What is Personalised Support?
Personalised support refers to assistance that is tailored to the unique needs, preferences, and context of an individual rather than offering the same solution to everyone. Instead of providing generic advice or standardized responses, personalised support adapts based on factors like user behavior, history, learning style, or accessibility requirements.
Essentially, the goal is to make support more relevant, efficient, and effective through utilising contextual information to help shape support interactions. It can occur manually through a person expert that customises the support they provide, or through an AI system that assesses large volumes of data.
How to deliver personalised support?
Delivering personalised support requires a mix of strategy, tools, and execution. Common approaches include:
- Data Utilisation: Using CRM systems or analytics tools to access customer history, preferences, and prior interactions.
- Segmentation: Grouping customers by demographics, behavior, or usage patterns to provide contextually relevant solutions.
- Omnichannel Engagement: Meeting customers where they are via email, chat, social media, or phone while keeping information consistent across channels.
- Adaptive Communication: Tailoring tone and detail level to the customer’s expertise (e.g., simplified instructions for beginners vs. technical detail for advanced users).
- Feedback Loops: Collecting customer feedback and incorporating it into future interactions to continuously improve relevance.
What are the benefits of personalised support?
Personalised support adds value for both the organisation and customers in the following ways:
- Improved Customer Satisfaction: Personalised support helps customers feel seen and heard, fostering trust and a stronger, long-term relationship.
- Higher Efficiency: Tailored responses eliminate unnecessary back-and-forths, leading to quicker resolutions and decreased support costs.
- Customer Retention: Meeting each customer’s specific expected level of personalisation keeps them engaged, grows their loyalty, and reduces their chances of churning.
- Upselling and Cross-Selling Opportunities: Relevant recommendations based on customer data increase the likelihood that they will be inclined to purchase more.
- Stronger Brand Differentiation: Offering personalised support will differentiate their business in highly competitive markets and keep customer-centricity at the forefront of reputation.
What is the role of AI in personalised support?
The role of AI in personalised support is crucial, as it uses evidence-based models (models based on data) to enable customised interactions, recommendations, and interventions, based on the user’s current situation in real-time. For example, recommendation engines in e-commerce sites (e.g., collaborative filtering and deep learning at Amazon) will provide product ideas likely to be purchased by a specific user.
In customer service, customers will increasingly engage with AI-supported chatbots and virtual assistants. These chatbots and virtual assistants use natural language processing and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to offer contextualised support that includes previous use, rather than generic responses.