A topic of debate in 2022 is how small businesses should navigate their market when they are faced with labour shortages, increasing interest rates and rising inflation. Although there is no definitive answer, I’ve learned that prioritising exceptional customer experience is essential no matter the market conditions.
However, customer experience is often treated as a secondary objective as far as revenue growth and brand building are concerned. Having a deep understanding of the impact that CX has on a customer’s relationship with a brand – especially in today’s digital age – is the bare minimum if you are looking to grow and scale.
So, here are my three focus areas for small businesses to prioritise when faced with limited manpower and budget resources:
1. Look through the customer lens
Small businesses should listen to the “voice of the customer” when making strategic decisions because happy customers drive better loyalty, return purchases, and referrals.
That means meeting your customers on the channels they want. And that sometimes means experiencing your brand the way your customers do. This may involve browsing through your website content and navigating the same service channels as your customers would.
This approach will give you a sense of how your touchpoints land with your customers. The bottom line of this exercise is to get acquainted with the customer journey and understand why they do what they do.
2. Look after your employees
There’s an old adage that goes along the lines of, “If you look after your employees, they’ll look after your customers”. My experience has proven to me that automating the tasks that humans tend to dislike using bots, machine learning and AI frees people up to focus on fixing the more interesting and rewarding issues for customers.
AI is no longer just accessible to large companies. With software now democratising AI, small businesses can reap the benefits of implementing bots and machine learning in their support for customer self-service.
3. Align CX with business resilience
With a solid CX strategy, businesses can successfully ride out short-term fluctuations and long-term market changes and emerge stronger. Customer acquisition will always cost more than customer retention, and so if businesses pay attention to boosting stickiness, customers will generate more revenue and profitability compared with chasing new customers – and, as a result, better business resilience.
Superior customer experience is the way to land loyal customers. At the same time, just one bad experience can cause a customer to cut all ties with a company and move to another. Focusing on improving your customer experience is critical to retaining a competitive stance and reap the many economic benefits that come from improved customer retention and loyalty.
4. It matters more than ever
Customer experience has always been important to a business. But it matters more now than it did before.
Until recently, customer-facing functions such as marketing, sales, and customer service worked under their own customer experience management mandates. Today, with lines between these functions blurring, particularly in smaller businesses where resources might are limited, no customer-facing function can afford to work in silos.
The new CX mandate demands a tightly unified ecosystem for managing customer expectations as they move through functions. By leveraging a platform that offers a 360-view of a customer’s journey, mapped along with relevant transactional data to help paint a clear picture of a customer context and service their needs best, small businesses will always know the context in which their customer’s problems and solutions live.
