Personalized Service is the Right Fit for Shoes of Prey

By Laura Norman

No one likes to get a canned response. Whether your customer is your mother-in-law or a Fortune 500 company, everyone wants to know that they’re heard and that you care about their needs. But when you’re a small company, trying to offer personalized service to all of your customers can be a daunting task. Don’t despair! With the right systems and company-wide philosophy, even startups can provide personalized service that helps them forge stronger relationships with customers.

We talked to Dione David, Customer Happiness Manager at Shoes of Prey, a global retailer that lets consumers design their own shoes, about the importance of offering personalized service every step of the way.

How important is it to your business to give customers personalized responses?

Most consumers see customization as a service for special occasion and mass production as the norm. We believe mass customization is the future of retail and we intend to be pioneers in this movement that will change the way people shop forever. This means essentially asking our customers to commit to a product they have formed a personal connection to, but have never seen in reality. Customer confidence is the biggest roadblock and our greatest tool to break down that barrier is offering a service as personalized as the product. Every customer should feel heard, valued and confident.

How do you encourage agents to give responses personality?

We integrated our customer support tool with our customer order system so all of our employees can have immediate visibility to historical order and payment information so they can provide totally personalized service. Everyone in the company from the management team to retail associates to engineering has access to the tool so they can quickly take a pulse on the business and be knowledgeable when helping customers during busy times.

What advice do you have for companies that are just starting out and want to make sure their support reinforces their brand?

You need to have a strong brand from day one of your company, and you need to reinforce it with everything you do. Identify early what your “north star” metric is — the metric that drives decisions across all departments — then let data drive your scaling efforts. This means ensuring every process is geared towards empowering your staff to keep your finger easily on the pulse, respond quickly and appropriately and in a way that does your company proud.

Learn more and read their full case study here