The late 90s saw the emergence of 1:1 marketing, the idea of brands changing their behaviors toward individual customers based on what they tell the brand, and what else the brand knows about them. Today, 1:1 marketing is no longer a differentiator but a hygiene factor – something that all customer-focused businesses must do. But what will differentiate them is 1:1 marketing combined with a focus on Customer Experience (CX) and hyper-personalization.
Capgemini defines hyper-personalization as the “advanced and real-time customization of offerings, content, and customer experience at an individual level.” It involves hearing, knowing customers, and understanding context, relevance and timeliness. In today’s competitive landscape, hyper-personalizing CX is the only way to delight customers, and earn their long-term loyalty. This is true for any customer-facing organization, especially contact centers.
Luckily, several tools are available to help contact centers hyper-personalize CX. Here are 5 that you should consider adding to your contact center’s CX ecosystem.
- Sentiment Analysis
- Personalization Engine
- Customer Feedback Management
- Customer Self-service Portal
- CRM and CRM Integration
1. Sentiment Analysis with CallMiner
Sentiment analysis enables contact centers to gauge customer opinions from agent conversations. Also known as opinion mining, sentiment analysis is a great way to evaluate customers’ language and voice inflections to quantify their opinions of and attitudes towards the organization’s business, product or service. In customer service settings, it is a valuable tool to take action on customers’ emotions in different segments, such as customers interacting with certain agents or during certain shifts, customers with a specific issue, etc.
Sentiment analysis is a great way to:
- Segment buyer groups to better understand their needs and motivations
- Plan and execute product, service or workflow improvements
- Get a unified view of the customer journey
- Adapt to meet the changing needs of customers
Ultimately, contact centers can utilize the outcomes of a sentiment analysis to find and close CX gaps.
Sentiment analysis can be done manually by human analyzers. However, it is more effective to do it with an automated tool like CallMiner. CallMiner combines the acoustic characteristics of a customer’s voice, and the context of their agent conversations into a single score that enables contact centers to “measure” their customers’ relative sentiment or emotion across various calls, agent groups, timeframes, etc.
CallMiner’s powerful Semantic Building Blocks enable interaction analysts to reuse previously defined patterns, reducing the time required to analyze customer sentiment, and take the necessary corrective action. They can also identify negative sentiments followed by positive sentiments, representing an agent’s skill at successfully addressing customers’ frustrations. Thus they can monitor agent performance, recognize best practices, and identify coaching opportunities. Combine sentiment analysis with your org’s other CX measures like Net Promoter Scores (NPS) to get a more holistic view of what customers think and feel, and how you can improve CX.
2. Personalization Engine with Salesforce Interaction Studio
A personalization engine analyzes customer data from outside applications. It leverages machine learning algorithms which rely on the preferences and choices of similar individuals. The organization can then use this data to automate segmentation, and design hyper-personalized marketing campaigns and digital content, such as emails with tailored product recommendations and customer-specific landing pages. Ultimately, they can deliver 1:1 CX to optimize long-term relationships with each customer.
These tools can also integrate with Customer Data Platforms (CDP), Digital Experience Platforms (DXP), and work with content experience and A/B testing software to create a hyper-personalized content creation and distribution cycle.
Salesforce Interaction Studio (formerly Evergage) is a Leader in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Personalization Engines. With this real-time personalization and interaction management solution, you can design and execute 1-to-1 CX across multiple online or offline channels. It provides in-depth customer insights, so you can understand each customer’s true interests, affinities, and intent, build more accurate customer records, and even predict their next move.
With powerful real-time segmentation and a sophisticated Einstein AI engine, you can deliver relevant and individualized content, offers and CX to guide your customers towards some action. Today’s customers appreciate and demand “unified” experiences, so you can connect all their online and offline interactions with your agents, in-store associates, at kiosks, etc. and send them consistent messaging at just the right time.
3. Customer Feedback Management with NICE Satmetrix
Customer Feedback Management (CFM) is a powerful way to glean invaluable information from customers, and then use it to meet their needs. With CFM, you can create and send omnichannel customer surveys to get in-depth analytics and improve your benchmarking capabilities, both of which can drive actionable insights and improve customer satisfaction and CX.
Gain a comprehensive understanding of your strengths, and identify improvement opportunities that could minimize potential future lapses in CX. Predict customers at risk of churn and take quick action to arrest churn and increase retention. With detailed, specific and quantified interaction information, you can better recognize high-performing agents who receive positive customer feedback. For under-performing agents, you can identify coaching opportunities so they can improve and enhance CX.
A CFM tool like NICE Satmetrix enables you to collect direct and indirect customer feedback on any channel. Combine this feedback with operational data to develop role-specific insights, identify follow-up actions, and implement plans to better align agent performance with customer interactions. With its advanced automation capabilities, you can easily manage your CX program to disseminate timely information, streamline workflows, and monitor your action management. The software analyzes feedback information to deliver on-point CX insights to all roles and levels, and guides you to CX best practices that create loyal customer advocates.
4. Customer Self-service Portal with Zoho Desk
In today’s customer-centric landscape, fast response time is one of the most important customer experience attributes. Recent research revealed that the average customer service response time is a whopping 12 hours! When 88% of customers expect a response within 60 minutes, this statistic is obviously worrying. The best solution to customers’ need for speed – customer self-service portals.
With a self-service portal, your contact center can support customers without human interaction through FAQs, knowledge base, how-to videos, step-by-step guides, online discussion forums, and more. Using this option, customers can reset their passwords, make reservations, get information quickly, log service requests, etc. without needing to wait for a human agent. Since the portal will take care of routine issues, it allows agents to focus on higher-value cases, so your contact center can scale service, and keep improving its CX capabilities. You can even personalize the customer experience by addressing each customer by name, displaying relevant topics based on past records, and creating customized portal content that addresses common issues.
Zoho Desk is a flexible, cloud-based software with Contextual AI that enables contact centers to provide great CX. With its ASAP plugin, your customers can find quick answers by themselves, wherever they are. Build and publish a support knowledge base with a repository of solutions for common questions. The software’s “Work Modes” feature automatically organizes open tickets, while its “Response Editor” makes it easy to craft and send responses using customer context, FAQs and templates. With Zoho Desk, agents have all the tools they need to better communicate with customers, delighting them and delivering memorable CX every single time.
5. CRM and CRM Integration with NovelVox
Your contact center’s CRM is a goldmine of customer information. It will show you who they are, what they do, how to contact them, how they have interacted with your org in the past, as well as the relevant context for each transaction and key trends and patterns. By tapping into its granular nature and 360° customer views, you can derive meaningful insights, tailor your communication strategies, and provide relevant services through the right channel at the right time. You can also highlight CX pain points, uncover underlying root causes, and use this information to inform your CX improvement strategies.
But that’s not all. By leveraging the contact center integration solutions from NovelVox, you can integrate and synchronize your CRM with your contact center platform. Such integration makes timely, relevant and contextual data available to agents, especially when combined with a Unified Agent Desktop like Cisco Finesse Agent Desktop with Salesforce or the Avaya Agent Desktop with Salesforce. Since they can understand customers better, they can quickly address their queries, and deliver excellent service quality and experiences with every interaction.
A customer support system that is not integrated with CRM forces agents to switch between multiple screens and applications to look for relevant customer information. This makes navigation incredibly difficult, increases handling time, and hinders their ability to provide meaningful support, leading to less satisfied customers and poorer experiences.
Conclusion
By personalizing your customers’ experiences, you can earn their loyalty, trust, and long-term support. In September 2024, a survey of 1,200 executives revealed that 59% of them aimed to enhance their customers’ experience by adopting various CX tools. To this end, some tools like Aloware are more popular than others, and the 5 tools in this article are among them. Adopt them in your contact center, and see your CX results hit the stratosphere!
Kim Marks 
Nicola Holder