What is personalized customer service? + 10 ways to provide it

Opening an email, talking to a support agent, or chatting with an AI-powered bot is more enjoyable when the customer experience (CX) is tailored to your needs, expectations, and past interactions. Customers don’t expect over-the-top exchanges every time, but they do desire unique, highly engaging individual experiences.

Our Zendesk Customer Experience Trends Report 2024 found that most customers expect personalized customer service and interactions that feel honest, informed, and friendly. For many buyers, a better customer experience means one that’s more personal, as well as efficient and accurate.

While businesses continue to collect customer data to improve CX, use this guide to learn more about why personalized customer service is on the rise and how to deliver personalization in the modern age.

More in this guide:

• Why customers expect personalized service?
• The benefits of personalized customer service
• 10 ways to deliver personalized service
• Frequently asked questions
• Use personalized customer service to enhance CX

Why customers expect personalized service

Customers expect nothing less than personalized service, especially as they become more willing to share their personal data with companies. According to our CX Trends Report, a majority of customers want businesses to use their data to create hyper-personalized interactions that mimic warm, friendly exchanges—even those handled completely by digital agents. Customers want to be seen as individuals, not as a means to an end, so they expect organizations to tailor experiences to meet their changing customer needs.

As this becomes an increasingly important aspect of customer support, businesses are experiencing a shift in the expectations tied to good customer service. Gone are the days when agents can impersonally respond to customer inquiries—here to stay are the days when personalization is essential for delivering exceptional CX.

The benefits of personalized customer service

For businesses dedicated to customer orientation, personalization is the way to go. Below, we list a few of the invaluable benefits businesses can reap while prioritizing personalized customer service.

Enhanced and efficient customer experiences

Personalized customer service is more than just addressing a customer by their name and pronouns—it’s a strategic practice for improving CX. By leveraging customer data, businesses can deliver tailored responses that precisely anticipate and address individual needs, streamline experiences, and reduce the time and effort customers spend seeking assistance.

This level of customization makes interactions more relevant and engaging and helps teams quickly resolve issues and offer proactive solutions. As a result, customers are delighted not only by feeling valued and understood but also by the personalized customer service you provide, which drives efficient, smooth, and highly satisfying interactions.

For example, you can improve first contact resolution rates by knowing your customers’ needs, learning from their past interactions, and adapting to their communication preferences. When agents can deliver bespoke one-touch resolutions, they spend less time recommending unsuitable resolutions, and customers do not need to test inaccurate solutions or re-contact customer support.

Meaningful customer communication

With personalized service, businesses can transform mundane interactions into meaningful dialogues. By leveraging customer data and preferences, businesses can craft tailored customer communication designed to resonate on a personal level. Personalized communication demonstrates a deep understanding of customer needs and desires, whether it’s a timely email with relevant product suggestions or a proactive interaction addressing a potential issue.

This approach to customer communication fosters trust, builds rapport, and creates a sense of connection, ultimately elevating the customer experience from transactional to truly engaging. Plus, deep customer relations that support personalization efforts help agents adapt to specific customer communication styles and customer service phrases without a second thought.

Satisfied customer expectations

To succeed and meet customer expectations, brands must provide optimal support experiences with heightened customer personalization. By taking the time to understand individual customers, businesses can deliver tailored solutions that resolve issues the way customers want, making them feel heard and appreciated.

Personalization also helps teams understand customer requirements, which increases each solution’s relevancy, demonstrates a genuine commitment to the customer, and improves customer satisfaction (CSAT). Plus, businesses can foster customer happiness and deeper, more emotional relationships by treating customers as valued individuals with unique needs and preferences.

Boosted customer trust and loyalty

Leveraging customer data safely and effectively to provide consistent, personalized, and proactive support is one of the best practices for cultivating loyalty in customer service. When agents (both human and digital) know their customers’ wants and needs—and act on them—they position themselves as reliable partners, building customer trust.

When customers feel their concerns are genuinely heard and addressed with tailored solutions, this trust grows and fosters a strong brand connection that leads to customer loyalty. Plus, our CX Trends Report found that a majority of CX leaders agree that instant, personalized experiences drastically enhance loyalty, creating a powerful foundation for long-term relationships.

Consistent company growth

Personalization is a necessary customer service skill because it directly (and positively) impacts business outcomes. By delivering personalized experiences that exceed customer expectations, businesses can cultivate a loyal customer base built by satisfied customers. These customers may become powerful advocates who are likely to make repeat purchases, explore additional offerings, and refer friends and family, increasing customer lifetime value and driving sustainable revenue growth.

Personalized customer service also provides invaluable insights into customer preferences and behaviors. This enables businesses to refine their product offerings, marketing strategies, and customer journey maps, improving overall customer understanding, driving innovation, and enhancing competitive advantage.

10 ways to deliver personalized service

No matter your customer retention strategy, it’s essential to strike the right balance of personalization by protecting customer data and using it responsibly to deliver a seamless, omnichannel support experience. Follow these customer service tips and best practices to connect with customers wherever they are.

1. Leverage AI and automation

With AI and automation, delivering personalization at scale has gotten easier. With AI in customer service, businesses can quickly analyze vast amounts of customer data. This enables teams to identify customer patterns, preferences, and behaviors, offer tailored recommendations, anticipate needs, and proactively address issues.

With autonomous digital agents, like AI agents, businesses can also provide instant and personalized 24/7 support. By connecting to backend systems, these bots can reference customer data to understand expectations, respond to requests, and resolve all levels of inquiries. In fact, our Zendesk AI-powered CX Report 2024 found that 86 percent of CX leaders believe AI agents will be able to handle questions of any complexity—similar to how Grove uses AI agents to provide all levels of customer service—within three years, enabling human agents to focus on complex tasks like building deeper connections with customers.

Other digital agents and virtual assistants, like the Zendesk agent copilot, assist human agents in providing more accurate and tailored solutions to customers. This digital assistant recommends the next best steps and contextually relevant responses, guiding agents through simple and complex interactions. Plus, agent copilot can use historical data to automatically resolve simple requests and increase efficiency without sacrificing personalization. By putting customer needs front and center, automation and AI improve CX by streamlining customer data use.

2. Gather and analyze customer data

Using data to provide personalized service means anticipating customers’ needs in a way that feels magical and helpful. Instead of bombarding customers with ads for products they viewed for less than a few seconds, collect customer data about their communication preferences, interaction histories, names and pronouns, language preferences, and more. This type of context-rich data allows businesses to create in-depth customer profiles and make data-backed assumptions and decisions.

Personalization—no matter what customer service analytics you’re capturing—should always balance technology with human considerations. As you collect information to create personalized experiences, be transparent about why you’re capturing their data and how you plan to use it. Invest in customer database software that securely stores and accurately tracks data to satisfy you and your customers. Then, you can directly impact your business outcomes through personalization without sacrificing trust, loyalty, and revenue.

3. Offer omnichannel support options

Customers today expect brands to meet them where they are by offering support on multiple channels, not just one. As more companies meet this demand with omnichannel customer service, personalization tools can help provide superior, seamless service across channels.

An omnichannel approach to customer service also enables companies to harness the full potential of customer support. From instant messaging and social media to email and phone service, omnichannel support allows customers to choose their service preferences, leading to more efficient resolutions, instant and personalized support, and higher customer satisfaction scores. Plus, omnichannel routing uses automation to direct requests across multiple support channels, factoring in agent status, capacity, skill set, and ticket priority so every customer receives the best, most personalized service possible.

“Customers expect a personalized experience via all channels,” says Heather Wintermantel, senior director of customer experience strategy and programs at Zendesk. “We should know our customer and personalize their experience, regardless of what channel they engage with us in.”

4. Humanize your language

Personalization adds a layer of complexity to customer service, but the expectation is still the same: High-quality, conversational support that resolves a customer’s inquiry. Using human language while talking with customers can instill confidence, build long-term customer relationships, and encourage loyalty.

To foster these positive outcomes, avoid technical terms that your customer may not understand, develop a welcoming customer service voice, and use emojis or emoticons to soften messages and relate to consumers. Plus, make sure your canned responses and chatbots follow your brand’s identity by reflecting its values and voice.

5. Use your customers’ names

Using a customer’s name during a service interaction is a simple yet powerful way to create a personalized and memorable service experience. By addressing customers by name, businesses demonstrate a genuine interest and regard for the individual.

Whether you’re working in a contact center or managing a company’s business text messaging service, this seemingly small gesture can significantly enhance customer satisfaction by fostering a sense of connection and value.

6. Provide custom solutions

To deliver support that resonates with customers, businesses must provide custom, tailored solutions. Leverage customer data and insights to identify specific needs, preferences, and customer pain points, empowering agents to brainstorm targeted solutions, troubleshoot issues efficiently, and offer alternative recommendations that align with individual requirements.

For example, an agent can use historical customer insights to recommend product or service options based on past purchase history. If a customer recently purchased a new pair of running shoes, agents make additional product suggestions, like running shorts or other running accessories, to customers—items tailored specifically to an individual customer’s needs and interests. Whether suggesting a product upgrade based on usage patterns or offering expedited support to high-value customers, personalized customer service demonstrates a deep understanding of and commitment to filling customer needs.

7. Create VIP or loyalty programs

For businesses with loyal and engaged customers, teams can deliver personalized customer service by creating and maintaining VIP or loyalty programs. Companies can segment customers based on purchase history, engagement level, and other relevant criteria, creating tiered rewards and benefits that cater to specific preferences. Plus, customers can receive exclusive access to products, events, or customer support channels, making high-value customers feel truly appreciated.

For example, Zendesk AI agents use backend systems to identify VIP customers and customize their customer journey by speeding up escalations, offering them exclusive rewards, and more. By singling out customer engagement and loyalty, businesses can encourage continued interactions and long-term relationships by merely recognizing what their customers already do.

Additionally, these programs allow a business’s customer loyalty software to collect additional customer behavior, enabling companies to offer tailored recommendations and personalized communications while effectively anticipating needs. These programs foster deeper customer relationships and drive long-term retention by creating a sense of belonging and exclusivity.

8. Train agents on personalization techniques

To deliver personalized customer service, you must empower your agents through thorough customer service training. Training that teaches personalization techniques will:

• Help agents develop a deep understanding of the customer journey, from initial interaction to post-purchase support.

• Equip agents with the tools and knowledge to access and interpret customer data.

• Use immersive methods like role-playing.

• Prioritize ongoing coaching centered on the art of active listening, empathy, and building rapport.

Personalization-focused training will also teach agents hands-on skills, like adapting live chat canned responses and using agent copilot to surface customizable responses. By fostering a culture of customer-centricity and providing continuous learning opportunities, companies can equip agents to deliver exceptional, personalized experiences that prioritize customer satisfaction.

9. Ask for customer feedback

Customer feedback is essential to personalized customer service. By using customer feedback tools to actively seek in-depth input from real customers, companies gain critical insights into pain points, preferences, and expectations. Plus, customer feedback can help teams calculate CSAT and bot satisfaction rates (BSAT), which enables businesses to identify areas in need of improvement.

This real-time feedback—collected through customer surveys, reviews, and social media—can be used to tailor products, services, and interactions to individual needs and adjust experiences based on customer preferences. For example, a customer who consistently praises a specific product feature can be offered exclusive updates or early access to related products. Businesses build trust and loyalty by demonstrating a genuine interest in getting customer feedback and acting on their opinions while continuously refining their offerings to meet evolving expectations.

10. Be proactive when possible

When personalized customer service becomes proactive, it goes beyond reacting to customer needs; it anticipates them. By leveraging customer data and insights, businesses can identify potential issues or opportunities for improvement and take action before customers even realize they have a need.

For example, a business might engage in proactive customer service by sending timely reminders, offering proactive solutions to known problems, or suggesting relevant products or services based on purchase history or browsing behavior. Additionally, according to our AI-Powered CX Report, 83 percent of CX leaders expect customer service interaction volume to increase by five times in the next three years, so staying a step ahead by offering personalized, proactive service will be the difference between long-term loyalty and temporary transactions.

Frequently asked questions

Use personalized customer service to enhance CX

Focusing on the customer is key to personalizing customer service. Providing valuable personalized service can be the difference between being dismissed as spam and gaining a loyal customer, so the software you use to deliver service solutions, curated messages, and proactive support matters.

With customer service software like Zendesk, you can get up close and personal with your customers through an omnichannel agent workspace, robust customer profiles, and key customer context. AI tools also provide real-time insights into customer needs and emotions that enable you to tackle more sophisticated queries with bespoke and step-by-step resolutions. Plus, service software can offer users a 360-degree customer view, so you always know your customer’s expectations and how to deliver.

Personalize your customer experience and use a hybrid approach to level up your contextual support with Zendesk customer service software today.