Over the next several years, customer experience (CX) will become the leading differentiator for many brands. To do this, they must keep pace with customers’ ever-changing needs and preferences for customer service.

Two important factors for exceptional customer experience are self-service and personalization. Self-service channels are growing in expectations and importance, and more customers are demanding personalization throughout their customer journeys. For businesses, both present an opportunity; a chance to boost customer retention and revenue if done right.

Customer expectations for self-service support

Gartner’s latest research into customers’ changing preferences has revealed an emergence of a “self-service or no service” attitude, especially among younger generations, and failing to accommodate this growing preference could have serious consequences for businesses.

While there have always been noteworthy differences between generations—along with speculation around what and why they are—the data to back it up is key to seeing what younger consumers are craving:

  • 38% of Gen Z and millennial customers report that they’ll give up on resolving a customer service issue if it can’t be resolved in a self-service channel.
  • 52% of Gen Z and millennial customers say they would not buy from a company again if their issues could not be resolved in a self-service channel.
  • 44% would go on to say negative things about the company if they couldn’t use self-service channels to resolve their issues.

The cravings of younger customers are clear: they want self-service options, and if they don’t get them, there will be negative consequences.

Three steps to enhance customer self-service

Here is a three-step solution for dealing with this “self-service or no service” dilemma:

  1. Help yourself to a modern self-service solution: Look for contact center solutions that allow your organization to use automation, chatbots, and conversational AI to support exceptional self-service experiences. But make sure your solution is also omnichannel, so that all customers are presented with their preferred methods, too.
  2. Discover and hone self-service needs from data: Your contact center solution should have a suite of data and analytics tools that you can use for insights into self-service trends. If it doesn’t, explore a contact center solution that does. Using customer data, like conversation and sentiment analysis, you can pinpoint the primary issues that customers approach self-service channels with and modify the self-service journey to match.
  3. Use powerful AI integrations to enhance interactions: Artificial intelligence now has the ability to “understand” and respond to human conversation in a human-like way. Combined with conversational AI and your organization's knowledge base, new AI-enabled contact center platforms can significantly enhance the powers of standard self-service channels, inform agents and the entire organization, and deliver hand offs between self and assisted service with context.

Personalization: from preference to prerequisite

Personalization is the shaping and customizing of the customer experience to meet the needs of specific customers. Some organizations do it more and better than others. However, for all businesses, it is growing as a customer service and support expectation.

When it comes to the growth in demand and business impact, the data on personalization is in:

  • McKinsey & Company finds that personalization is no longer a “nice to have” but a “need to have”. The data shows that 71% of consumers now expect companies to create personalized interactions throughout the customer journey. So, from purchasing to aftercare and support, personalization has transitioned from a preference to a prerequisite.
  • According to the Customer Service Institute of America, personalization is key to customer retention, with over 90% of consumers saying they will repeat their business with a company if it provides them with a personalized service.
  • The boost to the bottom line is clear, too. The same McKinsey research found that the average increase in revenue from personalized customer experience is 10-15%, rising to 25% for digitally-native companies.

While the need and benefits of personalization are clear, what can organizations do about it? After all, personalizing anything is a labor- and time-intensive process.

Improving personalization in three steps

To ensure you’re offering personalized customer services, organizations can follow these steps:

  1. Curate customer data: Using a contact center platform with holistic data and analytics can give you insights into customers as individuals and groups. Using specific data will enable you to personalize your customer service interactions to their needs, while using group data will allow you to make predictions about their future preferences and needs.
  2. Automate and modify journeys based on your insights: Use the data to personalize customer journeys in systems such as your intelligent voice response (IVR). By doing so, you’ll create more personalized experiences.
  3. Equip agents with data and CRM pops: Use a contact center platform that gives agents as much relevant data as they need to personalize their interactions. By using a platform with native-feeling integrations and customer relationship management (CRM) and customer history screen pops, agents can speak with customers in natural, personal ways without having to ask them to repeat information.

What’s next?

Creating a consistent customer experience across channels and across the organization is a key goal for CX leaders. Recent 8x8 research reveals 98% of business leaders agree that customer experience is an organization-wide initiative.

Focus on customer needs and what they’re telling your organization they want—and make sure that focus extends beyond the contact center—to deliver differentiating CX.

Explore 8x8's solutions for delivering exceptional CX here.