What really makes a customer a VIP? Sure, high-spenders and long-timers might make your VIP list. But don’t forget influential brand advocates and referral all-stars. When these premium clients have a poor service experience, it costs you big time in terms of loyalty, word-of-mouth, and revenue. The solution? High-touch customer service.
Instead of basic support, high-touch care offers tailored, above-and-beyond assistance focused on the individual. It’s built around understanding customer needs, being proactive, and building real relationships between your business and VIPs.
In this article, we’ll break down what does high-touch customer service mean, like day-to-day, why you need it for your best customers, and most importantly, how to pull it off. Providing personalized experiences at scale gets tricky. We’ll cover some common pitfalls, along with how outsourcing to specialists like ScaleSupport helps take care of top clients without inflating costs.
What is High-Touch Customer Service?
What actually makes customer service “high-touch”? It’s the total opposite of robotic chatbots or vague FAQs. High-touch support is all about understanding people’s specific needs and customizing how you interact as a result. The goal is to build real relationships between VIPs and dedicated service reps—not just resolve issues quickly.
With this concierge approach, agents proactively contact clients about new perks or anticipate problems before they happen. And when issues do arise, nothing falls through the cracks before it’s addressed. Teams go above standard resolutions to deliver exceptional service through personalized extras.
The result? Higher retention, expanded purchases, and invaluable referrals from loyal, vocal brand advocates. In fact, 80% of customers say they’d pay more for great experiences. And once you lose premium clients, it’s much harder to replace their lifetime value.
That’s why subscription services, tech giants, and even medical providers now invest in high-touch care infrastructure. It directly strengthens customer loyalty among those high-value accounts that likely drive a disproportionate slice of revenue. In competitive markets, it’s a key differentiator.
Why High-Touch Customer Service Matters for VIP Clients
Implementing high-touch customer service requires substantial strategy, resource allocation, and focus. But, the significant benefits across growth, expansion, referrals, reputation, and competitive differentiation make the investment worthwhile for VIP accounts. By truly personalized support, businesses see:
Increased customer retention and loyalty
- Research shows 60% of customers point to poor experiences as reasons for churn. Yet high-touch service flips the script – over 70% of clients say personalized care makes them more loyal, leading to substantially improved VIP retention rates over 5-10 years.
- By assigning dedicated account managers, resolving issues proactively, and surprising customers with care miles beyond expectations, companies become their premium clients’ absolute first choice thanks to strengthened emotional connections and trust.
Higher lifetime value
- All customers have an LTV – the revenue they drive over a relationship. High-touch care extends that relationship lifespan with VIPs, making repeat purchases for longer periods.
- This leads to exponentially higher LTVs. One of the most prevalent high-touch customer service examples is that repeat customers spend 67% more than new ones. That also gives more cross-sell/upsell opportunities. A 10% increase in retention boosts LTVs by 30%. The care leads to expanded revenue.
Positive brand reputation and word-of-mouth referrals
- Research shows that over half of customers mention poor service when advising friends against a brand. But get it right, and your biggest fans become your best spokespeople.
- By exceeding expectations, high-touch service earns 5-star online ratings, sparks organic social shares, and drives high-value word-of-mouth sales among the VIP’s inner circles due to reputational boosts.
Differentiation in competitive markets
- In crowded marketplaces, over 85% of buyers rank service as the key brand differentiator, outweighing even price or product quality. For commoditized categories, care is the competitive edge.
- High-touch support builds similar reliability for customers as beloved household names known for world-class assistance models, making them the clear preference option.
Key Elements of High-Touch Customer Service
Delivering high-end, concierge-like experiences requires excellence across channels, departments, and individual team members. Most high-touch care models incorporate:
Personalization
By building integrated customer profiles leveraging purchase data, support history, and channel preferences in their CRM, brands can personalize interactions across communication touchpoints. Emails, web landing pages, help bots, and more would all feature customized messaging tailored to individual priorities.
Not just marketing messages but predictive analysis and relevant cross-sells would stem from unified profiles. Through dedicated success managers assigned to understand and assist high-value clients, one-to-one relationships provide the pinnacle of personalization.
Proactive Support
Analytics capabilities allow brands to get ahead of potential customer issues before complaints arise. Monitoring usage patterns and service changes enables sending VIP alerts and pointers preemptively. Success managers can check in with guidance personalized to clients’ typical activities.
Surprise account upgrades, exclusive perks, and complimentary offers delight when least expected, because predictive models identify opportunities to exceed expectations. The goal is constant value-adding outreach, not just reactive issue resolution.
Dedicated Account Management
Rather than contacting random call center reps, high-touch programs assign individual success managers as ongoing points of contact when high-value customers need assistance.
By managing all queries and cases, familiar faces build rapport through consistent exposure. Agents become personal concierges or advisors, backed by the brand’s broader support ecosystem. Trust and relationships deepen each interaction.
Omnichannel Availability
Customers may engage across phone, email, web chat, social media, and branded app touchpoints. High-touch brands maintain context and provide tailored responses regardless of channel, with unified CRM profiles integrating communications data across them.
If a VIP customer requests a change via chat and then calls their dedicated rep with follow-up questions, the agent sees chat transcripts already within existing records. Switching channels flows smoothly as one continuous exchange enhanced by underlying CRM intelligence.
Direct access options like text/call contacts, priority routing, and channel integration enable seamless self-service or support conversations.
White-Glove Treatment
In luxury hospitality, guests’ needs are met with highly customized care by anticipating desires and addressing them thoroughly. High-touch customer service borrows aspects of this white-glove model through accountability from dedicated reps.
If a long-time premium subscriber has issues, resolutions that might appease average customers simply won’t suffice. To retain VIPs and preserve the revenue possibilities within those relationships, staff go to great lengths to not just fix issues but to deliver a positively memorable service.
This means personalized assistance, creative troubleshooting, executive leadership involvement if required, and extensive resources allocated to transform dissatisfying scenarios into renewals of trust.
Challenges of Implementing High-Touch Customer Service
While high-touch care drives significant benefits, it also comes with hurdles around efficiency, capabilities, and setting reasonable expectations.
Scaling personalized support
Delivering tailored assistance hinges on dedicating more time to relationship building between agents and VIP clients. But the high operator-to-customer ratio traditionally required makes exchanges feel personalized, yet remains difficult to economically scale.
Care teams must maximize empathy and customization while minimizing average handling time. Intelligent workflows route requests by priority while allowing flexibility in complex cases. Automation handles common inquiries to let reps focus on value-adding exchanges. Still, a balance between personal and efficiency is key to controlling service costs.
Training skilled teams
Excelling at high-touch support requires skill sets that combine technical knowledge, emotional perceptiveness, and discretion. Agents must grasp solutions for integral systems along with soft skills to earn client trust through earnest relationship building. This means extensive training in troubleshooting, communication, and documenting insights within CRM profiles.
Quality assurance testing during onboarding and coaching from veteran reps continues to enable thoughtful, accountable assistance. Hiring is another priority – identifying candidates with the right knowledge, capabilities, and service mentality for ongoing nurturing.
Managing high expectations
VIP customers anticipate superior service on demand in line with the royal treatment metaphors. 24/7 availability, personalized interactions, and white glove issue resolution are expected from invested brands. However, this level of care may cause over-hasty overpromising between representatives and clients regarding response times or communication policies.
Tactful management of customer expectations is crucial so service teams don’t eventually disappoint. Clear agreements help align on reasonable response SLAs based on priority tiers. They also establish appropriate interaction norms and boundaries to make relationships most productive.
Steps to Implement High-Touch Customer Service in Your Business
While outsourcing high-touch support can make the process easier, brands still need internal buy-in and planning to integrate elevated services for VIPs. Key steps include:
Segmenting customers
- Analyzing billing records, projected future spend based on current subscriptions, and net promoter scores helps brands categorize subscribers by loyalty and revenue potential. Typically, the top 5% of heaviest spending, longest-tenured, and referral-driving users become VIPs.
- Mapping out these high-priority customers’ end-to-end journeys – from awareness to purchase to account management – reveals the major touchpoints where personalization and elevated support options would be most impactful.
Training support teams
- Agents must complete rigorous certification courses on the company’s products, services, common user issues, troubleshooting playbooks, and account management systems before assisting VIPs.
- Soft skills training in emotional intelligence, verbal de-escalation, and professionalism is equally crucial.
- Performance evaluation will be based on satisfaction survey results, client retention cycle metrics over time, and new customer referrals by those VIPs. This holistic approach ensures representatives can provide best-in-class assistance.
Leveraging technology
- AI chatbots can be implemented to resolve frequently asked questions and basic account updates at scale, freeing up human agents to invest time in nurturing relationships with VIPs.
- Automation similarly handles common subscriber tasks like password resets. Customer data aggregated into unified profiles provides the 360-degree view that makes personalization possible through predictive analytics. The goal is to enhance the human touch, not replace it entirely.
Partnering with BPO experts
- High-touch customer service specialists have existing facilities, technologies, hiring pipelines, and training curricula to elevate support programs quickly without immense internal investment.
- Clear workflows Mapping hand-offs from in-house tier 1 teams to outsourced VIP assistance teams streamlines escalations up to senior management if required. This allows brands to tap into mature infrastructure.
How ScaleSupport Helps Businesses Deliver High-Touch Customer Service
For brands struggling to provide concierge-level service directly to every VIP at scale, outsourcing support to specialized high-touch customer service partners like ScaleSupport unlocks top-tier assistance without overinflating resources and costs.
Dedicated Customer Support Teams
- ScaleSupport provides partners the benefit of branded, VIP-only assistance teams as an extension of their customer service staff. We hand-pick friendly, knowledgeable agents to handle all inbound support tasks for high-spending subscriber bases.
- Our people are rigorously trained not just on resolving account issues quickly, but doing so with discretion, empathy, and professionalism to nurture ongoing relationships between care reps and clients.
Technology-Driven Personalization
- Our proprietary platforms power the personalization underlying great high-touch care. Customer relationship management software aggregates subscriber preferences, service history, purchase data, and communication channels into unified user profiles.
- Machine learning helps analyze all this information to assign the right account managers for each VIP for coherence. It also auto-categorizes inbound queries for intelligent routing to reps with related expertise. Interactions feel tailored because our technology has empowered agents behind the scenes.
24/7 Omnichannel Support
Customers can engage VIP teams across popular platforms – phone, email, web chat windows, or customer portals – on demand, night and day. Our conversation management tools interconnect these channels, facilitating seamless transitions between them by retaining prior context.
If a VIP emails and then calls an agent at 2 AM, our coordinated software ensures continuity between exchanges. We offer access flexibility for on-the-go executives along with responsiveness around the clock.
Conclusion: The Future of High-Touch Customer Service
As consumer expectations for personalized and premium interactions continue rising, high-touch customer service models will become decisive competitive differentiators rather than nice-to-haves. Already, today’s subscribers have little brand loyalty, with research showing 57% willing to switch providers instantly for better experiences.
To future-proof service strategies, brands must get executive buy-in on specializing care for high-lifetime-value users rather than following outdated one-size-fits-all approaches. Allocating resources directly for concierge-style assistance can drive immense returns through enhanced retention and referrals. For support teams, training in relationship-building and emerging engagement channels is equally key.
The scalable option is partnering with specialized providers like ScaleSupport to tap into mature, high-touch solutions. With deep expertise gained over the years assisting premium brands’ VIPs, we make elevating service smooth without immense costs. Reach out for a consultation today to discuss your current customer segmentation, gaps in servicing top tiers, and goals for transforming retention outcomes. Our team looks forward to showcasing innovations for the discerning customers representing your company’s future.
Dianne has extensive experience as a Content Writer, she creates engaging content that captivates readers and ranks well online. She stays on top of industry trends to keep her work fresh and impactful. She has a talent for turning complex ideas into relatable stories. When she’s not writing, you’ll probably find her with a crochet hook in hand or working on a fun craft project. She loves bringing creativity to life, whether it’s through words or handmade creations.
