The concept of “personalisation” is more common in business than ever before. In a B2B (business-to-business) support services context, personalisation means making all interactions relevant to the exact industry, business, and processes of your customers.

While the level of personalisation in B2B still trails behind its B2C (business-to-consumer) counterpart, the gap is closing as more business customers are demanding the experiences they have in the workplace catch up to their experiences at home.

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Here are some strategies on how to implement personalisation in B2B support services to make your customers feel valued and convey your understanding of their business…

Automated personalisation for basic information

A great way to get started with personalisation is through automation because it requires less long-term maintenance and optimisations.

Certain elements of personalisation can be automated by leveraging customer information, stored within customer support software, to deploy tailored communication via your technology stack.

This can start with automatically inserting a first name or company name into an email and can also be far more complex. For example, a company may automatically email only customers running a specific version of software to let them know about an upcoming change or fix.

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Another company may have rules in place to display self-service content to customers logged into their portal based on the specific products they have. This level of sophisticated automation thrives as it reduces customer confusion and creates a more relevant and impactful experience.

Give agents access to info for deeper personalisation

Automation, while it saves time, only goes so far in B2B support services. Taking personalisation even further means empowering agents with information to more efficiently solve customer issues.

Customer support software enables agents to utilise detailed information including company locations (and headquarters), exactly what products they have, their overall satisfaction as a customer, and much more so responses can be personalised to each unique situation.

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Suggesting applicable solutions is critical to personalised customer support and the level of detail in the response can often vary based on whether you’re dealing with a happy or unhappy customer.

For even more information, use integrations to pull data from other sources (such as marketing or sales). This allows agents to see additional interactions that a customer has had with your company, and can prevent overlap issues such as suggesting an asset to resolve an issue when the customer has already acquired it from your marketing site.

Create human interactions on an individual level

One area where great B2C companies such as Amazon and Apple shine in support services is their ability to “wow” customers with great human interactions.

Instead of pushing B2B customers to online self-service right away, try to understand the issue at an individual level first by making the experience about the customer and their needs.

One way to accomplish this is by creating personalised experiences at both the company and contact level. Employees at the same company can respond differently to customer support, so make notes of each individual interaction at both levels in your support software to personalise future conversations. This is important for working with companies that have many employees with different personality types.

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In short, implementing personalisation into B2B support services can be accomplished in a variety of ways. Simple automation through customer support software is a good starting point, but empowering your agents with detailed information truly takes your personalisation efforts to the next level.

Customer relationships are complex in B2B, and it’s important that communication is personalised for both the company as a whole as well as each individual within a company.

This is important to ensure the right message with the right tone is getting across. Getting your “feet wet” with personalisation is rather easy, but it’s a concept that is difficult to master regardless of your industry or customers.

Sourced by Robert C. Johnson, CEO of Team Support

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