Why are companies increasingly competing on customer experience? Think about how high the bar’s been raised by disruptive brands like Uber and Amazon—we’ve latched onto innovative concepts like on-demand transportation and same-day deliveries as though they’ve been around for decades, proving that customers aren’t averse to change when it results in greater convenience.

Every company dreams of amassing a huge fan base of intensely loyal customers, but true customer loyalty is hard to earn and doesn’t happen overnight. It takes time and dedication. Many companies struggle to answer the question: What exactly does real customer loyalty look like? And the next logical question is: How can a business build customer loyalty?

The steady rise of customer expectations is central to every conversation about customer service. The most successful companies are taking ongoing and proactive steps to meet those expectations, which can vary by industry and demographic, through thoughtful omnichannel support offerings, empathetic agents, and great analytics.

Most companies understand the importance of implementing omnichannel support—however, despite efforts to provide customers with a seamless experience, 85% of organizations still have fragmented channels. This is especially problematic for businesses since a cultural shift is underway, driven by millennials who have little desire to get support over the phone, instead preferring text or messaging channels.

As a company grows in size and complexity, so does the nature of its customers’ issues. As a result, modern enterprises need to constantly evaluate and update the tools, processes, and systems it uses to solve customer problems.

Creating more personalized and modernized customer experiences means first understanding the customer experience—that means bringing customer data together from a variety of different sources. It’s a great idea in theory, but it’s also a complicated one. Support professionals understand the need to bring all that data in, but the technical elements are often too costly and complicated to prioritize.

Since his days serving treats at Dairy Queen, to cashiering at Shopko—which, fun fact, is how he met his wife—to supporting Zendesk customers as a Tier 1 support agent, Brett Bowser is a customer-service natural. After more than three years answering customer queries as a front-line advocate, Brett is now a Community Engagement Specialist in Zendesk’s Madison, Wis. office, where he applies years of hands-on customer-service skills to a different kind of support experience.

Learn about some great news app to help improve and extend your Zendesk experience.

Every day, customers are comparing you to the best customer experiences they have, even if that’s Amazon and you’re a time-honored regional banking institution that has never shipped a book or a case of cereal in its 150-year history. Not fair but true all the same. It doesn’t matter if you’re good; you have to improve. No longer are most people willing to carve out time in their day for a trip to a brick-and-mortar trip just to do a simple transaction.

Personalized customer service, and a personalized customer experience, means that a business 1) knows its customers and their needs, and 2) is willing and able to provide them as efficiently as possible. This is sometimes called personalization at scale: where software solutions help provide the context necessary for assisting customers in need or pointing them efficiently to what they want.