Advantages of Personalized Customer Service

The support center of 2023 should be more nuanced and hands-on than ever. Brands now need to pinpoint the acquisition and retention strategies that will meet customers’ sky-high expectations. One strategy is to understand how the advantages of personalized customer service elevate your brand over more reactive, less-prepared competition.

Your C-suite knows that investing in customer service and personalization is vital, but they might not be doing so at the level your brand needs. A report from Twilio found only 35% of companies feel they are successfully achieving omnichannel personalization, showing that a majority still aren’t convinced about the benefits of the financial commitment. Luckily, we’ve outlined the most compelling arguments to prove how effective the practice is. Businesses who navigate personalized customer service successfully stand to reap a multitude of benefits: you’ll create more sales, foster more sustainable relationships with shoppers, and drive new acquisitions thanks through next-level support.

What Is Personalized Customer Service?

Personalized customer service is the practice of customizing support experiences around each unique shopper, based on their needs, preferences, and purchasing journey.

How to Drive Personalized Customer Service With Support Teams

You can achieve this type of service by offering customer service agent training to proactively incorporate customer information and expert-level product knowledge into interactions, as well as investing in technology that makes these conversations more natural to agents. Implementing these improvements requires time and resources, but capitalizing on the advantages of personalized customer service will lead to proven, long-term ROI.

Learn more: Use our Direct-to-Consumer Personalization Guide (PDF) — which includes action tips and insights from the annual Gladly Customer Expectations report — to start implementing personalization on your support team.

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4 Advantages of Personalized Customer Service

1. It fosters loyal customer relationships

Personalized service is the start of greater customer loyalty. A report from McKinsey found that 76% of shoppers would purchase from a brand that personalized their experiences and that 78% would repurchase from those brands.

Clearly, personalized service experiences are one of the most crucial aspects of not only attracting shoppers but also building their loyalty over time. By earning loyalty through personalization, you’ll get a customer for life — an ideal strategy for creating sustainable revenue streams for your business.

Learn more: Loyalty is a key output of personalization, but achieving the service that drives it means understanding what to do and what not to do. Read more about the do’s and don’ts of personalization.

2. You’ll meet and exceed customer expectations

Many brands see the importance of personalized customer service and are working to improve their personalization methods — 73%, according to a report from GetFeedback. But Twilio found that fewer shoppers — around 60% — felt that companies had actually created personalized customer experiences, showing a disconnect between what brands are offering and what shoppers are actually seeing.

If you want to show shoppers that you’re not “most companies,” personalization is the difference maker. McKinsey found that 71% of shoppers expect companies they interact with to provide personalized interactions, making it an essential hallmark of how you should deal with customers.

Learn more: Hyper personalization is a great tool to meet customer expectations — but you need to make sure you don’t cross boundaries of trust. Avoid these three personalization mistakes other brands have made.

3. You’ll drive new sales — and prevent lost ones

When customers feel like their shopping experiences are tailored to their needs, they’ll be far more likely to pull out their wallets. Customer acquisition research from HubSpot shows that excellent customer service leads 90% of shoppers to want to purchase more, with 93% indicating they would buy more frequently from these companies.

Personalization also solves cart abandonment and missed sales. Personalized retargeting messages over support channels help revive the sales conversation and bridge the gap between a disinterested buyer and a closed sale. Precise retargeting can decrease abandonment by 6.5%.

Learn more: Personalized, retargeted ads are a great example of personalization and automation coming together. Read more ways you can bridge the gap.

4. It creates vocal, supportive customer communities

One of the main advantages of personalized customer service is that it inspires individuals to spread the word about your business. Our Customer Expectations Report found that 59% of shoppers recommend brands to their friends when they love the service experience. Through persistent personalization efforts, brands can ignite a loyal, consistent customer community that shares their experiences through reviews and word-of-mouth referrals.

Chubbies knows the importance of personalization and community firsthand. The clothing retailer expanded to channels that their customers used the most — SMS, chat, etc. — and used Gladly to communicate with them on those platforms directly. They then built on the resulting loyalty by highlighting key customer stories in their social media accounts, building further brand affinity and creating the customer community that now raves about their hands-on service. All of this spawned from the initial strategy of taking a personalized approach to their daily support tasks.

Learn more: Listen to the Chubbies episode of our Radically Personal podcast to hear firsthand how the retail brand maximized their use of personalization.

Gladly Makes Personalized Service Second Nature

Your business has plenty to gain from more personalized service, so how can you take the next step to jumpstart these upgrades in your own support center? With Gladly, you access an out-of-the-box solution that makes personalized customer service as natural for your support staff as answering a phone.

Our conversation-driven system is a major personalization improvement to legacy ticketed systems, consolidating the entirety of a customer’s conversation with your brand into a single interface that each agent can reference at any moment. Support agents also use our customer details tools to reference and act upon a shopper’s information, keeping the flow of service while adding personal touches and details to each conversation.

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