The rise of omnichannel customer service and 24/7 helpdesks means that today’s customers expect tailored and personalized communication from every brand they interact with — and they don’t expect to be kept waiting. This presents a challenge for growing businesses. As a startup, it might be easy to stay close to your small pool of customers and even give them access to relatively senior members of the team. But as the customer base starts to grow, that level of individual attention quickly becomes unsustainable. The question is: How can you cost-efficiently maintain a personal relationship with customers without limiting growth or burning through funds?
Leveraging big data to customize CX interactions
The more data you have on your customers, the easier it is to efficiently personalize your interactions with them — whether that’s giving customer service agents access to a comprehensive customer history when they’re on a call, or supplying your marketing team with enough granular data to engage with them on an individual level (rather than the much-derided “Dear Customer” style emails).
Knowing your customer should therefore be a priority — taking every opportunity to gather and update data about their preferences, activities, and history and storing this in a way that’s easy to analyze and retrieve. That means investing in a CMS or similar platform and building a data-first culture among all customer-facing roles to ensure it’s continually cleansed and kept up to date. Of course, this needs to be considered within the context of data protection and transparency laws in the jurisdictions you operate in.
Automating the “human touch” convincingly
AI-powered tools like chatbots and virtual assistants can be incredibly useful in streamlining customer service interactions, providing timely, personalized support at scale, and freeing up human agents to focus on more complex issues. However, it's crucial to invest the necessary time and effort to ensure these AI tools are properly trained and capable of delivering high-quality support.
Poorly implemented AI can lead to frustrating experiences where customers feel they are being fobbed off with canned responses that don't genuinely resolve their issues. On the other hand, well-designed AI systems with robust training data and advanced natural language processing capabilities can engage customers in more natural, human-like conversations. Using the comprehensive customer data we mentioned above, AI-powered tools can effectively personalize interactions, provide relevant information and solutions, and seamlessly hand off to human agents when needed.
The key is to view AI not as a simple cost-cutting measure, but as a tool to enhance the customer experience. By focusing on quality and continuously refining the AI's abilities based on customer feedback, companies can rely on these technologies to provide efficient, personalized support that strengthens customer relationships and improves satisfaction scores.
The battle for talent: the right skills at the right price
We’ve touched on the important role that AI solutions can play in delivering more “human-esque” interactions at scale, but there’s still a need for the human touch, especially in complex interactions and emotionally charged situations. However, hiring and training customer support representatives is a significant challenge when scaling support — finding skilled individuals who can provide empathetic and personalized support is no easy task.
Providing consistent training to ensure high-quality support across a growing team can be time-consuming and resource-intensive. The key is to opt for quality over quantity. Rather than setting the skills bar high for every hire — and paying the associated recruitment and salary costs, a mixed approach can work well.
A smaller number of highly skilled staff can add value across the department, not only dealing with the most challenging customer interactions directly but also helping to shape and refine automated systems, train more junior staff and assist with designing tools and support systems for the whole CX function to use. Less complex interactions can then be automated, or assigned to lower-level agents, making these higher volume issues more cost-efficient to resolve.
All hands on deck: breaking out of departmental silos
Truly personalized customer support isn’t just about getting the right mix of automation and person-to-person interactions within the customer service department — it’s business-wide. Breaking down departmental silos and ensuring consistency across all customer touchpoints is another critical aspect of personalizing support at scale.
Customers expect a seamless and unified experience, regardless of the channel they use to interact with a company. Fostering a customer-centric culture throughout the organization and encouraging collaboration between departments can help ensure that personalization efforts are consistent and effective — even as the business grows.
CX teams have a central role in securing buy-in from other departments. For example, they can communicate the value of better customer relationships to product teams, allowing them to gather invaluable feedback to guide development. They can also demonstrate this to marketing teams, who can target and refine their campaigns more accurately the better they know their existing customers. With the whole organization on board, the customer experience can be more personalized, and more consistent, at every point in the customer journey, regardless of scale.
A balancing act: efficiency versus attentiveness
The decision to make is how far you are prepared to go to maintain a personalized, individual service — recognizing that there is always going to be a compromise. At one extreme, allowing any customer to call up the CEO’s cell phone whenever they have a question provides amazing service, but is unsustainable for any significant number of accounts. At the other extreme, underinvesting in customer service to the point that repeat custom drops to almost zero will quickly kill your business.
The key is setting a realistic customer service budget as a proportion of spending and then maximizing the value you can achieve through continuous review and improvement. It’s vital to have systems in place to track the ROI of the budget you assign to personalizing customer service—in many cases, if it’s done right, CX can become a profit center rather than a cost, justifying further investment.
It requires a delicate balance between efficiency and personalization, effective data management and integration, skilled and well-trained support representatives, and the strategic use of AI and automation technologies. But ultimately, by iterating and refining personalization strategies based on data-driven insights, companies can continuously enhance the customer experience — and reap the benefits in terms of loyalty, advocacy and customer lifetime value.
At Sappy, we’re developing the tools to solve these issues — using AI to automate more interactions, but also to support skilled human agents to focus their time where it makes the most difference to customers. If you’re looking for a simpler way to scale customer engagement, join our waitlist.
