Customers expect more from businesses than ever before — 71% of customers expect companies to deliver personalized interactions and 76% get frustrated when this doesn’t happen.
But for revenue-generating and service-to-sales contact centers, personalization has historically been difficult to achieve, due in part to the one-to-one nature of the interactions which makes scale a near-immediate challenge.
Still, as customer expectations grow steeper, personalization is no longer a nice-to-have, so businesses need a way to achieve personalization at scale — and sooner rather than later.
We’ll explore key barriers to personalization and how contact centers can leverage modern technologies like generative AI to unlock personalization at scale.
What stands in the way of personalization?
Aside from the one-to-one nature of customer interactions, one of the key barriers to scaling personalization in the contact center simply comes down to defining it — which areas of the customer experience can be personalized, and where will personalization have the greatest impact? While these questions may seem simple, companies don’t always have sufficient customer insights to confidently steer personalization initiatives.
Data silos present another hurdle. Although the majority of customers believe businesses should use the data they collect to personalize experiences, some organizations struggle to centralize and gain usable insights from data at all.
These and other challenges have long prevented contact centers from providing truly tailored customer interactions. Now, modern innovations in contact center AI are minimizing these roadblocks and enabling new levels of personalization.
4 ways to scale personalization in the contact center
With advanced generative AI solutions now available to contact centers, achieving personalization at scale is no longer a nonstarter. There are a few key ways AI can help achieve this goal.
1. Serve agents information about contact history at the right moment in the interaction
By integrating a generative AI solution with a CRM, contact center leaders can ensure agents have the relevant details to deliver a personalized experience from the critical points of every interaction, along with hints or tips for meeting the customer’s needs. This may include recent purchase history, geographic information, or any other detail an organization deems relevant for personalization based on the context of the conversation.
With these details on hand, agents can engage the customer with a sense of familiarity and create a truly tailored experience for the customer.
2. Get more granular customer insights
Generative AI makes it possible to transform unstructured data into usable information. In this way, contact centers have access to far more detailed customer insights — and they can uncover those insights far faster.
Trends and anomalies can be detected as they emerge, equipping agents with background information to drive personalization. For example, if a contact center sees a spike in complaints about shipment delays from customers in a specific part of the country, they can deploy an alert to all agents instructing them to immediately raise this topic when a customer within that geography reaches out.
By harnessing more granular customer intelligence and coupling it with AI-driven notifications and guidance, contact centers can skirt the challenge of scale typically imposed by the one-to-one nature of customer interactions.
3. Leverage an advanced knowledge base
While sticking to a prescribed flow of conversation undeniably supports better sales outcomes and productivity in general, not every conversation follows the same pattern. Different customers will raise different objections, ask different questions, and prioritize different considerations.
Knowledge bases help agents address customers’ individual needs by supplying tailored answers and information, though this has typically required some searching on the part of agents, at minimum. The rise of generative AI in the contact center has upleveled knowledge base capabilities so they can now identify knowledge moments to proactively surface information relevant to the context of the conversation, equipping agents with the right response at the right time. As a result, every interaction feels customized without veering away from best practices.
4. Take unnecessary manual work out of the equation
Ultimately, the key to providing personalized, superior customer experiences comes down to making the customer feel like an individual.
When agents are focused on note taking, knowledge base searches, and other satellite tasks, they’re not focused on the conversation at hand. By offloading manual work from agents and giving them the freedom to engage fully, customers receive the care and consideration that builds differentiated experiences.
Scaling personalization has long seemed impossible for many contact centers, but in the age of AI, more tailored interactions that drive loyalty and improve sales conversions are well within reach.
To learn more about how you can leverage generative AI to unlock personalization in your contact center, reach out for a customized demo.
