From Generic to Genuine: 5 Tactics for Personalizing Customer Experience with Siena

If one technique can transform your business on all levels, it’s personalization.

Today’s market is competitive. And customers more than a generic response that gives them information they could get from anywhere or anyone.

The challenge is maintaining a personal touch as your business grows and customer interactions multiply. Every effort to personalize your product or service takes overhead, resources, and training to implement consistently. 

At Siena, we’re passionate about building a truly Empathic AI agent to represent your brand fully. There are many ways to train Siena to include that personal touch in every customer interaction, enabling you to provide personalized experiences at scale. 

To help you maximize Siena's full potential, we’ll provide some practical suggestions focusing on the e-commerce and SaaS industries. We’ll also dive into specific prompts and techniques you can use to train Siena to understand and respond to customers in a way that reflects their unique preferences, history, and behavior. 

Whether you're just starting or looking to optimize your existing system, these strategies will equip you with the tools to create more meaningful and effective customer interactions.

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How personalization transforms customer experience

People want to be recognized and treated as individuals rather than just another number. 

Personalized experiences fulfill this need by acknowledging unique preferences, behaviors, and past interactions. This creates a sense of importance and appreciation, significantly enhancing customers' emotional connection toward your brand. 

This psychological bond increases the likelihood of repeat purchases and encourages customers to advocate for your brand. You can implement personalization in your e-commerce store (Amazon made this very popular by showcasing its effectiveness), in marketing campaigns (by providing tailored offers based on customer behavior), or in customer service. 

When done well, each avenue increases customer loyalty and retention, impacting bottom-line business metrics like revenue. 

The statistics on how effective personalization is cannot be more precise: 

• Companies can generate as much as 40% more revenue from personalization. 
• 60% of consumers say they’ll become repeat customers after a personalized shopping experience. 
• Leaders in personalization have a 1.5x higher customer loyalty rate than their peers.

From the customer support perspective, you can usually measure the impact of any of these strategies using a few key metrics:

• Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) is based on a survey sent out after an interaction with a customer asking them to rate its quality.
• Net Promoter Score (NPS) which gauges customer loyalty by asking how likely they are to recommend your brand to others.
• Customer Retention is usually measured as a percentage over time.  
• Customer Lifetime Value (CLV or LTV) which is the total revenue a business can expect from a single customer throughout their entire relationship with the company. 

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The challenges of scaling personalization

If personalization is so effective, why aren’t all businesses doing it all the time?

The answer is simple: It’s very hard to do at scale. When you interact with thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of customers, finding ways to personalize their experience just takes insane effort. 

It’s hard to:

• Maintain consistency across multiple touchpoints. As customers interact with a brand through various channels—such as websites, social media, email, and customer support—they expect their experience to be seamless and personalized at every step.
• Handle how resource-intensive manual personalization is. Having human agents tailor their responses can quickly become unsustainable for businesses with large or rapidly growing customer bases. The sheer volume of data to process and the need for quick, accurate responses make it nearly impossible.
• Balance personalization with privacy concerns. While customers appreciate personalized experiences, they are also increasingly aware of their data privacy rights. Striking the right balance between using customer data to create personalized interactions and respecting their privacy is crucial.

The good news is that AI agents can help with these challenges—provided they’re implemented in the right way. 

Siena can be implemented across all channels, she’ll take the same amount of time to generate a response whether it counts as personalized or not (although she’ll always try to personalize), and she will still use the same data you give her access to. 

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Five ways to personalize your customer service with Siena 

Siena has three key features that enable you to personalize her interactions with your customers:

• Integrations. Using integrations with Shopify or Stripe means that Siena can access information about that specific customer and order. For example, if a customer has placed multiple orders through Shopify, Siena can reference past purchases, suggest complementary products, or update current orders.
• Personas to reflect the tone, language, and style that best aligns with your brand and resonates with specific customer segments. A brand that caters to a younger, tech-savvy audience might opt for a more casual, friendly persona, while a business targeting corporate clients may prefer a professional, formal tone. Because Personas include global instructions, this is a great place to start with personalization. 
• Automations are the second place you can input instructions to enable Siena to respond in a way tailored to each individual. Remember that Siena’s automations can be comprehensive and cover multiple scenarios in depth–you simply need to provide the instructions.

Many of the following examples can be used across multiple industries but you’ll have to adapt them for your business. It often helps to keep these tips in mind for great prompt engineering. These will already go a long way towards personalizing the responses and improving their accuracy. 

• Provide contextual information. Start with the assumption that Siena doesn’t know anything about your company, product, what you want to achieve, how you want to talk to customers, and what causes an issue. This information needs to be fed to Siena through the features above.  
• Be as clear and specific as possible. Ambiguous instructions will often lead to misunderstandings. AI models are typically very literal. If a customer says, “If you don’t fix this feature now, I’ll cancel my subscription,” AI models will classify the intent as a cancellation request. This is the level of precision your instructions need to hit.
• Incorporate fallback instructions. Try to anticipate potential misunderstandings or errors and provide Siena with instructions about how to handle those. For example, you can explain that there are three potential interpretations of a specific request and guide Siena to ask clarifying questions to understand the issue before guiding the customer on how to solve it. 

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Using AI Context to tailor responses

AI Context is one of the best tools available to you for personalization. Not only does it allow you to pull contextual information about that customer, it can make for a pretty versatile set of prompts since you can access a broad range of data. 

The standard integrations are listed under “Modules” on the right in the Siena interface. 

Here’s an example of the data type Siena can pull from Shopify. What’s great about these is that you can refer to any of these items in the automation instructions–for example, whether they’ve agreed to marketing emails, the Shopify line item, or any tags associated with the order.

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Note that Siena also allows you to create custom integrations with other APIs, so there’s a lot of flexibility in the data you can access and use. 

That’s a great starting point, but how can you use that context in practice? 

Here are a few examples of what this might look like if you’re trying to utilize previous purchase history as  a way to personalize an interaction: 

• Ask for feedback. When a repeat customer asks about their order status, you can instruct Siena to provide the order information–with a twist. She can also proactively ask for feedback about how they liked their previous purchase and their experience with it. 
• Provide care instructions. Say you run an e-commerce for handmade leather items. Again, if a repeat customer reaches out asking about the availability of a certain product, Siena can handle the direct interaction. You can then add an instruction to the automation to ask Siena to identify if the customer had previously purchased leather shoes and confirm that they know how to increase their longevity. 
• Create a personal connection. These situations are highly variable and dependent on the specific products you sell. For example, maybe you sell gift boxes for birthdays or to celebrate Christmas. When a repeat customer reaches out with any standard queries they might have, you can instruct Siena to ask about the reaction to the gift or reference it in the response. 

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Adapting its communication style

Hitting the right tone is one of the biggest challenges in customer service. 

While 65% of customers say a more casual tone is preferable in general, 78% say that being casual while denying a request often reduces customer satisfaction. Adjusting the tone based on the situation is foundational in creating a good experience–and is also a way to tailor the interaction to that user. 

Siena is already programmed to adapt her communication style based on the customer. But you can tweak and fine-tune this in your Persona instructions. 

Try out some of these types of instructions: 

• Adapt greetings based on the customer’s location. You can instruct Siena to adjust the greeting and closing phrases to match common expressions from the customer’s region. She can interpret this based on their question or you can provide the data using AI Context. For example, you can tell her to use “Cheers” for customers from the UK and “Have a great day” for customers from the USA. 
• Simplify the response based on the type of customer. For customers identified as tech-savvy (for example, because they previously purchased an advanced gadget), tell Siena to use the info you provide verbatim. For novice users, she can simplify the explanations and you can include a few more basic steps to support the customer with product setup in the automation. For example, maybe you sell professional DSLR cameras. Beginner photographers need a very different level of instruction. Siena could also ask about their experience with the product before providing either set of instructions. 
• Change the tone based on sentiment analysis. This is something that Siena should do automatically but you might want to have more granular instructions in contexts where it makes sense for your product. The instructions might look like this: “If the customer’s sentiment is positive, adopt a more enthusiastic and upbeat tone.”

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Tailoring upsell, cross-sell, or return responses

Another opportunity to use personalization is upselling or cross-selling products, or handling returns and downgrades.

When these are handled elegantly and without coercion, they can significantly improve customer satisfaction and retention. 

• Pausing instead of canceling subscriptions. In this automation, instruct Siena to tailor her response based on the customer’s reason for wanting to cancel their subscription (assuming they provide one). For example, if they want to cancel a food box subscription because they’ll be traveling for two months, Siena can help them pause the subscription. 
• Swapping a return with another item. A customer might reach out asking to return a product for a refund. Rather than immediately providing the refund, Siena could suggest swapping it for another product instead. You can provide relatively in-depth information and give Siena a list of suggestions for each product in your store, so she has a good range of options to work with. Then tell her to choose one or two relevant to that customer. 
• Offer a personalized discount based on the current subscription. When existing customers ask questions, Siena can provide discounts based on their purchased products. Again, the trick here is to provide a range of options. Note that you have a lot of space in the automation instructions to make sure she really understands your portfolio and which options make sense for which customers. This is what a tailored discount offer looks like: 

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Providing product or content recommendations

In the future, AI tools will probably read a customer’s interactions with a product or store and immediately provide personalized recommendations.

Until then, the onus is on you to provide the instructions based on the available information. Most of these examples are relevant to SaaS: 

• Provide training for new customers. For most SaaS products, there are usually a few very typical questions at the beginning of the customer journey–for example, questions about pricing or some of the most basic features. Each of these automations allows Siena to send out extra material to help them make the most of other high-value features they might not know about. For us at Siena, that might mean sending over the certification program for customers who ask about intent classification to go beyond answering the question. 
• Send webinar recommendations. Say you have 2-3 recurring questions people ask when they don’t know how to leverage your product in their business. Provide instructions for Siena here to explain how the feature they’re asking about works and still find ways to engage them further by sending over a webinar targeted at their industry. Siena can proactively ask about their business to identify that industry. 
• Pull detailed information about feature requests. This could be a simple prompt like, “When people send in a feature request, ask about their business goals and what they’re trying to achieve.” Product decisions often depend on the goal the customer is trying to achieve and less on the specific feature. Asking clarifying questions is a great way for Siena to tailor her responses. 
• Suggest similar products in response to pre-order requests. Another method to potentially cross-sell a product is to suggest similar products when customers send in pre-order requests. This is how that looks in the Playground: 

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Offering specific workarounds

Positive positioning is a very simple technique that has a massive impact on the perceived effort on the customer’s end.

In practice, it’s quite simple. Rather than being upfront and admitting that something isn’t possible, focusing on what you can do or provide for that customer is often a much better response.

This is a great technique to use in Siena as well. Workarounds provide solutions, even if they aren’t exactly what the customer is looking for when they contact you. But workarounds are always personalized because they only make sense in the question's broader context. 

• Provide alternative payment methods. Say a customer contacts you during a sales campaign because of a technical issue while trying to purchase your product. Tell Siena to always suggest alternative avenues to purchase (for example, using your website instead of the App Store or your Shopify store instead of Etsy), while asking for additional information about the error they’re seeing. 
• Suggest workarounds for feature requests. Feature requests are exceedingly common in SaaS, and it’s often tempting to respond in a fairly generic way that acknowledges the request and provides minimal information. Siena can help you personalize these responses at scale by providing some extra context or suggesting workarounds for all of your common feature requests. You simply need to give her information about your top feature requests and what the status of each one is. 

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Personalization is a combination of creativity and data

Personalization in customer service is ultimately about understanding the customer and their needs. AI tools like Siena can do this with customer data and by asking questions to get more information.

How effective these techniques are ultimately depends on how you adapt them to your business and how well they resonate with your customers. At Siena, we hope to provide you with all the tools you need—most of which is detailed information about your products and services. 

The result can be truly transformative. 

A mundane touchpoint or basic interaction can become a memorable experience that fosters long-term customer loyalty and satisfaction. 

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