In today’s competitive business landscape, customer support transcends mere transactional exchanges; it’s about building meaningful relationships with an Aircall personalised customer service experience. People naturally gravitate toward individuals and businesses with whom they have strong, positive connections. Conversely, they tend to distance themselves from those they find less appealing. For interactions that fall into the “just okay” category, customers often adopt an indifferent attitude. When relationships become challenging or one-sided, the simplest solution is to sever ties.

A personalized customer support experience leaves a lasting impression on your customers, making them not only content with their interaction but also eager to return. So, what’s the secret formula for creating such a personalized experience? It involves understanding the components of personalized service, devising a strategic plan, and diligently measuring your results.

Our systems come with many useful features to help your team garner the power of personalised customer support. If you want to help your sales representatives dial faster and reduce manual entry into your CRM, our Power Dialer is the phone feature that your business can’t live without.

The Significance of Aircall Personalised Customer Support

Why should businesses invest in a personalized customer support experience? Renowned author and business expert, Seth Godin, defines personalization as follows:

“Personalisation wasn’t supposed to be a cleverly veiled way to chase prospects around the web, showing them the same spammy ad for the same lame stuff as everyone else sees. No, it is a chance to differentiate at a human scale, to use behavior as the most important clue about what people want and, more importantly, what they need.”

To build robust customer relationships, you must make customers feel like individuals rather than just one of many. When your workflows consistently recognize your customers personally, trust and confidence form the foundation, leading to brand loyalty and advocacy.

In cases where trust and confidence are absent, retaining their business becomes an uphill battle. It’s more efficient and productive to provide a superior customer support experience from the outset.

The Benefits of Personalising Customer Support

Customer relationships take time to nurture and strengthen. Your sales funnel offers multiple opportunities to implement strategies that nurture leads. By personalising the customer experience, you can reap the following five benefits:

1. Building Trust: Personalised service builds trust in your brand, encouraging customers to return. Trust ranks as the second most important factor in purchasing a new brand, according to the Edelman Trust Barometer Special Report: Brand Trust in 2020, second only to price.
2. Motivating Action: A personalised customer experience motivates interested customers to progress through your sales funnel. Author and Harvard professor Gerald Zaltman suggests that 95% of purchase decisions are subconscious.
3. Enhancing Engagement: Personalisation boosts customer engagement and increases conversions. An Experian study revealed that personalised email campaigns resulted in six times higher transaction rates and revenue per email compared to generic emails.
4. Improving Retention: Personalised marketing campaigns improve customer retention rates. Existing customers are high-quality leads and are likely to return as long as they’ve had a positive, personalised experience with your brand.
5. Fostering Loyalty: Referred customers often bring a sense of loyalty with them. Studies show that referral customers exhibit long-term brand loyalty, and referrals are considered the most credible form of advertising.

Identifying the Elements of the Customer Support Experience

To define a personalised customer experience, one can use customer behavior as a valuable source of insights. According to the 2016 Customer Engagement Index, 86% of customers highlighted three crucial elements for a great customer service experience:

1. Understanding Customer Intent: Every order provides an opportunity to collect data and understand your customers better.
2. Offering Easy Self-Service: Customers appreciate intuitive and user-friendly self-service options, like Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems. Notably, a third of millennials prefer efficient self-service over speaking with a call agent on the phone.
3. Meeting Customers Where They Are: In today’s diverse communication landscape, customers expect businesses to interact with them through their preferred channels and devices.

Apart from these core elements, customer behavior and purchasing habits exhibit the following characteristics:

• Customers may switch communication channels and devices during their journey.
• While many generations prefer phone contact, they dislike being trapped in IVR systems.
• Cable/satellite providers, retail banks, and retailers have reported customer churn due to poor support experiences, highlighting the importance of excellent customer service.
• Customers appreciate self-service options when they are predictive and valuable.
• Younger generations, in particular, favour mobile interactions.
• Most customers are willing to share data as long as it serves a purpose.

Crafting Your Customer Experience Strategy

Meeting high customer expectations is paramount, and achieving this requires taking a customer-centric approach. Begin by mapping out your customer’s journey from their perspective, focusing on the following stages:

1. Marketing: Assess the effectiveness of your communication channels in generating leads for your products and services.
2. Warm Leads: Identify when customers start engaging with your company and its representatives.
3. Initial Interactions After Expressing Interest: Analyze how customers contact you—through contact forms, phone, email, chat, or text.
4. Conversions: Monitor how warm leads progress to sales and the mechanisms driving this conversion.
5. Post-Sales Follow-up: Identify post-sale touchpoints, such as automated satisfaction surveys, follow-up calls, or email automation, and assess their impact on customer relationships.

Throughout the customer journey, continually gauge the customer’s sentiment regarding their experience. If feedback at any stage falls short of excellence, use it as an opportunity for improvement. Ask yourself questions such as:

• Are customers struggling with your IVR system?
• Do your call center agents require additional training?
• Are most issues resolved during the first contact?
• Are customers experiencing long hold times?
• Are you aware of the communication channels your customers prefer?
• Are your contact centers mobile-friendly for customers?

Answers to these questions will guide you in implementing actionable improvements to enhance the customer experience. Utilize call center analytics to measure the impact of these improvements.

Personalising the Customer Support Experience

In an era where customers have countless options for products and services, a superior customer experience distinguishes your company as the preferred choice. Here are tips to create a personalised framework that supports exceptional customer experiences before and after sales:

Pre-Sales:

1. Craft a Customer-Centric Vision: Base your approach on the needs expressed by customers in their feedback.
2. Use Caller Information: Utilize caller ID to address customers by name and establish a personal connection.
3. Train Responsive Agents: Equip call center agents to have natural, engaging conversations, avoiding robotic or overly scripted interactions.
4. Leverage Self-Service Solutions: Implement self-service options like IVR and knowledge bases, ensuring they are efficient and helpful.
5. Embrace Multiple Communication Channels: Offer customers various options, such as chat, email, text, and phone support, to cater to their preferred methods.

Post-Sales:

1. Create Detailed Customer Profiles: Populate your CRM with as much information as possible, allowing for highly personalised interactions. Remember to note preferred names and any additional relevant details.
2. Gather Customer Feedback: Employ automated surveys to collect feedback and take prompt action on areas that need improvement.
3. Collaborate with Agents: Engage your call center agents for feedback, as they have insights into recurring issues and positive feedback.
4. Explore Distributed Teams: Consider setting up distributed teams to access a broader talent pool.
5. Identify Cross-Selling Opportunities: Use your CRM system to pinpoint chances for cross-selling, upselling, add-ons, and referrals.

Remember that there is no one-size-fits-all approach to providing excellent customer service. The key is ensuring your call center agents put their best foot forward and treat customers as valuable individuals.

Customer Retention

The objective of customer retention programs is to keep customers satisfied and cultivate brand loyalty. Focusing on the personalised customer service enables you to retain customers from the initial contact throughout the entire relationship. To personalise your customer experience program for enhanced retention efforts, consider implementing the following strategies:

• Employ Active Listening: Develop active listening skills to better understand customer concerns.
• Use Clear and Simple Language: Communicate with customers using terms they understand, avoiding excessive technical jargon.
• Anticipate Customer Needs: Proactively identify customer needs and offer solutions or additional products.
• Exceed Expectations: Strive to surpass customer expectations in every interaction.
• Show Empathy: Display empathy when dealing with unhappy or frustrated customers.
• Offer Incentives: When appropriate, provide discounts, coupons, or refunds to appease dissatisfied customers.
• Maintain Follow-Up: Follow up with customers as promised to demonstrate your commitment to their satisfaction.

Envision the response you would desire if you were in the customer’s shoes.

Measuring ROI on Personalization for Customer Loyalty

To evaluate your return on investment (ROI) concerning customer loyalty, it’s crucial to rely on measurable data. However, consolidating data from various software programs can be time-consuming. This is where an Aircall cloud phone system becomes invaluable. With Aircall not only our systems offer a comprehensive set of phone system features but it also integrates with CRM platforms and other programs within the Aircall App Marketplace, providing unified analytics.

A modern phone system and integrated software solutions work in tandem to empower your call center agents to deliver excellent personalised customer experiences. The system also furnishes you with the necessary metrics to assess the success of your customer experience strategies. When you successfully create a remarkable customer experience, it benefits both your customers and your business.

Personalising the customer support experience is a multi-faceted process that encompasses understanding customer behavior, implementing personalised strategies, and continuously measuring and improving. By focusing on personalisation, businesses can build trust, motivate customer action, enhance engagement, improve retention, and foster loyalty, resulting in a more loyal customer base and long-term success.

Unilever’s new CEO Hein Schumacher has finally woken up to the fact that his predecessor potato head Alan Jope was running the company into a smelly woke sewer, bleeding profits like a cluster of suppurating haemorrhoids.

Oh, the grand revelation, folks! Can you believe it? Hellmann’s mayo is apparently no longer the almighty saviour of the planet that we once thought it was. Instead, it’s just good old sarnie spread, not the holy grail of egg-based environmentalism we were promised!

And Dove soap? Well, it turns out it’s only useful for the mundane act of showering. Who knew? And as for Ben & Jerry’s, it’s been served a cold scoop of reality – their tasty ice cream doesn’t actually have profound insights on international conflicts or transexual rights. Sorry, folks, cookie dough can’t solve the world’s problems, you just shove it down your throat by the bucket load.

Anti-woke rescue mission

In a stunning twist of events, Hein Schumacher, the new head honcho of Unilever, has put the kibosh on the soggy Marxist wokeness that has infected the company for the past decade. He’s promising to return to the good old days of making and selling useful products instead of woke virtue signal preaching to its customers.

But, oh, what a long and arduous journey it will be to escape the treacherous tides of corporate wokery! Schumacher might find it as tough as teaching a cat to sing opera.

This change of direction is long overdue, to say the least. Unilever has been trailing behind its competitors for years, its previous numbskull CEO Alan Jope thankfully got the boot, and shareholders were none too pleased with the virtue signalling. Even Nelson Peltz, the American corporate raider, hopped on board.

Schumacher finally admitted that not every brand needs to save the world or push a social purpose. What a shocker! He must have discovered that Magnum ice creams aren’t the answer to saving rainforests after all. He does not want to repeat the same death dive to the bottom as exhibited by Anheuser-Busch.

Unfortunately, Unilever’s share price has been taking a leisurely stroll downhill, unlike its competitors like Nestlé and Procter & Gamble, who are laughing all the way to the bank. It’s been a pitiful performance, and if they continued down this path, they’d probably end up at a car boot sale for corporate raiders or private equity firms.

But Schumacher is in for a wild ride as he tries to shake off the social purpose baggage. First off, it’s embedded in the organisation like a fat fucking blood bloated tick on a dog. For years, they’ve been hiring based on political views, not merit, and promotions have been doled out for parroting the right Marxist woke slogans. Good luck trying to change that culture. The woke leftist zealots are firmly embedded and will have to be shoe-horned out.

Go woke, go …

Then there’s the problem of forgetting how to sell stuff. Unilever has been so busy preaching woke moral leadership that they’ve forgotten the basics of brand building. They’re not launching new products, extending their existing brands, or utilising new media effectively.

And to top it off, they sold Dollar Shave Club, which they bought for a billion dollars seven years ago, for practically nothing. Meanwhile, their rival Harry’s is still shaving away profits. Looks like their marketing muscles have been replaced by diarrhoea.

The backlash against corporate wokery is in full swing, and Unilever is the latest to jump off the fake diversity bandwagon. Finally, they’ve realised that their average customer just wants to look good and slim, not be preached about social justice issues. It’s about fucking time, folks!

But turning back the clock to when Unilever made things “whiter and tastier” won’t happen overnight. It’ll be a long and bumpy road, and shareholders shouldn’t hold their breath for quick returns. So, here’s to the return of practical products, and goodbye to the days of mayonnaise-inspired far left woke anti-capitalist virtue-signalling tin-pot socialist money-losing dreams!