What do you think of when you hear the word “personalization?” Do you think of subject lines with your name in them? A Facebook ad that targets you based on items you’ve put in your cart but haven’t purchased?
But personalization can be both much simpler and much more complicated than that. It uses data to learn what your customer wants and needs and drives a truly extraordinary experience for customers.
Personalized customer service can help you build better relationships with your audience and boost customer loyalty. Loyal customers equal repeat purchases and referrals, resulting in a better bottom line for your business.
Let’s look at ways to offer a truly personalized customer experience.
Do customers expect personalized customer service?
The simple answer is yes. Unfortunately, the one-size-fits-all approach won’t work for modern consumers. So, you have to take your customer service strategy to the next level by planning for personalized customer experiences.
Up to 71% of customers expect personalized services from their chosen brands. Some expect you to know their name and address them appropriately rather than use general titles.
Others want product recommendations based on their purchase histories. And some expect businesses to engage with them on their preferred communication platforms.
Failing to meet customer needs can cause frustration and ultimately reduce brand loyalty. When studies show that companies with high brand and customer loyalty grow their revenues 2.5 times faster than their competitors, losing loyalty shouldn’t be a risk you’re willing to take.
The importance of understanding your customers
To provide personalized customer experiences, you first need to understand your customers. What are their needs? Pain points? Expectations? Preferred product features?
Understanding your customers is like having a compass that helps you navigate the high seas—or, in this case, the complex business landscape. You can provide products or services that meet their needs, adapt to changing trends, communicate better, and build stronger relationships. All these ultimately result in higher customer loyalty.
To understand your audience and personalize experiences, you need to collect and utilize customer data. How exactly do you do that? Here are some tips to get you started:
- Offer customer surveys.
- Conduct direct customer interviews.
- Talk to your customer support team to understand the common issues raised.
- Monitor social media platforms to determine what customers are saying about you.
- Assess customer transaction histories.
When you collect the data, don’t just store it—use it for customer service personalization. For example, if you collect customer information like birth dates, add a personal touch to your experiences by sending out special birthday offers. Similarly, when you understand customer purchase preferences, provide relevant content and offers.
8 strategies to create a personalized customer experience and provide better service
Want to improve CX metrics, like the Net Promoter Score (NPS) and Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)? These strategies are interconnected and build on one another, so follow each one for a more personalized customer service experience.
1. Use customer data effectively
Customer data is your most valuable knowledge base. It’ll tell you what your market likes, dislikes, needs, and more.
You can leverage website tracking tools to learn not only your customers’ names but also their purchase preferences and browsing habits. Customer surveys and interviews are also a great way to get information directly from your audience.
Bitly’s tracking links can give you further insights into your user engagement. With these links, you get access to data like total link engagements, clicks by location, and clicks by devices.
This gives you a holistic view of the kind of services and content your customers are interested in, as well as their locations. With this info, you can personalize services by providing content and offers based on customer preferences and locations.
2. Implement CRM solutions
Customer relationship management (CRM) systems can reveal areas for improvement in various customer service touchpoints. This will help you better tailor your services to your target audience’s needs. CRM features that can help with personalization include:
- 360-degree customer view: CRM software that keeps track of all customer interactions with your business can help you understand customer needs, enabling you to personalize experiences.
- Customer segmentation: Segmentation capabilities allow you to group customers into categories based on their needs and preferences, facilitating easier personalized communication.
- Predictive analytics: Systems with this feature anticipate customer behavior based on their purchase history, helping you personalize offers and recommendations.
3. Tailor your communication channels
Modern consumers expect an omnichannel experience. Make this possible by maintaining a multi-channel communication strategy. This means engaging with your audience across various communication channels, including social media, websites, SMS, email, print, and more.
For the best results, tailor the omnichannel experience to customers’ preferred communication methods. For example, if your customer base mainly comprises Gen X, then email might be the best choice. For Gen Z, SMS and social media are better options.
If you have a diverse audience, use Bitly links to highlight their preferred communication channels. When you shorten a URL with Bitly, you can seamlessly share it across various mediums and use its tracking data to study customer preferences.
This way, you can maintain support channels in your market’s most preferred mediums to ensure they get timely assistance whenever they need it.
4. Personalize individual customer interactions
Make each interaction unique and personal to build strong customer relationships. You can start personalizing interactions by learning your customers’ names and using them in communication.
But to take it a step further, you’ll need to understand their needs and customize offers and content—or even customize your products or services to their preferences.
If you’re interested in personalizing customer communication, consider the following examples:
- Personalized emails: Address customers by their names in all your email correspondence.
- Customized newsletters: Tailor newsletters to your customers by discussing products, services, or topics they’ve shown interest in.
- Targeted SMS: Again, address customers by name in all messaging and ensure the information provided aligns with their interests.
If you regularly share URLs with customers, personalize the experience by using branded links instead of general ones. With Bitly, you not only get to shorten your URLs but also personalize them by using your custom domain name and adding custom phrases to the back half of your links.
You can add the name of your targeted campaign, preferred customer products, or even customer names if you really want to wow your audience.
5. Customize offers and recommendations
Use customer data, like purchase and search history, to provide product and service recommendations. Also, give offers relevant to customer needs or searches to encourage sales and make your audience feel heard and valued.
However, it’s worth noting that showing customers you know too much about them can feel intrusive. Use data responsibly and avoid being too invasive when communicating to maintain a good relationship.
6. Create personalized customer journeys
Map out the customer journey (from pre-purchase to post-purchase) to help you provide personalized experiences throughout all customer touchpoints. Here’s how to create a personalized customer journey:
- Collect customer data.
- Map out customer journeys.
- Identify critical touchpoints in each stage of the customer journey (website visits, contact with your support team, interactions with marketing materials, and so on).
- Personalize communication at all touchpoints. For instance, if website visits are a key touchpoint, set up personalized product recommendations based on customer needs and interests.
7. Gather and act on customer feedback
The key to maintaining continuous improvement in your personalization efforts is listening to your customers. Collect, listen to, and act on customer input to stay ahead of your competitors in terms of customer experiences and customer relationship management.
You can collect feedback through various means, including feedback boxes, interviews, and surveys. To maximize responses, offer some incentives.
For example, you can encourage customers to participate in surveys to enroll in loyalty programs or earn coupons. When you get your feedback, organize it by sentiment or urgency to ensure you deal with critical issues first.
8. Train your team to meet customer expectations
Educate your team on the importance of experience personalization, as well as how to personalize services, to ensure you’re on the same page. This includes everyone from customer service agents and customer support teams to sales reps and IT teams—anyone who plays a role in customer touchpoints.
Provide scripts for each member of your team to guide customer interactions. However, don’t confine them to the scripts. Encourage some flexibility and ask them to add personal touches to their conversations with clients to make interactions feel more natural.
Tips to measure the impact of customer journey personalization
To successfully maintain effective personalized customer experiences, you must be willing to continuously improve the customer journey. This calls for regular assessments of your processes. Here are some tips to help you measure the impact of personalization.
Define key performance indicators
Key performance indicators (KPIs) help you gauge how your personalization efforts improve or worsen the customer journey. This can save you from investing resources in strategies that don’t work.
Define your KPIs and regularly assess them to determine the success of your efforts. Key metrics to keep an eye on include:
- Net Promoter Score (NPS): A measure of customer loyalty based on personalized experiences
- Customer satisfaction score (CSAT): A measure of customer satisfaction with your personalization
- Conversion rates: Percentage of customers who take desired actions, like purchasing products or signing up for newsletters
- Customer retention rate: Percentage of customers who continue to choose your brand over a specific period
Establish benchmarks for your chosen metrics to help keep you on track. Then, regularly monitor the KPIs and compare them to set benchmarks to determine the impact of your personalization efforts.
Use customer satisfaction surveys
Your customer satisfaction rates tell you a lot about the effects of your personalization efforts—the higher the rates, the more successful your efforts. Send out email, SMS, or website surveys to measure factors like customer needs, customer retention, brand loyalty, and the like.
For a successful survey, use various communication channels and offer incentives to encourage high response rates. Also, ensure your survey questions specifically address personalization aspects. Examples of questions to include are:
- Were the product or service recommendations offered relevant to your needs and preferences?
- On a scale of 1-10, rate your satisfaction with your recent personalized experience.
- Was our communication tailored to your needs and preferences?
- To what extent did we understand your preferences?
These questions can help you determine the success of your efforts and highlight areas to work on to provide better personalized experiences.
Analyze customer support behaviors
Customer support data provides a wealth of information about your personalization strategy. You can interpret and address customer data and feedback in various ways, including:
- Feedback clustering: Group feedback into clusters based on common themes, identify recurring issues, and address them based on priority.
- Sentiment analysis: Assess the emotional tone of customer feedback to help refine personalization strategies.
- Engagement assessment: Evaluate how engagement rates evolve with personalization efforts. Bitly Analytics can help by providing link performance data, such as the number of link clicks over time. Typically, many clicks indicate you’re doing something right and should move forward with your personalization strategy.
Learn how to revolutionize service with personal touches
In an age where aggregators find thousands of different options for customers to choose from, a real customer experience is not defined by products. It’s defined by interactions between brands and customers. Adding personal touches to your customer service can boost customer retention rates and put you ahead of your competitors.
With Bitly, you can customize links for better customer interactions and track the performance of your personalization efforts, all from a centralized platform. Bitly Analytics will help you determine whether your approach is effective, allowing you to focus only on successful strategies.
Create your Bitly account today to take your personalization strategy to the next level!