Every business wants its customers to feel special, and ensuring the service they receive during their interaction is one that is specifically geared towards their individual wants and needs is a great way to achieve this.
When striving to deliver a more personalised customer experience, it is essential to get the balance right between what is useful and what comes across as being unnecessarily intrusive. The key to achieving this balance is basing personalisation decisions on customer data.
In recent years, this has become more challenging as traditional routes to obtaining such data, such as loyalty schemes, are rapidly declining in popularity as few customers are willing to share their data. Here are three alternative strategies you might want to consider.
Invest in Artificial Intelligence
The best customer experience is one that requires minimal effort. If you want to book a hotel room or make a dinner reservation, the last thing you want is to end up in a queue for a call centre. Instead, allow your customers to have any basic queries answered by a chatbot rather than a live member of staff
The technology is still relatively new and not totally infallible, but the rise of devices such as Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa and the Google Home means that consumers are rapidly becoming more comfortable with such systems and understand the limitations they have. Although improvements are being made that allow chatbots to understand natural language speaking with a conversational ai is becoming much more normal.
Streamline your data
A key element of creating a personalised customer experience is ensuring that experience is consistent across multiple platforms. Today, customers may start their shopping journey on a laptop, then continue it on a mobile device before shifting to a tablet or other device later in the day.
SAP holds the data which can be served up to the customer, or indeed supplier, but the integration of systems can often lead to duplication of data. One solution that also drives up efficiencies is to make use of one of the specialist SAP portals, such as Weaveability’s Omnia, which makes it easy to utilise and display your SAP master data without duplication.
Ask for specific feedback
Your customers are the best source of information about how well you are delivering your goods and services. Finding out more about what they want from your business is a great way of ensuring they will come back in the future. Asking for feedback in a way that is very specific to the interaction the customer had with your company will make them feel as though they have been picked up, rather than simply receiving an automated response. Utilising and combining all the data and facilities you have can enable you to achieve this goal without adding significantly to your existing workload.
You should also ensure your staff strive to build an emotional connection with your customers. Ensure your staff are taught the importance of building rapport during interactions and that they actively listen to what they are being told. Anyone can ask a customer how they are doing at the start of a call, but it is those workers who then take the time to pause and wait for a response that consistently receive higher customer ratings.
