The future of customer experience: Personalized, white-glove service for all
The modern reality: White-glove service is both inevitable and economical
Modern customers increasingly expect highly personalized service. Providing such service offers several benefits to the organization:
Deeper customer trust and loyalty. Companies can win lifelong customers by creating a seamless experience across all touchpoints and providing the right service or product to meet individuals’ needs.
Reduced need to call. Proactively resolving issues or contacting the customer can significantly decrease the volume of calls that reach the contact center. Improved prediction of intent and first-call resolution will also reduce repeat calls and average handle time. Digital channels can also reduce customers’ need to call—and the move toward digital service capabilities has accelerated in recent weeks and months as the COVID-19 pandemic has led to physical-distancing and shelter-in-place requirements.1
Reduced costs. Traditional customer service is the same for all customers—for example, businesses typically create standard solutions for all disgruntled customers. Companies that know customers individually can tailor solutions to meet individual customer needs, possibly at lower cost to the organization—for example, offering a simple apology rather than a gift card.
Increased revenue. Individual customer profiles also enable companies to take a needs-based approach to selling, replacing the standard one-size-fits-all approach—such as walking the airplane aisle with a credit-card offer—with tailored outreach with higher acceptance rates. In our experience, some organizations have seen a revenue increase of 30 percent or more from adoption of a needs-based approach and proactively reaching out to customers at the right time with the right offering.
These benefits can far outweigh the cost of the investment required. Historically, white-glove service was costly because it required companies to hire highly trained, premium agents and expensive concessions, but today it involves investments in IT, data management, and advanced analytics as well as change management and training. A systematic analytics capability enables organizations to analyze the whole population of customers—after which adding a new person comes at almost negligible cost. Once a company has developed a methodology to identify needs, execution is far simpler and the service is ultimately cheaper to deliver. This is increasingly true as digital capabilities become more ubiquitous and less expensive.