26 Tips to Personalise Customer Experience

Looking for some quick ideas to personalise customer experience?

Here are 26 quick-fire tips that have been submitted by our readers.

1.    Make transactions different

My Nationwide ATM recently asked me if I wanted my usual £50 or £100. There was no other choice. I thought that was great personalisation.

Thanks to Dave

2.    Look at potential value

Personalisation shouldn’t just be based on a customer’s current value but should also take potential value into account.

3.    Refer to earlier contacts

Personalising can be created by referring to an earlier contact from the customer. For example: you called last week about not having internet.  Is this problem now solved?

Thanks to Miranda

4.    Make customer experience into a regular process

Follow this process for improving customer experience

• Define your vision for customer experience
• Ask your customers what they want/good and bad bits of current approach
• Identify relevant channels
• Know where your customer wants to be heard
• Ensure that replies are in context
• Reuse “new” answers to benefit all relevant parts of customer base

5.    Become technology agnostic

Be technology agnostic and “ignore” the current process.  Instead you should focus on what you’d want to do if you could start from scratch.

Thanks to Scott

6.    Random acts of kindness

Empower staff to use random acts of kindness.

For example – resolving an enquiry using information gathered to find an incentive personal to that customer.  You could send a story book for a customer’s family whose present was delivered late.  Just giving presents as an apology in place of a regular gift voucher can work well.

Thanks to Sandra

7.    Ask your customers for suggestions

Ask your customers for feedback and get suggestions for further improvement after you have served them.  I guess that’s a good example of personalisation.

Thanks to Rahul

8.    Invest in your staff

Invest in your staff.  The staff have to believe in the product/brand and care for the customer, if you want customer service to be at the top level.

9.    Share the ideas of front-line teams

Really engage the front-line teams to share their ideas.  They are the ones taking the calls and talking to our customers.  They have ideas on how to engage the customer with a personalised experience.

Thanks to Sarah

10.    Regular mystery shopping

We regularly do mystery shops within our contact centre to ensure that we experience the customer journey.

Thanks to Kim

11.    Recognise what your customers want

You need to make sure that the customers feel that they are unique, by listening and recognising what they want.

Thanks to Annemiek

12.    Personalised greetings

Unique greetings – using dynamic routing we are able to answer the calls by saying “Good morning ‘Name’ how can I help you?” This is proving that our data is up to speed. It’s incredibly effective.

Thanks to Richard

13.    Use the IVR to identify the customer

Use IVR options to identify the customer and not to direct the call to a generic area. Doing so allows the agent receiving the call to have the system bring up relevant customer information at the onset of the call and provides a more direct, personal feel – beginning with greeting the customer using their name.

Thanks to Third

14.    Try handwritten cards

We sell costumes, so our customers generally are attending events that they are excited about.

When they mention an event they are planning to attend, our representatives will pass along handwritten cards wishing them a happy birthday, a good time at the 70’s party, and so on, which is then sent along with their package.

Thanks to Tyler

15.    Train advisors on understanding customer emotions

We have training for employees about understanding customers’ emotions and how to handle them. It is important that the employee feels committed to solving the problem and so it helps the customer in the best way.

Thanks to Miranda

16.    Create a Customer Advocate Team

We have recently created a Customer Advocate Team (CAT) to call customers back and have established a Customer Satisfaction Team to deal with outstanding customer issues head-on.

Thanks to Raquel

17.    Have a HOT alert team

We have a HOT alert team that contacts the customers immediately if there is any negative feedback from CSI comments.

Thanks to Lorraine

18.    Keep IVR to a minimum

Decrease IVR to a absolute minimum and let the agent do all the personalisation, without a script.

We are minimising the IVR to 2 options or fewer. Often customers experience an IVR as obstructive and annoying.  Therefore reduce the IVR to a minimum.

Thanks to Hjalte

19.    Remove the IVR

My company has never had IVR and our customers have always said how much better it is without it.
Thanks to Vicky

20.    Work on the advisors

Some advisors don’t like to receive a personal service, so struggle to see the buy-in of giving that personal service to our customers.

Thanks to Lisa

21.    Make sure you don’t penalise agents with higher AHT

One thing to watch out for is that employees think their AHT gets higher when they are personalising.

Thanks to Miranda

22.    Nice and slowly does it

We prefer being slower and delivering a better customer experience to speeding up service. Our channel strategy is designed in such a way that for difficult questions we prefer customers to call – although this could lead to a long call.

We are taking the slower approach, as we believe it is vital for a customer to know the product is right for them and they are getting what they need.  This in turn helps first call resolution.

Thanks to Hjalte

23.    Mix customer experience with the employee experience

Our strategy is to mix customer experience with the employee experience. If the ambience or work atmosphere is not an experience itself, agents will have a low intent to deliver an experience to another. Therefore increase the employee experience and they will be more willing to deliver the wow experience to customers.

Another good opportunity to increase customer experience is to start using software that removes specific tasks from agents. In this manner the agent will have more time to really listen to the customer.

Thanks to Hjalte

24.    Throw away the scripts

We have created a training programme that focuses on interacting with our customers, adapting to our customers and enabling our staff to tailor the call to the customer.  This moves it all away from the traditional scripted calls.

Thanks to Francesca

25.    Remember your own best experiences

Ask your team to remember their own best experiences as customers – when was I wowed or decided to come back as a customer due to excellent or consistent service & experience.  Your customers are likely to be just like yourself, so treat them as you want to be treated –  through personal, engaged service.

Thanks to Malou

26.    Create a customer-focused vision statement

We have created a vision statement focused on the customer which the front-line staff work towards and will be measured against as an end-of-year goal.

Thanks to Sarah

For more ideas for personalising customer experience, read our article: 6 Ideas for a Great Personalized Customer Experience

Author: Jo Robinson