Personalized customer service is a game-changer for business today! Faced with multiple products and alternatives, customers have high expectations. They want you to treat them with respect and to value their time, money, and opinion.

The quality of customer experience (CX) impacts their decision to come back or become members of your loyalty programs more now than ever. While there are numerous customer support chat tips nowadays, and many companies are competing in providing personalized customer experience, many of them actually fail to deliver on quality.  

In order to deliver a best-in-class, personalized CX, you need to answer these WHY questions first:

• Do you need it to build long-lasting customer relationships?
• Does it help you better present your offer?
• Does it positively impact your customer retention rate?
• Can it help you increase your revenue?
  

A big supporter of the person-centered CX approach, Kristin Smaby emphasizes the importance of personalized customer experience in her book ‘Being Human is Good Business’:

“In an era when companies see online support as a way to shield themselves from ‘costly’ interactions with their customers, it’s time to consider an entirely different approach: building human-centric customer service through great people and clever technology. So get to know your customers. Humanize them. Humanize yourself. It’s worth it.”

According to the latest consumer survey conducted by Segment, almost half of your customers (44%) will give you repeat business if they receive personalized CX. From the company perspective, 51% of business owners reported higher conversion rates after implementing personalized customer service within their department.

However, for this success to translate into sales,  you must know how to make customer service more personal, especially the support chat CX. You need to use customer support technology wisely while still giving a personal touch to the service.

Let’s check out some more customer support chat tips now!

1. Establish Pre-Chat Surveys

There is no better way to enter each customer conversation than to be thoroughly prepared. To be successful, you need to implement a practice of having basic customer profiles at your disposal. The best way to create these profiles is to establish pre-chat surveys that will automatically collect essential customer data. These surveys will help you provide a personalized customer experience of the highest quality.

To build an effective customer profile, it is advisable to collect:

• Name: To start a meaningful conversation, you need to know who you are talking to.
• Email: Having their email address enables you to follow up with the chat transcript and build your customer’s trust.
• Address or country: If your business operates globally or you offer different services on a local level, you may need to adjust your conversation to your customer’s specific needs.
• Customer ID number: You will need to assign an ID number to your customer at the beginning of the interaction because, well, there can be many men named Sam, right?
• Order ID number: If you decide to upsell or discuss an order, having an order ID helps you drastically increase efficiency on the required tasks.
• Routing Question: Determining the customer’s topic will allow you to easily direct them toward the right department that can solve their issue successfully.
• Comments/Issue: This is a crucial part of your survey as you need to determine what the actual customer request is about in order to resolve it.

Once the survey form has been completed, it is time for your trained customer support agents to step up with their advanced communication skills. They should aim to make the whole conversation friendly and to provide as personalized a customer experience as possible.

The collected customer data benefits are incredible as they ensure:

• Customer identification
• Data accuracy
• Expression of genuine interest

This is one of the customer support chat tips that you simply can’t skip. It eliminates delays and confusion, making both your customers and your employees happy. And if you imagine yourself in your customer’s situation where they need to wait in a queue for so long and are annoyed due to a constant transferring from agent to agent like a hot potato, would you like to stay loyal customer?

With the right customer support software, you can reduce the wait time drastically as it sends your customers directly to the right department after analyzing their survey answers. Remember, the more prepared you are, the better your customers will see how much you appreciate their time and effort.

2. Leave a Great First Impression

A first impression is important in every conversation, and perhaps even more so in virtual chatting where it is so much easier for customers to leave you. Proactive greetings are the latest improvements in the customer support industry and enable a highly personalized customer experience. The first rule is to start a conversation with a pleasant and appropriate greeting, showing your customers that you  know their names.

Next, it is of great importance to use the data collected from the survey to send multiple proactive messages that suggest the best solutions for their specific needs. You can go one step further with the latest customer support technology.

With top-notch customer support software, you can use fantastic chat triggers that enable you to send multiple automated messages based on customer behavior and their purchasing history. For instance, if you have a repeat customer, your proactive greeting can be “Welcome back!” This customer support chat tip sounds so much better when it can be automated, right?

Revenue-wise, a Forrester study proves the extraordinary benefits of employing an online chat. They found that reactive chat produces a 15% ROI and investing in proactive chat capabilities will get you a terrific 105% ROI!

3.  Practice Concise Introduction

Through steps 1 and 2, you should know everything you need about your customers. However, to get them to trust you, you need to introduce yourself as well. Online chat is like any other conversation: there should be at least two parties involved in a back-and-forth dialogue.

Use a real profile photo and create a human-like atmosphere. Your customer support reps should observe each interaction as a face-to-face meeting that should be held professionally while maintaining focus on the goal.

4. Integrate your Live and AI chat with your CRM

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software combines all the customer data collected across your company’s different departments to create a holistic view of each customer’s journey. It enables you to create comprehensive customer profiles, which include Personal Identifiable Information (PII) as well as data on their preferences and purchasing history. It also keeps all of the data in one place, a mouse click away from you.

An advanced CRM software guarantees:

• Higher ROI: You can increase your ROI again! According to a Nucleus Research study, for every dollar you invest in your CRM software you get $8.71 back!
• Consistency: No matter when your customers engage or where they are, they will be provided with a completely transparent conversation, as all CX processes are perfectly streamlined.
• Personalized customer experience: There is no better tool on the market for support agents to access customers’ detailed history to tailor the conversation to their unique needs. This includes prior complaints and orders, and even a chat transcript that provides a complete picture of customers’ behavior.

Now you only need to integrate your chats with your CRM software, or simply hire a customer support software that has the capability to record all customer interactions for valuable future reference.

5.  Language Tolerant Feature

The built-in translation feature is quite handy and makes your customers feel at home. When they feel comfortable, they will trust your brand more and appreciate the effort you made to facilitate the conversation for them. This feature is a must-have for global businesses.

It is impossible to show that you understand your customers’ issues if your agents don’t even speak their language, right? Additionally, a Customer Management Institute (CMI) study found that customer support managers report higher customer satisfaction scores when language adaptation is available.

6. Provide Empathetic CX

Empathetic customer service is an often overlooked technique, yet it is the most important for delivering a personalized customer experience. To achieve empathetic customer service, you need to think and act as a customer to comprehend the current request.

This will allow you to know what is the best solution for the actual issue and what resources you should utilize. By approaching your customers on a personal level, your knowledge and care for their concerns will be apparent. This is a crucial step in building a completely personalized customer experience! Show them appreciation, say thank you at the end of every message, and they will surely be knocking on your door again!

7. Use Emojis

This may sound trivial but it is extremely relevant for providing a personalized customer experience. There is no doubt that emojis are a widely accepted form of communication these days. You see them on every social network and in your very own text messages. They help to deepen an emotional connection by replicating real human facial expressions.

The same applies for strengthening your relationship with your customers. For instance, your agents can use :) to express gratitude and :( to show sympathy. The use of emojis depends on the situation as well as on each customer’s profile. They help you take your customer experience to a higher level, which is important because a customer that has a deep emotional connection with a brand records a 306% higher lifetime value!

Now you can see the importance of personalized customer service and how you can deliver it right away with a reliable and secure customer support software!