Why is personalised customer service important?

The value of quality customer service must never be underestimated. As a customer's main point of contact within a company, it's customer service reps who are responsible for building relationships, converting new customers and keeping old ones.

Personalised customer service, which can be loosely defined as treating customers like individuals and not simply as customers, is the best way to provide a high-quality service that customers notice and appreciate.

Build trust

By speaking to customers with genuine warmth and honesty, contact centre agents can break out of formal 'business' conversations and speak to customers on a more natural level. This builds a rapport between customer and call handler which reflects well on the company and gains the customer's trust and loyalty - an investment which will prove valuable for a long time. The key to achieving this kind of rapport with customers is great staff training; teach employees to be flexible and to adapt their service to the customer they're talking to at the time.

Making customer calls more efficient

'Efficiency' isn't a word often associated with the concept of 'personal', but in this case, personalising your customer service can help to streamline your call process, too. One of the best ways to personalise customer service is by keeping customer profiles with logs of past queries and conversations with frequent callers, as well as relevant data about the customer.

Particularly in sensitive industries, such as in the case of funeral and care businesses, simply knowing the names and ages of a customer's family members can go a long way. Not only does this allow call handlers to understand a customer's history on a more personal level, but it can also speed up the efficiency of a call by helping service reps to pinpoint relevant problems and by ruling out past solutions. It's win-win.

Empower your customers

At the end of the day, customer service should make your customers feel good. Personalised customer service makes customers feel like they're 'problem-solving' with you, rather than simply being taken down a customer service treadmill. Empower your customers by bringing them into the conversation, speaking to them with openness, and approaching each telephone query like a call from a friend.

At Frontline, we offer outsourced customer service to a range of clients spanning many industries. If you'd like to find out more about our personalised telephone answering service, please get in touch today.