Webinar Review: Tactics for Personalised Customer Service with Martin Hill-Wilson

Today we hosted the latest in our series of webinars featuring industry expert Martin Hill-Wilson. Martin spends his time advising some of the most forward thinking contact centres in the World and has fantastic insight into how the best organisations are delivering an amazing customer experience.

Today’s webinar focused on tactics for delivering personalised customer service.

It is generally accepted that all organisations want to offer a carefully designed customer experience. Martin displayed some statistics:

84% of people would walk away from a company that “doesn’t listen”.

• A company that offers you a product you have already declined
• A company that contacts you on a channel that you have asked them not to use
• A company that consistently contacts you at inconvenient times

Have you found yourself saying “As I said to your colleague….”? Very frustrating.

Conversely, the study shows 74% of people respond positively to an organisation that does listen to them. Personalisation stimulates customer behaviour, encouraging them to buy more, stay longer, and evangelise their experience to others.

Anticipating Situations

The key to starting your personalisation efforts is to change the lens through which you view the problem. Instead of focusing on internal needs like resourcing and utilisation empathise with your customers and the situations they might find themselves in.

Map out your customer lifecycle and understand what the critical phases are that generate calls.

• Receiving the first marketing communication
• Requesting a quote
• Abandoning a shopping cart
• Awaiting a delivery
• Trying to install the product
• Receiving the first bill
• Upgrading/Renewing

Knowing that a caller fits one of these situations allows you to develop ways of personalising their experience when they call in.

Lesson number 1 – let them know that you know. Either by an automated pre-queue message, or post-routing welcome message from your advisor.

Take these examples:

A high value customer – “We recognise you as a valuable customer and have prioritised your call.”

A customer calls 3 times in a week – “We see you have a recurring query, would you like us to route you to our escalations team to get this solved today?”

A call back for an incomplete issue – “Would you like to speak to the same advisor again?”

A customer nearing a renewal date – “I’ve got a great renewal offer for you at the end of the call.”

A customer with a recent purchase – “Is this call relating to the product you recently purchased?”

Any of these situations can build an emotional connection with your customer, showing that you know who they are, you understand their situation, and you want to help.

Making it happen

The technology to do this is available, so why isn’t it happening?

Martin wrapped up his presentation with a poll – a critical question that will enable you to push forward your personalisation agenda:

“Are you able to correlate an improved customer experience with an improved cash position for your business?”

Only 38% of attendees said yes, showing there is work to be done to prove to the C-Suite that your efforts in improving customer service deserve the investment they require.

Did you listen to the webinar? What advances is your business making in the world of personalisation? We’d love to hear your comments in the section below.

For more information on how NewVoiceMedia can help deliver a personalised experience to your customers visit the ContactWorld for Salesforce page on our website.