While the future of customer support and contact center business is often discussed from a technological standpoint, it’s probably more helpful to imagine what the near future will bring from a process management standpoint. We already know that today’s customer wants service quickly and accurately via whichever channel he or she chooses.  Just as critical, however, is understanding that today’s customer wants personalized customer service. It’s no longer enough to treat customers like an action ticket or just another transaction in a long list of transactions.

While some of this personalization will come from technology, more of it will come from the contact center agent’s attitude and behavior. Customers today expect more than just efficiency, according to digital media expert Boyan Josic in a recent blog post.

“When you tailor your customer service to an individual, you show them you really do care about them and their needs,” wrote Josic. “Every customer is unique, and so there may be times when you need to break free of the rules to make a customer happy. If you tell your customer ‘Our company policy doesn’t allow that’, you’re feeding them a party line and can’t expect them to like and trust your company. However, a simple rephrasing to ‘This specific service is not on our usual list, but I’m sure we can find something to help you’ will assure the customer you’ve listened to their issue and are making your best effort to help them.”

Accomplishing this, of course, requires contact centers to empower their agents to accommodate customers in whatever (reasonable) way available. Contact center agents trained to stick strictly to scripts, with no ability to carry out autonomous problem solving, will present a robotic, inflexible face to customers. Those who are given leeway to please customers, within reason, will be better able to provide the kind of personalized experience that customers want.

There is an added benefit to training agents to please customers and giving them wiggle room in solving problems: it helps make agents’ jobs more fulfilling, since they perceive that they are actually using their own problem-solving skills to really help people. This, in turn, leads to better employee engagement, which leads directly to higher agent retention and better performance.

According to Josic, by combining improved training for customer transaction personalization with a robust customer relationship management (CRM) system, agents will be better positioned to take advantage of “unexploited potential” in customers, which can potentially raise the value of customer relationships as well as increase word of mouth and boost the rate at which customers become “net promoters” of a business. (A net promoter is someone who acts as an unpaid ambassador of good will for a company, sharing positive experiences with friends and family and on social media.)

In theory, a customer-facing company can improve nearly every contact center metric of success there is – first-call resolution, customer satisfaction, transaction value, employee retention and customer and employee engagement – simply by striving to personalize the customer experience.