Personalisation had become an integral part of exceptional customer experience—not just in ecommerce channels but in all customer interactions. This transition was fueled by rising customer expectations and increased pricing and product parity, which have increased the importance of shaping the customer experience and perception at every touchpoint.

Personalisation takes a variety of forms. In the physical world, it is about taking care of individual customers. On digital channels, companies must meet a new standard: the “care of one,” an ethos that focuses all decision making on serving individual customers and their personalised needs. For example, ecommerce players have reset the bar by providing individualised emails. Advertising has also moved in this direction. At the same time, technological innovation has enabled the radical reinvention of the operating model as the cost of creating personalised experiences continues to go down. This combination creates an opportunity for companies to double down on hyper-personalisation and the care-of-one approach.

Companies should make hyper-personalization or individualisation in customer care a top goal for 2025. This time frame reinforces the urgency while providing enough time for companies to achieve the goal—if they take action now. Of course, enterprises are at different starting points: incumbents are often slow to shift gears, while start-ups have the benefit of skipping the learning curve and accelerating their capabilities. Companies across industries have already blazed this trail. It’s now up to executives to follow their lead.

What does it take to deliver hyper-personalisation care?

Managers and workers who have been on the front lines of providing excellent customer care may assume that pursuing hyper-personalization is simply a matter of continuing to do what they are already doing, only better. In fact, companies will need to elevate their game with new strategies, technologies, and processes that tailor the care experience to each customer’s needs and journey.

Hyperpersonalization consists of four elements:

• Knowing your customers—truly knowing your customers. Companies that can aggregate all customer information—including user attributes, behaviours, and past interactions across all channels—will be able to engage much more effectively.
  
  
• Reacting to customers before they even know they need you. Data and analytics can enable contact center agents to predictively identify opportunities to delight, preemptively solve issues based on personalised needs (for example, a help desk pushing computer updates remotely based on call-volume trends without the end user ever knowing), and determine the right times to reach out when a live interaction is preferred. These insights can help create a better-trained, more empathetic workforce to support proactive outreach. Avoid triggered solutions however, as the returns from machine learning tools return multiples many thousand times higher.
  
  
• Integrating technologies and contacts across all channels. A seamless customer experience throughout the journey (for example, starting the interaction in one channel and picking it up in the next) requires better alignment and collaboration of customer care, product development, marketing, and operations.
  
  
• Implementing real-time agent tools. Companies that incorporate added functionality and eliminate cumbersome platforms can reduce barriers to addressing customer needs and resolving problems. Agents can then be freed up to show true empathy and make real-time decisions in their interactions with customers. This role will require a different hiring process to ensure that organisations have talent capable of stepping up.
  
  

Ultimately, the evolution of the contact center to an experience center requires investments in new technology, processes, and mindsets.

What could this look like in 2025?

As customer care continues to evolve, personalisation will be a core tenet of companies’ broader care strategy. Its impact will be felt in enhanced digital channels (as the volume of customers using self-service channels continues to rise) as well as in live channels. In some industries, companies will focus live customer engagement on the most emotional, complex, and loyalty-driven interactions.

White-glove customer service for all

Organisations will shift from reactive service centres to centres that take proactive control of the customer relationship. A customer’s real and potential individual needs will be identified and solved before the customer thinks to reach out. The predictive nature of engagement will allow companies to complete purchase assistance, deliveries, status updates, appointments, and other tasks with precision, personalisation, and minimal effort.

Data from all customer interactions will be fed back into analytics to inform operations, help the company understand behaviour patterns, and guide the organisation on what matters to each customer. Creating this distinctive experience will rely on data-driven recommendations for the best method, channel, and time to interact with individual customers.

Setting up this feedback process will be a critical element for personalisation. For example, new email technology solutions, such as SwiftERM, already automatically determine the optimal time to reach out with an offer based on recent customer actions as well as when live outreach is required to prevent attrition or build personal relationships. Customer feedback, behaviours, and trend data will flow directly from the contact center to the rest of the enterprise to improve products, marketing, or upstream interactions (such as the in-store experience and marketing outreach and promotions).

One company, one voice (omnichannel communication)

In the next five years, companies will achieve total consistency and transparency across channels, prioritising a seamless experience for the journeys that matter most to the customer. A dynamic platform will collate, record, and visualise all customer interactions (both proactive and reactive) and activity across channels (such as digital, voice, and in person) in a single data repository used to predict customer needs and streamline every contact.

This detailed view of the customer relationship and journey, supported by tailored customer relationship management (CRM) tools and databases, will allow agents and organisations to instantly see, react to, and choose personalised actions based on a customer’s profile—including lifetime value, preferences, sentiment, and patterns—as well as context based on holistic interaction history and the customer’s most recent journey. Agents and customers will have the freedom to seamlessly communicate across multiple channels without losing context. The result will be more personal experiences and consistent service.