Companies failing to provide a hyper personalised experience for their customers will quickly find themselves losing business, argues Matthew Chadd, Senior Project Director at Content Guru.

More than two thirds of companies now compete on the basis of customer experience. Customer service is the competitive differentiator, and it is essential now more than ever to maintain brand loyalty and meet business goals. Companies can face losing customers if they don’t keep up with the ever-increasing standard of service expected of them.

Delivering superior service is particularly challenging during spikes in the volume of customer contact. Human agents on their own cannot manage these peaks, let alone deliver a consistent and personalised customer experience. Long call queues and fragmented customer engagement lead to disappointed customers, reputational damage and ultimately financial losses. 

Why does hyper personalisation matter? 

Hyper personalisationis a way for companies to provide a bespoke customer service by using real-time behavioural data from multiple channels to react to consumer decisions and tailor the experience appropriately.

Although many businesses hold a wealth of data, they often lack the tools to use it to provide a tailored customer experience. Artificial intelligence (AI) and intelligent automation technologies can revolutionise the way businesses use data to deliver hyper personalisation across all interfaces and channels.

An example of this is where utility companies use a phone number to identify which customer is contacting them and the location of their property. If there is an outage in their area, they are directed to an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) recording which provides them with instant access to information about the situation. The customer’s enquiry is answered automatically, leaving human agents to focus on dealing with more complex customer queries.

Hyper personalisation requires deep integration

To deliver the best results, AI-driven hyper personalisation requires integrated front-end and back-end IT systems. Businesses often hold customer data across multiple channels and systems. If these systems remain disparate, organisations end up with data siloes and miss out on invaluable insights which can improve customer service. Deep integration means that data can be processed and leveraged to personalise the customer experience throughout every interaction. 

For example, a life insurance company holding records of past customer interactions in its back-end systems will see that a customer calling in might have recently lost a family member. This information will be fed into the front-end with prompts during a customer call. A human agent handling the query will be encouraged to express condolences and demonstrate empathy to help build a relationship.

A blended approach to contact centre transformation

While technology is the driving force behind hyper personalisation, the role of human agents cannot be overlooked. The success of a hyper personalisation strategy relies on a blended approach that maximises the potential of both IT and the human touch.  For instance, sentiment analysis can detect if a person is getting agitated or angry with the machine agent and route the call to a human agent that has specialised skills to deal with calls of that nature. 

AI-driven hyper personalisation enables companies to meet customer demand for a seamless, consistent experience. In order to achieve this successfully, the technology must be deeply integrated into an organisation’s existing data, and function as an extension of the human agent. A blended approach to hyper personalisation is a key ingredient for enhanced customer service. Failing to achieve a personalised experience can cost a business its edge – don’t get left behind.