We live in an increasingly digital world and fostering human connections via digital platforms isn’t always simple, but these connections are vitally important for businesses. Customers don’t want to buy products from a faceless website. Those that do will potentially choose Amazon over your business. So how can your business humanize its customer experience (CX) and foster positive, long-lasting customer relationships?
Throughout this article, we’re going to take a look at the five most effective ways to improve your customer experience strategy, and all with a genuine touch of humanity.
1. Humanize Your Brand Identity
There’s a saying in marketing: “tell don’t sell”. A key part of humanizing your CX (customer experience) is reminding customers that you and your team are human. This comes down to using your brand identity as a way to tell stories about you and your business rather than to simply shift stock
Creating a humanized brand identity that resonates with customers can be achieved across your website, social media presence, and how your sales or customer contact center services interact. An “About Us” page that tells your business’s story, “behind-the-scenes” videos on your social media channels, and actively engaging with customers and social media followers are a handful of approaches to humanizing brand identity.
Remember, your brand identity should be consistent across every channel – so whether a customer is calling your business phone line or reading promo emails, your story, voice, and identity should be cohesive.
2. Empower Your Employees
Employees are the people behind every business’s CX, so it is vital that they have the tools and knowledge needed to offer the best CX possible. This can mean giving employees the power to help customers and resolve problems without needing a manager’s permission or creating an omnichannel customer support system that gives your employees a variety of communication channels to interface with customers through.
Many businesses are using a cloud based call center phone system to empower customer service teams. Cloud-based tech helps employees communicate with each other, managers, and customers quickly and over different channels with ease.
3. Help Customers Contact You
While we’re on the topic of customer service teams, it’s important that customers can reach said service teams in the first place. With 76% of customers primarily using phone calls to get in touch with customer support, businesses must streamline this experience for customers.
A few elements your business can put in place include displaying contact information clearly on your website and giving customers a range of channels to contact you through (phone, email, live chat).
You could use contact center tools such as an interactive voice response (IVR) system to route customers to the best live agent for their inquiry. Some businesses choose to incorporate VoIP phone service to streamline and improve CX in contact centers, as it lets agents access customer information quickly and to even make use of a shared knowledge base for customer inquiries.
4. Segment Your Marketing Strategies
Humanizing your CX is also about personalizing your CX while considering the voice of the customer. One important marketing strategy that any customer-oriented business should adopt is segmentation.
Segmentation is the dividing of a customer base into subgroups based on factors such as demographic data – age, gender, location – or purchasing habits. Marketers use this to create targeted campaigns for specific subgroups that will appeal to them and promote products they are more likely to buy.
Not all businesses have the tools or software needed for effective segmentation. Customer surveys are a great start for collecting useful data, but some businesses hire specialists or even use a BPO system (business process outsourcing system) to collect, analyze, and visualize customer data on their behalf.
5. Harness AI to Personalize CX
It may sound strange to mention AI when talking about humanizing CX, but AI can give you and your employees the information and customer support tools needed for providing a personalized CX. For example, AI can be used to gather behavioral data from customers and help you send triggered emails, such as abandoned cart alerts, or provide personalized offers when customers return to your website based on items they previously viewed.
Virtual assistants are also transforming digital CX and it can be integrated in a list of business processes. These are a kind of chatbot that helps customers along their journey on your website or on your social media channels. Virtual assistants can direct customers to products they are looking for, provide product and shipping information, and offer customer support that customers can resolve problems via a self-service channel.
Customizing your virtual assistant’s language to match your brand identity or linking it to a live agent when needed will help humanize this innovative technology.
What’s Next?
Businesses are increasingly recognizing the importance of showing their humanity. Customers are attracted to brands through the stories they tell and the faces behind the products.
Creating a humanized customer experience is a powerful CX strategy that benefits businesses, employees, and customers alike. By reminding customers that you and your staff are human through your social media and marketing channels, on your website, and in your contact center, you’ll form stronger bonds with each and every customer.
