We are in the age of super connected devices and networks, where customer experience delivery must be spot on and contextual to each person. Today, customers expect organizations to use analytics to not only provide customized offers & products, but also communicate and address their queries in a personalized manner. Personalization is about uniquely tailoring communications and experiences to be contextually relevant to each individual customer seamlessly across channels and journeys (at scale). While the internet has taken personalization to the next level, I would like to highlight few service elements with special focus on customer care.
Addressing basic expectations:
A genuinely personalized service goes much deeper than simply being able to greet individual customers by name, although that’s obviously the first step. However, what customers really want is to be able to sail smoothly through whatever query or challenge prompted them to contact your center in the first place. In order to achieve this, it’s important to provide agents with their complete history immediately. From a technology point of view, the first step then is to utilize a customer relationship management (CRM) platform to deliver the kind of integration that provides total visibility. If the agents can instantly access the caller’s history, it will enable them to demonstrate a keen understanding of the client’s needs from the outset. CRM integration is what is necessary to achieve this. For logged in customers, it will allow you to follow and understand your customer’s recent website activity. This information can then be linked to the agent, who will be able to immediately see what the client has been viewing on your website. Couple this with screen sharing technology and your agent will be able to demonstrate alternative products to the client, or indicate details on their web screen. Intelligent routing is critical if you aim to get the consumer to the right place as quickly as possible. In conjunction with call line identity (CLI) recognition, routing technology can be used to send the call through to the same agent the caller spoke to on a previous occasion. This allows you to deliver a much more personalized experience, as the said agent will already know about the client from the start of the call. Technology can also assist in maintaining an ongoing profile of the customers your agents speak to.
Customer Delight
Using technology in place to do something your customers will not expect, such as posting them a birthday card, sending them a coupon for their next purchase or even a box of chocolates to reward them for their input will lead to customer delight. This is the ideal way to round out the personalized customer experience – reward them when they don’t expect it and this, added to the rest of the personal approaches already detailed, will help in exceeding their expectations, distinguish your brand and vastly increase customer satisfaction, which will, in turn, lead to customer retention and loyalty. I firmly believe that it’s only when we understand perception of customers to an experience or service delivery, can we preempt what they might like. AI and ML helps a lot nowadays, based on your browsing history it recommends you to opt for similar products and services. It also helps create cohorts, where customization on a broad scale can be preempted. A strong modelling mechanism, changing it from time to time, and letting it learn based on consumer feedback/ behavior is a must.
Feedback mechanism:
If you track all engagements with customers, this knowledge – which could include knowing their latest purchases, as well as their recent complaints – will enable your center to deliver a truly personal experience. After all, agents will then be able to converse with the client with in-depth knowledge and will be able to discuss in a social manner the customer’s journey, ensuring that previous complaints have been dealt with and asking how much the customer has enjoyed using other products supplied by your company. Once a customer is happy with your service, and/or has had her/his grievance or query resolved, it is a good time to take feedback and even understand the Net Promoter Score (NPS) the customer is willing to attach to their experience.
Positive and neutral feedbacks can be converted into sales referrals and further into more customer and leads. This end to end cycle must be a part of a company’s service DNA. Gone are the days where sale and service are compartmentalized. If not a sale, rating and recognition is something a customer can be requested to fulfil. This has become very relevant in the era of apps and social sales. Customer interactions and experiences, help build propensity models for them as well as their cohorts. This can enable organizations to somewhat accurately predict next best product the customer is likely to buy, based on their demography and products purchased in the past. This is invaluable in today’s world.
Authored by By KV Dipu, President & Head – Operations & Customer Service, Bajaj Allianz General Insurance