In today’s competitive market, personalised customer service is what sets companies apart. With customer behaviour continuously changing, businesses must strive for seamless customer experiences to gain consumer attention and loyalty – and for small businesses, this holiday season may be their biggest test yet.
What can small businesses do to ensure they are focusing their efforts on the areas that their customers find most valuable?
Recognising the opportunity for small businesses
There’s a great opportunity for small businesses to double down on what’s working and understand what ultimately drives customer retention and growth. Zendesk’s CX Accelerator 2022 Report even shows that CX ‘laggards’ are becoming leaders.
Organisations that are considered ‘starters’ and emergers’ are showing the biggest movement in their CX journey. ‘Risers’ are also making headway, with 88 per cent of Australian businesses adding more customers from competitors than they lost.
Part of this is because relatively small operations can respond with greater flexibility and develop deeper personal relationships with repeat customers. So, with the right tools and technology, the right data can be analysed at scale both accurately and with speed.
Empower with technology
The pandemic impacted sales and made it hard for businesses to hire and keep top employees. Many are still having trouble finding and retaining candidates, negatively impacting productivity and SME’s bottom line.
This is where technology can be an invaluable tool for boosting the capacity of your team. Investing in the right tech stack can help SMEs save time while still providing the excellent service customers expect, and one way to do that is through AI-powered technology to streamline workflows and alleviate the workload of customer service agents. Chatbots can triage queries to identify trends, answer common questions, cut down on repetitive tasks, and answer simple requests, like checking on order status, and especially when they need help outside of normal business hours.
As AI grows in sophistication, it is also becoming more accessible to businesses of all sizes. Gone are the days where implementing AI requires specialised developer skills and deep pockets. There are companies, like Zendesk, democratising AI for all by providing AI-powered solutions that work out of the box, making such technologies more accessible to smaller businesses and startups.
You can’t improve what you don’t measure
Investing in teams goes beyond just equipping them with the right tools. There are also streamlining workflows, training agents, continuously monitoring CX performance to identify areas of improvement.
It’s no longer enough to keep a spreadsheet with customer orders and pricing. When you can dive into your data, you’ll find insights you might otherwise have missed. Using integrated dashboards with advanced analytics, you’ll see consumer behaviours that impact your inventory and support channels, and uncover trends that allow you to respond quickly to changes in your market.
Part of this is understanding how your business can improve and continue to monitor success. After all, how can business leaders understand and enhance how they engage with customers at every point of the buying journey, if they don’t monitor it?
CX software provides powerful, built-in reports that help you to view and analyse key information about every customer interaction, and leverage tools tailored to your unique needs. And these insights should be shared across the business as it can contain vital feedback on products, user experience and marketing campaigns.
Doing more with less is a mantra for small-business owners, and it has become even more true over the past few years. When the right technology is married with the right processes and workflows, small businesses can deliver more personalised experiences that deepen brand loyalty. Together, with embedding CX into growth plans, small businesses can make a big difference to their bottom line while ensuring the retention of their customers for the long haul.
