How does it feel when a customer service rep doesn't get what you're saying, just gives you the same old responses, and makes you feel like you're talking to a brick wall? 

Frustrated, unheard, and angry—and ready to ditch the brand for an alternative. 

Worryingly, that’s exactly how your customers feel when you offer them generic customer service support. 

According to the latest data, 76% of consumers said receiving personalized communications was a key factor in prompting their consideration of a brand, and 78% said such content made them more likely to repurchase.

To help you capitalize on this trend, we discuss in this detailed guide how you can conveniently and strategically personalize your brand’s customer service further.

What is personalized customer service?

According to Salesforce data, 66% of customers expect brands to cater to their unique needs. In a nutshell, personalized customer service involves identifying, understanding, and uniquely addressing your customers' pain points based on their individual preferences and needs.

Here’s a breakdown of how this typically works:

Understand the full context of customers’ issues

Beyond the complaints customers have made, you should investigate their past purchase history, website behavior, and previous support interactions to uncover patterns and preferences.

For instance, a customer might prefer communicating through emails over calls or web chats. In this case, sticking to phone call resolution over their communication preference will result in a poor experience even if you solve the problem. 

As an all-in-one, omnichannel customer service platform, Plivo CX can offer your customers multiple alternative communication channels: email, voice, SMS, WhatsApp, and live chat.

Also, all of your business system is integrated to our Unified Agent Desktop, so you get a 360° view of customers’ issues and serve them accordingly without requiring to switch tabs.

Unique customers, tailored solutions

Based on the data from your research, you have to develop tailored solutions to each customer’s problem.

For instance, a three-year customer might not need much explanation or additional guidance besides the first call on how to renew a subscription. But new customers will need all the assistance they can get, including detailed guides, video instructions, pre- and post-follow-up calls, etc.

Salesforce also notes that customer loyalty depends heavily on how well a company understands its needs, for example, 70% of consumers. So, if you’re not personalizing, you’re missing out on significant sales revenue and high-value customers.

The benefits of personalized customer service

81% of customers want brands to know and understand more about them, including when to approach and when not to, where to approach, and how to approach when assisting. 

Here are a few reasons why this personalized customer service is important:

1. Improves customer satisfaction

While overall customer satisfaction has improved, your customers are raising the bar and demanding more from the brands they choose. For example, 91% of consumers are more inclined to shop with brands that provide relevant offers, demonstrating the power of targeted marketing.

By implementing a personalized approach to customer service and addressing your buyers’ needs with individualized attention, you can help them feel fulfilled and valued. 

This ultimately improves the satisfaction index and helps your customers find a positive experience.

2. Drive new sales and prevent drop-offs 

Personalization creates satisfied customers, who are more likely to become recurring customers. Interestingly, Forbes notes that 58% of consumers are willing to pay more for a better customer experience. 

Additionally, a Bain & Company report indicates that a high satisfaction rate translates into high retention rates. For example, increasing retention rates by just 5% boosts profits by 25-95%.

This, in turn, enhances marketing ROI and reduces CAC significantly.

3. Promotes brand loyalty

Unsurprisingly, personalized support experience results in higher brand loyalty. In a 2020 report by ConverSocial, 96% of customers say they’ve become more committed to a brand after a positive experience.

Committed customers stick longer with your business than other customers. Moreover, they are also good brand advocates and are 5.1x more likely to recommend your brand, according to a 2022 report by Qualtrics.

4. Builds supportive customer communities

When you provide individualized experiences to each customer, you make them feel heard and included in your entire work process. This approach fosters a sense of belonging and community, encouraging customers to engage with your brand and each other. 

As a result, you develop a loyal base of customers who feel invested in your brand's success and are more willing to assist other buyers. For example, 92% of customers are open to using a knowledge base, with 83% saying they would also use a community forum for help if it was available.

5. Increases engagement

Happy customers tend to engage more with brands. This includes opening promotional emails more often, responding to social media posts, participating in community forums, or even leaving a review after every positive experience. 

Increased engagement, in turn, fosters good customer-brand rapport, higher lifetime value, brand advocacy, and reduced CAC.

6. Enables competitive differentiation

Did you know, 73% of businesses providing a personalized customer experience perform financially better than competitors? They are often regarded as consumers’ favorites as well because:

• Customers are more likely to recommend you to their friends and families, thus becoming your best foot forward for gaining more prospects. This gives you a lead-acquisition edge over brands that are not doing the same.
• Positive reviews from previously satisfied customers enhance your overall reputation and can be leveraged to attract prospects who consider such reviews before interacting with a brand. 

According to Spiegel Research Center’s report, a minimum of 5 reviews on a landing page can increase conversions by up to 270%.

7 challenges to delivering personalized customer service

Despite the benefits, several challenges are lined up for marketers to deal with. 

For instance, Salesforce’s 2022 Customer Engagement Research report notes that while 88% of companies believe they deliver personalized customer experiences, only 60% of consumers feel they receive such a service, illustrating a notable "personalization gap."

Here are some major challenges you must know: 

1. High volumes of data

The more you know your customers, the easier it is to provide tailored service. Therefore, effective personalization relies on data—purchase history, browsing behavior, customer demographics, interaction records from customer support, feedback from surveys and reviews, etc. 

However, the voluminous nature of this information also presents difficulties, especially for companies lacking the appropriate tools for data collection, management, and use. 

Capital One reports that over 76% of organizations find it difficult to even understand the data they collect, and others say their company simply lacks the human talent to handle it.

2. Siloed data

Many businesses unwittingly hinder their personalization efforts by isolating customer support from other departments like sales, product, and marketing. This creates data silos, preventing valuable information from being shared across teams.

Think about it:

• Marketing gathers crucial insights into customer preferences, campaign engagement, and lead sources.
• Product teams track usage patterns, feature adoption, and feedback on product experiences.

So, there must be a synergy by connecting these dots and sharing data across departments.

3. Lack of organizational alignment

In a Salesforce study, 53% of customers say they’ve had to re-explain their complaints to different customer representatives of an organization, and another 55% feel like they’re communicating with different departments instead of one company. 

This happens when there’s no cohesive data management or agreement on deliveries, even within the same department.

4. Customer privacy concerns

Privacy concerns are becoming a significant barrier against data collection and usage. As PwC notes, while 63% of consumers would offer their data in exchange for personalized customer service, another 23% feel less comfortable.

Moreover, 67% of respondents in a Pew Research Center survey do not understand what companies do with their data, whereas 11% of respondents in ClearSale’s survey say they have abandoned an online purchase because they didn’t trust the site with their data. 

In resolving such concerns, it’s difficult to collect data and provide personalized customer service.

5. Outdated or incompatible technology

Legacy systems often lack the flexibility to integrate with modern tools, resulting in fragmented customer data spread across multiple platforms.

Additionally, outdated technology may not support automation, AI, or real-time data analysis, which are crucial for effective personalization.

6. Staff training

There's a significant disconnect between employee needs and employer-provided training. While 88% of staff report inadequate training for the apps they use, 35% of companies admit lacking the right learning materials.

This leaves the support team and other crucial departments scrambling with inadequate skills and knowledge to provide personalized customer service. Plus, the absence of a knowledge base could make this more difficult. 

7. Scalability issues

Personalized delivery means attending to each customer’s needs individually, not in groups. For a small-sized company, this might not pose an issue. But as you scale up to handle more entries, providing the same experience becomes much more complex. 

Manual processes also become bogus, inefficient and unsustainable, leading to slower response times and inconsistent customer service. Plus, you must handle a larger data volume as you scale.

8 tried-and-tested methods to deliver personalized customer service

Now that you have a heads up about possible challenges, here’s how to overcome them and deliver personalized customer service.

1. Leverage AI and automation for personalization at scale

As previously mentioned, scalability becomes a big headache when you deal with more data and humanly handle manual processes. To solve this, you must integrate AI-powered tools and automation into your workflow.

For instance, CRM systems can help aggregate customer data across departments and seamlessly analyze it for advanced personalization insights.

To take your customer service a notch higher, use all-in-one communication automation tools like Plivo CX, which comes with an AI self-service chatbot to deliver exceptional customer support around the clock. 

These AI-powered agents instantly address customer inquiries, leveraging your knowledge base and brand guidelines to provide accurate and consistent responses. They can handle various tasks, from answering questions to processing exchanges and tracking orders, freeing up your human agents to focus on more complex issues. 

With seamless escalation capabilities, AI agents can smoothly transition conversations to human agents when needed, providing full context and summaries for efficient resolution. 

Additionally, the chatbot is easily adaptable to new products, promotions, and policies, ensuring your customer support remains up-to-date and efficient.

Try Plivo CX’s visual workflow builder to create complex customer journey workflows without writing any code. You can easily connect components like actions, conditions, and triggers to automate various tasks and processes.

This makes it simple to design efficient workflows for routing inquiries, escalating issues, and sending automated responses, all while ensuring the right agents are handling the right tasks.

2. Extend omnichannel support 

A customer’s preference for communication channels makes up a significant portion of personalization. For instance, approximately 35% of customers prefer email as their primary customer service channel, especially among millennials. 

On the other hand, Gen Z consumers increasingly favor messaging and chat channels for real-time assistance, illustrating a shift toward digital, instant-response options across demographics. 

It’s, therefore, critical to offer omnichannel support. As noted before, Plivo CX’s true omnichannel platform helps you achieve this by enabling seamless switching between voice, AI-powered chatbots, SMS, email, and WhatsApp. 

Moreover, you can do all these things in the same tab without needing to switch. 

3. Humanize conversations using customers’ language

Over 74% of customers say they’re more likely to patronize a business if post-purchase customer support is offered in their language. Remember that the idea here is to localize, not just translate. 

Communicating with your customers in the language and style they prefer can help them feel understood. In this scenario, a multilingual solution like Plivo CX can help.

4. Use your customers’ names

It’s better to address each customer by name throughout the conversation, not just at the beginning. It will make them feel known and valued. 

Besides, personalizing with names reduces relationship barriers and makes communication easier. But don’t overdo it, either.

5. Harness customer data to further personalize interactions

How far you can personalize customer service depends on how well you know your customers. Dig out their previous interactions with your brand, past purchases, browsing behavior through consented cookies, and past complaints. 

You can also use surveys to collect details on how customers “would want you to serve them better” or what “things you need to fix in your customer service delivery.” 

Also, ensure your customers know what you’re doing with their data to minimize distrust. In this regard, Plivo CX meets the highest data security standards, with certifications like SOC 2, HIPAA, and GDPR.

6. Offer tailored and unique solutions to customer queries

Based on the data you collect, derive insights that will help you offer unique solutions to customers' problems. 

As we’ve noted, problems can be identical for two customers, but that doesn’t mean you can solve them the same way. 

So, identify their preferred communication channels—email, phone, in-person meetings, or social media—and ensure all interactions occur. 

Additionally, consider factors like their budget constraints, operational limitations, and the urgency of their problem. Pay attention to any previous interactions or complaints they've raised to predict what matters most to them.

7. Train agents on personalization methods

Provide training programs, self-paced or cohorts, with live practicals to help your in-house support team acquire essential soft personalization skills—empathizing, listening, and paying attention to details—and hard skills. 

Sometimes, your agents can get stuck on the call despite having received proper training. This is where Plivo CX’s live coaching voice feature comes in. While communicating with a customer, a more experienced and knowledgeable agent can “whisper” instructions to another agent to finetune personalized service delivery. 

And yes, all of this is done without the customer knowing.

8. Be proactive about customer service and request customer feedback

Don’t wait until your metrics drop. Use the data you have to figure out what your customers need and send the prompt even before they ask. Plivo CX’s proactive service feature helps you do just that.

Finally, hear from your customers before they take the news out. Ask about their experience interacting with you immediately after every communication. 

You can also send survey forms backed by an incentive to encourage participation. Then, use these insights to improve your delivery.

Deliver personalized customer service at scale with Plivo CX

Automation is at the heart of every scalable personalization. But finding the right tool to use can be daunting.

And that’s where Plivo CX comes in. Our award-winning omnichannel communication platform integrates, centralizes, and unifies all your communications on one dashboard. This way, you can elevate customer satisfaction, improve agent efficiency, and drive business growth. 

Here’s what we offer: 

• Unified communication: Manage all customer conversations across channels like email, voice, SMS, WhatsApp, and live chat from a single, agent-friendly platform.
• AI-powered automation: Deploy smart chatbots to handle routine inquiries, freeing up agents to focus on complex issues and personalized support.
• Effortless workflow design: Visually build custom workflows and automations with a drag-and-drop interface, no coding required.
• Seamless integrations: Connect Plivo CX with your existing tools, including CRM, ERP, helpdesk, and more.
• Data-driven optimization: Track real-time analytics and generate custom reports to gain insights into customer interactions and agent performance.
• AI-enhanced efficiency: Prioritize urgent tickets, ensure brand consistency, and adapt quickly to changes with AI-powered support.
• Rich communication: Enhance interactions with multimedia support, including images, videos, and documents.
• Increased productivity: Streamline workflows with message templates, internal notes, and skills-based routing.
• Comprehensive features: Leverage call recording, IVR, multi-language support, and robust security features for a complete solution.

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