How call centers use technology to personalize customer service

Before outsourcing to a call center in the Philippines, know whether your prospective vendor could take advantage of modern innovations to personalize customer service. Open Access BPO explains the importance of personalized service and how to achieve it.

Businesses need to provide several factors to customers to be able to earn their trust. A company may offer a lot to make a one-time buyer into a loyal supporter that could spread good word about the brand. However, if what the business is offering is not what the market wants, then the effort to solidify the consumer base could be futile.

What do customers want?

We could list down so many customer needs that are specific to each to the brand they use, but there s a common demand that every consumer nowadays wants from businesses regardless of the industry they re in. It is personalized service.

Modern customers expect not just speed and reliability but also a personal touch in the goods and services they avail. This preference has been brought largely by the emergence of social media and mobile technology, innovations that enable people to connect to each other and receive goods by their own terms, methods, and time.

How can businesses cope?

Companies must realize the value and importance of personalization in customer engagement. Delivering personalized service, however, is not simply a matter of addressing callers by their first name. It takes careful gathering and analysis of customer data to generate an accurate profile of each individual who does business with you. Here are some of the ways to personalize customer service through modern innovations:

• Centralize databases with cloud technology

Product information and customer identities should be stored in a cloud-based database that is accessible to both customer support agents and the sales team. This way, the buying preferences and consumer behaviors recorded from a sales transaction could be used as base information for customer profiling. Should the buyer contact customer service, the representatives will have an idea about what the caller may want or need, thus enabling them to use a communication approach and offer goods that match the consumer’s profile.

• Widen options through social media and mobile technology

Multi-channeled call centers could benefit from social media and mobile apps not only because they could lower call volume but also because these platforms give customers the power to choose the channel they want to relay concerns and receive service.

On social networks, they could get answers from the site they frequent while with customer relations apps, they could get real-time assistance without the need to reach a live agent.

Personalizing customer service doesn’t stop at ensuring that the communication approach is aligned with the profile of each customer. Brands should also keep in touch by monitoring how well the brand is received, getting feedback from the users, and taking a proactive approach to a brewing problem that could be detected from the customers social media activities and mobile device use.

Personalization is becoming a standard for customer care, so companies should survey available and emerging technologies that they could use to elevate their service and improve customer experience.