If there’s one thing we embrace at Coveo, it’s that we can all learn a lot about our customers by going beyond the customer journey and taking a close look at their behaviors and actions. Personalized customer service is important because:
- It focuses on meeting individual customer needs
- It relies on data and AI technology to create a personalized approach (versus guesswork)
- It’s scalable and adaptable across touchpoints and audiences
- It makes the buying journey easy and seamless for customers
- It increases important KPIs like sales, leads, signups, and average order value (AOV) for businesses
- It removes some of the pressure from your customer service team
Each customer interaction is an opportunity to create a meaningful, tailored experience that builds trust and loyalty. After all, it’s those personalized interactions that allow us to meet each customer’s ever-elevating expectations in personalized customer service. Customer data and feedback help us understand individual customer needs so we can deliver a truly tailored experience.
What Is Personalized Customer Experience?
Personalized customer experience (CX) is the practice of tailoring interactions, content, and offerings to meet the unique preferences and needs of each individual customer. Companies use customer data, in-session behavior and other signals — combined with machine learning — to personalize a customer’s buying experience.
It’s this personalized approach that makes each interaction feel relevant for your customers’ unique needs. With capabilities like search analytics and real-time AI-powered page optimizations, you can take this a step further and anticipate customer needs — proactively addressing trends, issues, and changes in behavior as they happen.
Why Is It Important To Deliver Personalized Customer Service?
Customer preferences for contact channels are continuing to evolve. In a global study of over 28,000 consumers by XM Institute, 62% of consumers prefer using human-mediated channels for personalized customer service.
XM Institute defines “human mediated channels” as: “chat with a person on a computer, talk with someone on the phone, and meet with someone in person”. Meeting customer expectations around customer service requires personalized customer service for a few important reasons, including:
People Crave a Human Support
Consumers’ least favorite support experience? Chatting with an automated system. Only 10% of respondents in the XM report prefer using chat with an automated system. In Coveo’s 2025 CX Relevance Report Industry report, consumer respondents indicated a strong preference for human-assisted support, with 64% of 4,000 respondents noting that “having access to a live agent to assist me” would improve their self-service experience.
Caption: An insight panel brings not just relevant information to the case at hand, but can also show the actions the person experiencing the issue has already taken.
This suggests that even when customers don’t reach out directly to a human for support, being able to reach a human agent if needed is a key expectation for a good customer support experience. AI can help here, too — equip human agents with an ‘agent assist’ right in their flow of work.
Relevant reading: 6 Strategies for Improving Agent Experiences in Salesforce
Self-Service Is Rising in Popularity
Customer self-service options on mobile and desktop are gaining traction, especially among younger consumers aged 18-34, reflecting changing customer behavior and expectations.
Our own research backs this up. Although human agents still scored at the top of the customer service expectation list, our recent CX report also revealed a decrease in consumers’ desire to access a live agent. We also saw an increase in expectations for better information and online assistance around self-service features like site search, personalized recommendations, and AI assistance.
Caption: With generative AI embedded in their support portal, Xero achieved a 20% decrease in search sessions needing additional customer experience support in the first six weeks of launching the new feature.
We asked consumers, if they were trying to resolve an issue themselves online, what would improve their self-service experience? Thirty-eight percent said “getting content recommendations that have been helpful to others with a similar problem”, up from 32% in 2024. Additionally, 29% said “receiving AI guided assistance/troubleshooting within the product or application”, up from 22% in 2024.
Relevant reading: 6 Proven Techniques for Customer Self Service Success
Customer Support Is Never One-Size Fits All
The clear takeaway from our CX report is that good customer service equals personalized customer service. Businesses must balance multiple channels with human and automated support. Expectations for both types of support remain high.
Customers want whoever – or whatever – they interact with to know who they are, understand the reason they reached out, and be able to access the customer’s entire interaction history. This is difficult to do with just a human support team; AI helps enhance and extend human capabilities. It’s also the best way to offer 1-to-1 personalized customer support.
Relevant reading: See How Much AI Can Save You in Support Costs
But just as businesses can learn a lot from their consumers, so, too, can we learn a lot from each other when it comes to creating a more personalized customer experience.
How To Deliver Personalized Customer Support and Services?
The Customer Support Landscape, Today
There’s a clear trend among companies that lead the pack in great customer service: they put individual customer needs first.
They’ve renounced the traditional service structure and support experience that focuses on product lines and reoriented their operations to put their customer at the center. They’ve eschewed a siloed and segmented approach to customer support delivery in favor of one that’s relevant, coherent, conversational, and connected — from their customers’ point of view. This approach prioritizes customer satisfaction by addressing customer expectations head on.
That can be challenging, considering many organizations put product-led growth at their center. As you think about how to put your customers at the heart of your service structure, you’ll need to adapt to the strategic change this entails.
This approach is a means of survival in a landscape that’s becoming increasingly crowded with large tech companies that specialize in serving customers the way they want to be served — with hyper-personalization. With companies like Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft moving into industries beyond their home base, if you will, it’s clearer than ever that competition — and inspiration — can come from anywhere.
Tips for Delivering Personalized Customer Support and Services
Delivering personalized interactions and services means taking traditionally siloed customer interactions and reorienting them around individual preferences and unique needs. You’re anticipating customer needs before they even voice them. Do this by:
- Integrating customer data from all touchpoints to create a holistic view of each customer
- Empowering support agents and customer service teams with tools and training to access and interpret customer insights on the fly
- Developing flexible product bundles, personalized solutions, or service packages that align with individual customer needs
- Using search analytics to anticipate customers’ needs and actions
- Moving beyond scripted responses to foster genuine, personalized conversations
Let’s look beyond the confines of one’s own industries and look at others, learning how to offer personalization to customers — at scale.
Four Personalized Service Examples By Industry
Personalization looks different across industries. Yet the goal is always to create meaningful experiences — whether the customer is a healthcare provider who needs a telehealth solution, a consumer searching for car insurance, or a CEO researching wealth management.
Here are some specific industry examples that highlight how companies are using personalization to deliver exceptional service at scale.
Insurance: Decluttering the Complex
Sometimes, less is more… even when it comes to buying insurance. From established players like Geico and Progressive to the new entrants like Insurify and Lemonade, insurance companies are taking a clean, web-centric approach to customer service personalization.
Hyper-personalization is a great example of this. It’s a trend that’s being embraced by insurance companies. According to NTT Data, personalized marketing actions and tactics contribute 40% more revenue than one-size-fits all approaches. It includes strategies like:
- Tailoring premiums to customer behaviors and risk profiles
- Offering discounts based on individual customer data
- Customizing policies to align with unique customer needs
That means taking products that have traditionally lived in their own separate worlds and reorienting them around a customer’s preferences — and making information around these offerings available.
Bundles allow companies to integrate customization into service offerings upfront. This relieves customers from having to dive into every option on their own to figure out customer preferences and individual needs.
Relevant reading: Blueprint to Personalized Digital Experiences for P&C Insurers
This unification of product lines around people represents a fundamental rethinking in terms of the digital customer experience. It goes beyond coverage by considering a customer’s lifestyle and understanding where insurance can support them.
Wealth Management: Tailoring Your Recommendations
What you need from your bank account today may be different from what you need from your bank account tomorrow, or even 10 years down the road. And it’ll be different from what another potential customer may need. This variability underscores the importance of personalized support interactions that adapt to a changing customer relationship and new customer expectations.
The most successful contenders in wealth management have invested in building a personalized customer experience by:
- Providing tailored recommendations for products, services, and content based on individual customer needs
- Reorienting product lines around customers to make cross-selling and upselling feel seamless and relevant
- Packaging offerings in ways that align with customer preferences and life stages
- Using customer data to personalize interactions for both existing and prospective customers
This rethinking of product lines ensures that every interaction feels meaningful and helps build stronger, long-term customer relationships.
Relevant reading: How to Build Personalized Digital Banking Experiences
Healthcare: Responding to Emerging Needs
There’s no denying the healthcare industry has changed dramatically since the pandemic — health insurers and providers know this all too well.
Keeping up with the individual needs of customers drove more players to think about the best way to address customers and deliver a more personalized approach to customer service.
Those who were most successful turned to solutions that leveraged AI-powered search to automate their personalization efforts — all within a single, unified platform. This approach benefits both the consumer and the customer service agent by:
- Using search analytics to dynamically populate trending topics like telehealth services
- Connecting members to the right care providers based on their unique needs and preferences
- Adapting in real time to provide the most relevant user experience and information as customer needs evolve
- Leveraging a unified platform that simplifies personalization efforts for both customers and service teams
This approach ensures that every healthcare provider can meet ever-changing customer needs while delivering a seamless and personalized experience.
Relevant reading:Blueprint Personalized Member Service for Health Insurers
Manufacturing: Minimizing Customer Effort
How can your company serve your customers (or customers-to-be) with exactly what they need — without making them jump through hoops to find it? Look no further than the manufacturing industry, where leaders have mastered the art of customer engagement by serving up relevant information almost effortlessly, even for first-time visitors with no purchase history or customer information tied to them.
Key strategies include:
- Providing tailored results based on minimal input, such as auto equipment manufacturers offering a fully customized list of parts based on a single VIN entry
- Enabling faceted search to help customers quickly narrow down options, like computer manufacturers allowing users to filter by categories that matter most
- Personalizing product displays to show only what’s relevant, such as footwear manufacturers displaying running shoes available in the customer’s size
- Carrying forward customer data to future interactions, ensuring a seamless experience across searches, purchases, and service touchpoints
This focus on minimizing customer effort ensures that customers can easily find the information they need across a company’s entire knowledge base. Manufacturers, meanwhile, leverage data to personalize interactions from the very beginning — whether or not they know the customer personally.
Relevant reading: Give manufacturers the 24/7 dealer portals they expect
Minimize the Cost-to-Serve Curve
The cost-to-serve curve refers to the relationship between the cost of delivering customer service and the quality or personalization of that service.
As you strive to provide more personalized and effective customer experiences, you’ll need to balance the cost of these efforts with the value they deliver to both the customer and your organization.
4 Areas to Balance
The goal is to reduce the cost of serving customers while maintaining or improving the quality of the experience. To achieve this balance, focus on:
- Streamlining customer interactions: Integrate data from all touchpoints into a unified content index. This allows both customers and agents to access relevant information quickly and efficiently.
- Empowering self-service options: Self-service should be intuitive and effective. This is the best way to reduce the need for human intervention while still delivering a personalized experience.
- Leveraging AI and analytics: AI and data work together to anticipate customer needs and proactively answer questions and provide next steps before customers even have to ask. You can also solicit customer feedback to better understand pain points and further refine your approach.
- Optimizing assisted support channels: Provide personalized assistance and optimize support channels to handle complex or creative customer inquiries that require a human touch.
Because humans are better equipped for one-on-one service for issues requiring a creative response, a unified content index should be part of your personalization strategy. It can enable better self-service by helping customers and agents capture, crystallize and circulate knowledge.
Better self-service leads to a better customer experience, and an overall better, long-lasting relationship. With both existing customer data and new data collected through customer interaction, it’s possible to personalize for both a known or anonymous customer.
Are you ready to put your existing content to work across all of your customer service touchpoints? Contact an AI search expert today to get your personalized demo.
Dig Deeper
A personalized customer service experience helps businesses create loyal customers by addressing their unique needs and delivering tailored solutions. Every customer service interaction is an opportunity to build trust, strengthen relationships, and enhance satisfaction.
Want to see how specific companies are approaching these trends? Watch the on-demand Coveo Relevance 360, with tracks for commerce, CX, and EX. Learn how AI-powered abilities can empower your contact center and support team to deliver exceptional service.
Most might think of customer service as post-purchase issue troubleshooting, but it can really be much more. Customer service agents are brand ambassadors — learn more about how AI can enable them to help grow your business.