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Table of Contents
Introduction
Today’s customers have different expectations. When the technology for telephone customer service was new, it was a simple matter of answering quickly and resolving the ticket in a timely manner. However, with so many options and tools to choose from, customers are more discerning, and a personalized customer experience is a crucial aspect of ensuring customer satisfaction. But giving every customer a hyper-personalized experience can be a tall order for an in-house team, and it only gets tougher the more you grow.
Because of the challenge of personalized customer care, especially at the enterprise level, BPO partnerships can be instrumental for continued success.
Key takeaways
- Personalization is more than segmentation: Grouping customers into demographic buckets with shared playbooks will only get you so far. Real personalization is essential, as it allows enterprises to recognize and serve each customer based on their history, preferences, and current intent.
- BPO partners make personalization scalable: Building the infrastructure for hyper-personalized CX is a huge ask for in-house teams. Specialized BPO partners make that process much more feasible and scalable.
- The future of CX is predictive, not reactive: Anticipating customer needs before they surface is a major competitive advantage. Sentiment analysis and behavioral data modeling allow agents to act proactively before customers become frustrated.
The shift from segmentation to individualization
Personalized customer service at the enterprise level requires a well-equipped service infrastructure, one that enables the recognition of each customer’s individual interaction history, their preferred communication styles, and even provides the ability to infer their likely intent with each contact. Far from just segmentation (the grouping of customers into demographic groups, each with its own playbook), this practice is true individualization, essentially creating “segments” of one person.
In a traditional mass-market service model, efficiency is often gained at the expense of relevance. The universalized IVR flows and generic email responses have their place in optimizing the handle time of high-volume customer interactions, but they run the risk of alienating customers who are made to feel more like a number than a name. Though speed is important, a modern personalized experience needs to prioritize accuracy, as in the accuracy of understanding each customer as an individual with individual needs.
In order to cultivate both speed and accuracy, it’s important to make smart use of data. Data points such as behavioral signals, channel preferences, support patterns, purchase histories, and even sentiment trends can all coalesce to give companies a full profile of the individual customer. From there, the main challenge is to make good use of that data in real time.
Quantifying the value of a personalized experience
Personalization initiatives in consumer-facing businesses are well-known to noticeably boost revenue. Personalized service vastly reduces the number of contacts it takes to resolve each customer issue, while also enabling upsell opportunities in a shorter sales cycle, and even reduces overall churn, especially in your most high-value customers.
Additionally, CSAT and NPS™ scores are directly proportionate to the personal attention your customers receive, and how seen and understood they feel from your service. In situations where customers reach out for customer service, and they speak to someone who has a grasp on the status of their account, their interaction history, and their preferences in communication, the interaction becomes much less strictly transactional and is allowed to inhabit something more relational, resulting in measurable improvements to CSAT and NPS™ scores when done correctly.
Reducing the “cost of indifference” is also a major incentive to personalize the customer experience. When businesses fail to personalize their approach, opting for easy, generic interactions, customers are much more likely to feel unvalued and unseen, increasing their likelihood of either leaving or sharing their negative experiences with others. By creating a more personal experience, businesses greatly reduce the cost of indifference by taking a more active part in retaining customers, which reaps compounding returns in the long run.
Technical infrastructure for a personalized digital experience
To personalize your company’s customer service at scale, it’s useful to integrate a quality customer relationship management (CRM) system with additional AI tools that can surface relevant customer information to provide helpful context in real time. A properly maintained CRM will have a longitudinal record of customers’ history with the brand — their purchases, their interactions, details in their contract, any preferences they have, etc. AI-enabled tools can keep all of those data points in mind and surface them dynamically mid-conversation as they become relevant, giving customer service agents smart recommendations for next actions.
A huge point of failure that many personalization programs find themselves hitting is the fight to bridge the gap between digital self-service and human interaction. If one of your customers has already explored your knowledge base, has talked with a chatbot, and has finally been escalated to a live human agent, it’s incredibly frustrating for them to then be forced to repeat themselves. In order to fix that problem, a personalized omnichannel handoff protocol is necessary, allowing agents to receive the full context of the current conversation and all of the history that preceded it.
A fine line to walk, however, is to provide personalization without violating data privacy. When personalization becomes intrusive, trust falls by the wayside. Organizations of all sizes that implement personalization efforts should also be careful to stay compliant with any relevant data security regulations for their industry and region, as well as ensure that they pay attention to customer preferences.
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Leveraging BPO for personalized customer care at scale
Hyper-personalization during periods of rapid growth is an extraordinary feat for an internal team because it requires major infrastructure investments. Features like AI tools, architecture for 24/7 coverage, pipelines for multilingual talent, and an ongoing system for agent training can all be rather expensive, both from the financial and temporal viewpoints.
By turning to a specialized BPO partner like Global Response, businesses can achieve a more personalized customer experience at scale without such a significant investment. Instead of being forced to build these systems from the ground up, an organization can gain immediate access to skilled agents, already trained in advanced tools, and equipped to offer personalized customer care at scale.
The main challenges that any business should seek to solve within their BPO partnerships include:
- Consistency: The context of a customer’s history with the brand follows the customer account, not just a single agent who happens to be in the know. When a BPO has robust CRM practices, it allows customers to receive consistent, but personalized service, regardless of the time or their location.
- Linguistic personalization: A quick translation of a script isn’t enough to localize the customer experience for a new language or region. It’s important for agents to have native experience with the language to fully understand its place in the local cultural context if they hope to make more effective personalization decisions.
- Data synchronization: For full omnichannel functionality, it’s vital that when customers interact with the brand over various channels or time zones, the CRM record needs to be updated in real time. When data is out of date, personalization is much more difficult to achieve.
Future-proofing CX: Predictive personalization
Moving forward, companies and BPO partners hope to leverage predictive personalization for the ultimate personalized customer experience. This allows customer service teams to anticipate a customer’s unstated needs, using historical data to act in the customer’s best interest before the customer even realizes that a problem even exists.
For instance, if a customer’s historic data suggests that their current behavior might be trending toward a problem, the predictive model can surface the trend proactively to alert agents to growing issues they need to pay attention to. That allows them to step in and fix what’s happening before the real friction even comes into play.
Another great tool for the future of predictive personalization is sentiment analysis. This surfaces the real-time language and tonal patterns in customers’ speech. Not just the content of their words, but the emotion behind them. An AI-powered tool can silently point the agent’s attention to those signals, simultaneously providing answers, resources, or self-help tools that can be used to personalize the customer’s experience for the better.
Want to see how the right BPO partner can help your business achieve a more personalized customer experience? Get in touch with Global Response to learn more today!
FAQs
1.Can a BPO partner actually deliver personalized customer experiences at enterprise scale?
Yes, but only when they use the best-trained talent, well-integrated technology, and a robust infrastructure to do so. Well-integrated partners are able to handle high volumes, but they can also provide your brand with greater capability to notice, forecast, and respond appropriately to individual customers regardless of the communication channel, time zone, or language.
