Guest Post: Customized Customer Solutions–How can Customer Solutions be Custom Built to Your Customer’s Needs?

This week we feature an article from Pratik Salia, product manager at Knowmax. He talks about how the COVID-19 pandemic changed the customer experience and how business leaders responded.

In a world where we are spoilt for choice, a custom made option is the only right option. From customized automobiles to personalized phones to technology that adapts itself according to our choices, personalization seems to be the name of the game. In the world of customer service where customer loyalty is precious cargo and customer satisfaction is the raison d’etre, customized solutions are slowly but surely carving their spot in an arena where greater specificity, wider choice, and record speed spell out the mantra to greater success. Customer service executives across the globe agree that customizable solutions are truly the future.

So why is customization so difficult to incorporate? Different companies quote different reasons but two stand out as the most frequent causes. First, customization can be expensive. Investing in new technology can require large amounts of capital and may not yield proportionate return on investments. Second, knowledge is not distributed amenably to offer personalized choices and custom made solutions.

We considered these problems and built the following three-pronged strategy to build a customizable experience for your customers.

1. Be Smart with Your Smart Technology

As a company investing in newer customer services, ensure that you are investing in the right places. Often, this involves digging deep into your customers’ chief concerns and seeing how you can address them better. Does your platform contain all the knowledge required to customize client services? Is all this knowledge easily accessible to customer service executives? Is your knowledge base platform helping your executives and customers find more personalized solutions? Will investing in new technology enhance the customer experience? The answers to some of these questions may require weeks of rigorous questioning.

However, all that effort is seldom in vain. Answering these questions lets you know where you should be investing in the customer service supply chain and ensures that you get greater value off your knowledge base software.

2. A Customer in Need is a Friend Indeed

Often customizable solutions involve adding a personalized touch to what is otherwise a mundane process mandated by necessity. The smallest steps can go a long way in creating a better environment, leading to greater customer satisfaction. The golden rule here is that the customer is a friend. From greeting a customer by their name to asking how their day was, to ensuring that they understand solutions every step of the way, to listen to everything they have to say, a customer executive needs to be the model of a confidant for a more customized experience.

In the words of Lola Barbier, “This may sound silly, but it makes good sense. Using the customer’s name in conversation will show that you’re invested in their situation as an individual.” Individualized interactions often lead to greater customer loyalty and satisfaction.

3. Let Your Visuals do the Talking

A famous ancient Chinese quote reads, “The ear’s hearing something is not as good as the eye’s seeing it,” and this applies perfectly to customer services. Presenting a solution in terms of visuals, in addition to improving comprehensibility, provides a ready layout for incorporating greater choice and a larger number of readily customizable solutions. Enabling visual solutions on your company website also helps in enabling customer self-service and cutting down call center costs. For example, including solutions in graphic modules like decision trees provides choice at every step of the problem-solving process, and provides instantaneous personalized solutions to customers.

In addition, the same module can be customized to solve a vast range of queries- a truly customizable solution for a customizable client service experience!

While these solutions prove to be effective in improving the customer experience, the true key to creating greater choice for the customer lies in effective curation, distribution, and management of knowledge among the various service channels. This involves various short term goals like updating the knowledge base, creating more accessible content, and upgrading technology to effectively manage customer needs, as well as long term goals like building an interconnected network of customer solutions and creating effective training resources for executives. Fulfilling these short term and long term goals in tandem with each other will pave the way for a personalized and more effective customer experience.

Pratik Salia has headed CX function for a Google-backed startup. He currently manages product at Knowmax, developed in enterprises access 30+ countries in industries such as telecom, banking, e-commerce, and more.

For more articles from Shep Hyken and his guest contributors go to customerserviceblog.com.

Read Shep’s latest Forbes article: Reviews Count – Give Your Customers Something to Talk About!