4 Innovative Ways to Personalize Digital Customer Service

The pandemic had a significant impact on the majority of brands. But it also offered an opportunity to innovate and nurture customer relationships as global lockdowns broke customer contact.

We learned our lesson, and we don’t need another pandemic to remind us that we should find innovative ways to maintain customer relationships. One way to be ready for disruption is by deepening online personalized customer service.

The first step to achieving personalization is by understanding your customers’ needs and preferences. So, you should have an open feedback channel for collecting individual preference data. Preferably, it should be part of your innovation management program. That allows you to include customers’ input in product or service development and delivery.

The number of internet users in 2022 is 5 billion. That means leveraging digital customer experience can be more impactful now than ever. Personalization can assist with achieving excellence in customer experience because you understand each of your customers' needs at a granular level. And with good idea management systems in place, you can convert these customers’ needs, requirements, and ideas into practical solutions.

You can also enrich your personalization campaign by looking at browsing patterns, brand affinities, geo-location, previous searches, and orders. This gives you the ability to provide specialized product suggestions through innovation.

But excellence in digital customer experience is not a breeze. You need a digital innovation experience strategy to keep winning.

You can continuously improve the personalized digital consumer experience through innovation and research.

The following are some effective and innovative ways to tailor digital customer service.

1. Capture Your Customers’ Needs

You need to act on what the customer wants for customer service to be effective. You can digitize suggestion boxes to collect meaningful data from your customers. These suggestions can act as feedback on customers’ pain points.

As a result, capturing the feedback on users’ pain points allows you to iterate your offers to fulfill their needs. In short, the suggestions can help you innovate your processes or offers to serve your customers better.

Additionally, leveraging the right innovation management system is necessary to handle valuable customer feedback data. For instance, you can collect your innovation team’s new ideas on digital customer experience, track them through the system, and run tests and trials to validate them.

Once you have real-time feedback on which ideas worked and which didn’t yield positive results, these insights from the innovation management platform can be exported to make informed decisions on how to go full-scale, monetize, and bring these ideas to life.

You should go for intuitive innovation management software that integrates well with your innovation workflow. With the creative digital spaces that these tools provide, your ideas like those aimed at enhancing the digital customer experience can be nurtured faster without hassle.

Today most businesses are embracing technology to personalize the customer experience. Besides, idea management tools can help you in the following ways:

• Increase customer outcomes

• Provide timely communication

• Give more direct results

• Reduce expenses

2. Develop Opt-In Forms

Emails can also be an impactful way of driving your digital customer experience. About 96% of businesses confirm that email address is one of the most powerful tools you can't ignore.

According to DMA, you can have up to $38 ROI for every dollar you spend on email marketing. But if you want to win with email marketing, you need to customize your opt-in forms.

To have a successful email marketing strategy, focus more on the opt-in forms. The sign-in forms are one of the best ways to collect visitors' email addresses.

You will first need to create free and valuable content for your visitors. But, that shouldn't be the only strategy. Curate personalized messages for the opt-in forms to attract high-quality leads. Ensure your opt-in strategies use behavioral and contextual data to cater to each client.

If you have access to your client's data, ensure you send this message at the appropriate time and address the right individual. This is one of the most innovative ways to personalize and add value to your opt-in forms. Doing this will encourage more customers to share their email addresses and opt-in to know more about your business.

Personalizing your opt-in forms turns the focus to strategies that can build long-term business relationships. It will raise the standard of your business interactions and bring-in high-quality leads.

3. Personalize Follow Ups

According to statistics, only 2% of sales occur at the first interaction. Clients who close the deal at their first interaction often have done extensive research and are confident in your services or products. Your sales team only confirms that you're a right fit when they meet them.

The remaining 98% of people are not ready to purchase yet! You can convert these leads only after building trust. Unfortunately, most salespeople don't have the patience.

Often, the sales reps will only make 2 or 3 follow-up attempts. But usually, most clients will buy after the 5th trial.

You need to invest in a CRM data and idea management system to enhance sales. These tools will improve your sales team's capacity to effectively welcome and interact with clients and close more deals.

You can learn much about potential client behaviors with an idea management system and CRM data. For instance, these tools help you know about:

• The support tickets they raised

• Type of events they've registered for

• Email campaigns they participated in

• Websites they interact with

• Requested product demos

• Previously scheduled sales meeting

Personalizing follow-up emails is a great way to engage with clients and boost sales rates. A good way to do that would be website monitoring. It is easy to learn the posts or pages they interact with frequently.

Your sales team can use this data to personalize follow-up messages. You'll be able to note potential clients' product interests and resolve pending issues if any.

Sending emails with personalized email subject lines and message body increases the response rate by 30% and 32%, respectively. And just sending an extra follow-up can boost your response rate by 65%. In short, sending a handful of follow-ups with personalized messages and subject lines can enhance your customer experience.

4. Content Personalization

Is the content on your website the same for all your visitors? If this is the case, then your customer interaction is ineffective.

In this age of personalization, you can't risk addressing visitors as a group. Repeated trials and research shows that more than 90% of marketers leverage content personalization.

Content personalization is the latest trend in content marketing. It is easy for your business to show unique content and call to action to each visitor.

The clients need to feel that the content is unique to their needs. For that to happen, personalize the content you display to the best of your ability. Such heavy personalizations across several domains can be made possible with good idea management software. With the right innovation management systems in place, you can automate processes and ease the load of tracking several parallel processes.

So as a marketer or an organization, don't hesitate to use all the available information at your disposal. You can constantly tailor the content using demographic and geographic data.

Final Thoughts

Personalized digital customer service can become your USP. You don't need to limit customized customer experience to support only. Ensure you tailor customer experiences across all customer touchpoints.

To remain relevant in the market, you need to adapt to the changing consumer tastes. Each customer has a unique preference, and they need you, as a provider, to know that. Fail in that, and they deem you uncaring.

So, to keep tabs on each customer’s preferences and demands, you need ultra-personalized customer support. Such high-quality digital customer service can be made possible only with effective planning, understanding of the market, and the assistance and support of the right tools and idea management systems.

With such platforms, source better customer service ideas, test, and validate them to help scale quality digital customer experience. Most importantly, equip your innovation team to track and incorporate customers’ needs for tailored service delivery.

With these highlighted innovative ways, level up your customer support and overall satisfaction. That’s a win for your brand and your revenue.