Four New Features to Help Personalize Your Customer Service, At Scale

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Imagine if customer service felt like a conversation between friends—so whatever the channel you reached out on, the person on the other end always knew your preferences (that you’d never be caught dead in a skinny tie), or could anticipate what you were reaching out about before you had to say a word (is this about the dress you just ordered?)

It’s the kind of service you expect from your mom and pop store or the bodega down the street, but not usually from the bigger brands you buy from. And understandably so. As a company grows—and with it, their customer base—it becomes harder to maintain those personal, one-to-one relationships that are so unique to the smaller stores you purchase from.

Consumers today want service that’s personalized to their needs—particularly the Millennial and growing Gen Z market. And companies today want to deliver that personalized service, but they don’t always know how to do it, or what technology can help them achieve it.

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We believe customer service can, and should, remain a familiar conversation between friends, no matter the size an organization. To that end, here at Gladly, we’ve built a customer service platform that’s crazy focused on helping companies understand and build lifelong relationships with their customers — giving agents all the information they need, right at their fingertips to personalize every single conversation. Your agents are on the front line, and we think by arming them with the tools to help them do their job better, they’ll be the heroes to your customers and your business, that you need them to be.

Your customers never stop contacting you, so we never stop thinking about ways to help you deliver the kind of personal service you want every customer to feel. At Gladly, we’re always innovating, with new features releasing every Wednesday. Yup, you heard that right—that’s not monthly or quarterly or even yearly. It means we’re constantly working to make the platform that our customers use better and better every week.

Here’s a roundup of a few recent features we’ve launched to help companies go the extra step to provide more personal service.

How to provide VIP customer service

At the end of the day, companies want all their customers to feel like they’re VIPs. But focusing in on your top customers can also yield a significant ROI. Having a program focused on your highest-value customers can be a game changer for your customers and drive real revenue to your business. On average, a brand’s most engaged customers account for 66% of a company’s revenue—and that’s despite making up just 25% of their customer base. They’re also more likely to remain loyal to a brand (even if it costs more to purchase from them), and advocate on their behalf to friends, family, and the Internet.

With our new Dedicated Hero, companies can provide their high-value customers with a white glove dedicated customer service representative (or team), so whenever that customer reaches out, regardless of what channel they use—from email to phone, to text and chat—they automatically get directed back to the same person they always talk to. Someone who knows their history, knows their preferences, and simply knows them.

Dedicated Hero enables companies to provide VIP customer service, and bring that hyper-personalized, one-to-one relationship that is such a hallmark of the mom and pop store, to their larger organizations. It also takes the pain out of traditional concierge experiences that can become complex to manage for companies, and that don’t provide them with much oversight over how their concierge programme is performing. With Dedicated Hero, companies get the following key benefits:

A direct connection to their ‘Hero’

For companies that don’t have a concierge program, Gladly makes it super simple to set up quickly. Say you have a set of your top 10% of high value customers, simply pull that list and match them with a team of your top agents. We have seen companies map about 800-1000 customers to a single agent, what we like to call heroes. With Dedicated Hero, every customer that is mapped to an agent automatically gets routed back to that “hero” no matter what channel they use. And, the rest of the team can serve as backup if that hero is out of the office.

In our experience, we’ve seen that when companies try to set up concierge-like programs with their existing tools, they often end up with inefficient and expensive manual processes, such as giving customers dedicated emails and direct line phone numbers of their agents. These agents end up juggling multiple lines and inboxes, with customers often forgetting to reach out on their dedicated lines, creating more work for the agents and wasting valuable time for customers as they try to get redirected to the right agent. Also, if an agent goes out on vacation, their VIP customer may even go unhelped.

Because Gladly routes the customer, and not the channel, Gladly identifies when your VIP customer is reaching out, whatever the channel, and immediately directs them to their own Dedicated Hero. Agents no longer need to manage and juggle multiple phone lines and inboxes, improving their efficiency and handle times. And customers always reach their dedicated agent who knows their unique needs best and works on their behalf to not only quickly react to their questions, but also proactively reach out for things like celebrating their birthday or anniversary.

Insight into your VIP program’s performance

Companies often struggle to track, measure, and prove the viability of concierge support programs. But because all these support interactions take place in Gladly, instead of across personal lines maintained by agents, companies can now have full visibility into their concierge programs. That means supervisors can better ensure that their high-value customers get the support they need, and be able to track agent interactions with their top-tier customers, the long-term results of those interactions, and the success of their specialized customer programs — all with easy-to-read Reports and insights.

Increase revenue through the contact center

Engaging with VIP customers through a concierge support experience is an opportunity to stay actively engaged with your customers and provide a deeply personal service experience worth coming back for. Often times companies who don’t provide this isn’t because they don’t want to offer a VIP support program but simply because there is no solution to easily manage the high-touch experience.

Gladly makes it easy to get a VIP support program up and running quickly, as well as build it to scale as the company grows more loyal customers. The big value with Gladly’s Dedicated Hero is the ability for companies to drive real revenue through their contact center. For example, imagine if one of your top spending customers just made a large purchase. Now imagine if one of your agents, a “Dedicated Hero” could see when that purchase was delivered to them and proactively call them to make sure they were happy with it and even suggest something to accompany that item? Or, take for example, a loyal customer who has been with your brand for 5 years. At the five year anniversary, what if you were able to send a conversational text and offer them a promo code to come back and check out the latest products you just launched? Companies can enable their agents to establish a long-term personal connection with customers that equates to excellent customer service and continues to build brand loyalty. Additionally, agents are able to learn their customers buying behaviors and preferences, and proactively engage them to drive additional sales opportunities.

Relationships — Connect the dots between your customers

Customers often contact a company to ask a question or make a purchase on someone else’s behalf—like an executive assistant booking a hotel room for his boss or a wife planning a trip for herself and her spouse. But often times it’s almost impossible for agents to see these connections in the systems that their working on, which means customers have to spend time explaining their relationship and situation over and again, even though they frequently reach out on behalf of that person. That’s why we built Relationships.

With Relationships, customer service agents can use Gladly to easily identify and label the connections their customers have with one another.

Take, for example, if my wife wanted to change a flight that we had coming up. With Relationships, the customer service agent can see from my wife’s profile that I’m her husband, and that we’re flying together, and make changes easily to my reservation as well instead of having to get my details from her afresh.

And any changes which the agent makes to my reservation can be reflected on my profile too. That means if I were to call in myself later, the agent who helps me would be able to see the changes my wife made (and why), and have the context they need to satisfy any questions I may have.

We see Relationships shining in situations like this, but also when executive assistants reach out on behalf of their employers, or when members of groups traveling together change their reservations and more. Not only does it make life easier for the agent, saving them time and precious energy, but it also makes it easier for the customer too, while at the same time making them feel like valued customers, rather than anonymous individuals. Relationships helps keep your customers—and whether they’re aunts, uncles, assistants or interior designers—front and center, making for a better, more personal customer experience.

Everything your agents need to know, in a single view

Your agents are on the frontline of interactions with your customers, yet their jobs are often made harder, having to switch between multiple windows across multiple platforms to get the information they need to deliver a first-rate experience for your customers.

While the following features aren’t exactly brand new, they help empower them agents with the context and information they need to deliver service that’s personal to the customer they’re working with, without the added effort.

Every conversation, every customer event — all in one space

Gladly gives your agents the ultimate single view by bringing together every interaction a company has with a customer—whatever the channel it takes place on—within a single timeline. So if a customer emails, and then follows up with a phone call, then sends a text or chats in, an agent doesn’t have to ask them to recap their history. They can see it easily for themselves.

And the timeline isn’t limited to just support interactions. You can keep agents apprised of any promotional codes or campaigns that your Marketing team’s sent to them, which agents can use to offer personalized, insightful service.

With one continuous timeline of interactions, companies can help make the customer’s experience feel like one fluid conversation, rather than multiple, piecemeal transactions. That way, it feels as if they’re speaking to the same person—one who knows their history, likes, and dislikes, without needing any prompting at all.

A snapshot of the key customer information agents need to know

The information you have about a customer, like their loyalty status and points, past transactions, or the types of items they prefer to buy, often sits across multiple systems and platforms in an organization. But having such valuable information spread out this way puts agents on the back foot, making them waste precious seconds having to navigate to and search those disparate systems for the information they need.

Gladly helps companies pull the key customer information that agents can use to personalize their customers’ experiences—what they last purchased, the items on their wish list—and put them into a single view for agents, empowering them to make thoughtful recommendations based on their stated preferences or past purchases that benefit both the customer and the company’s bottom line.

Buying a product or service isn’t just about the product or service anymore. More and more, consumers are basing their purchasing decisions around the overall experience that they have with the brand—is it easy to purchase from a brand, or get help when there’s been an issue? Does the brand truly understand their needs, and value them as the unique individuals that they are?

The onus lies on companies to assure their customers that they do, and being able to understand who the customer is, and provide service that truly caters to them plays a huge role in proving that. Otherwise, you risk losing your customer to the brand that does.

About Gladly

Gladly is a customer service platform for digitally-focused B2C companies who want to maximize the lifetime value of their customers. Unlike the legacy approach to customer service software, which is designed around a ticket or case to enable workflows, Gladly enables radically personal customer service centered around people to sustain customer loyalty and drive more revenue.

The world’s most innovative consumer companies like Godiva, JOANN, and TUMI use Gladly to create lasting customer relationships, not one-off experiences.

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