data combined with real-time provided information to serve customers the most effective and personalized resolutions.
4. Streamlining insights to optimize experiences
No successful strategy is complete without analyzing the results and performance. Creating a positive customer experience requires your organization to evaluate contact center performance and actively find opportunities for improvement. By streamlining all service desk insights through a single platform view and leveraging AI-driven insights into performance, supervisors can quickly set the contact center up for success. When integrating the capabilities of AI-powered coaching and auto QA, the streamlined solution helps drive personalized and proactive agent training at scale. Each training program is effectively personalized based on real-time events and feedback for each agent, minimizing manual requirements for supervisors while creating high-performing agents at scale to deliver more personalized and effective customer communications.
Start transforming your customer service to provide positive experiences today
Transforming your customer experience doesn’t need to be difficult. Leveraging some or all of the strategies discussed in this article to improve personalization in the contact center is a tremendous first step toward driving positive customer experiences, long-term business growth, and increased revenue.
To learn more about transforming your contact center experience, schedule a personalized consultation with one of 3CLogic’s certified experts.
