Improving the experience of your customers should be a top priority for small businesses of all kinds. That’s because customer experience is already a top priority for—you guessed it—your customers. Unsurprisingly, it turns out that people are much more likely to make a purchase from or remain loyal to a brand that treats them well. As such, more than 60% of companies polled by Deloitte say they see customer experience as a significant competitive differentiator. However, customer experience is about much more than simply being polite over the phone or at the checkout counter. New technology provides many opportunities for small businesses to become creative when looking for ways to improve their customer experience.
What are the Keys to Customer Experience?
Customer experience can be broken down into several different areas. Learn to nail each of these, and you will be able to create satisfying experiences for your customers consistently.
- Engagement: customers feel that their attention is valuable—and they’re right. Learn how to hold it and you’ll keep their interest focused on your products and services.
- Satisfaction: customers want to feel that their concerns are being heard and that the companies they give their money to are working hard to provide for their needs.
- Retention: you don’t just want to provide someone with a compelling reason to buy from you once. Create a lasting relationship with your customers and you can ensure that they come back to you whenever they need help with the problems your products and services solve in the future.
The Best Tools for Satisfying Each Key Area of Customer Experience
Specific technology can help you excel in all of the areas listed above. Take note of the following, and work them into the way your company approaches customer experience:
- Multi-channel marketing: increasing the number of ways you reach your target audiences will drive up engagement significantly. This also increases retention—according to Aberdeen Group Inc., companies with strong multi-channel marketing engagement strategies keep 89% of their customers on average, whereas companies with weak ones only manage to retain an average of 33%. Ensure that your brand has a strong social media presence, as well as an up-to-date website and compelling conventional ad campaigns.
- Invest in mobile technology to increase customer satisfaction. More people use smartphones to access the internet than they do desktops or laptops, so it’s critical that their experience is a good one when they do. A mobile presence also helps protect you from losing engagement levels. In fact, 52% of customers say they are less likely to engage with a brand if their mobile experience with it is a poor one.
- Consider using chatbots on your website and on applicable platforms such as Facebook Messenger. Chatbots are able to make sure that all of your customers can have their concerns addressed in some form, no matter when they reach out to you.
Financing New Technology to Improve Customer Experience
Maintaining an active social media presence need not be expensive, but creating a new website or mobile app can be. If you want to unlock the power that these customer experience strategies can bring you, make sure you are able to pay for the work required. Consider short-term working capital loans that can be paid off relatively quickly. Such loans are ideal for implementing initiatives that will improve customer experience and increase sales.
Improving customer experience can transform your business and help you find the success you deserve. Pay close attention to the strategies listed above so that you can make the most of them in the future,
Marcela De Vivo is an International Corporate Speaker for SEMrush, a Serial Entrepreneur, and Founder of Gryffin, a customizable productivity platform where teams can create a collaborative environment to work smarter, not harder. An industry veteran with nearly 20 years of digital marketing experience, Marcela is a dynamic speaker who attends industry events around the world to speak about SEO, data-driven marketing strategies, omnichannel workflow optimization, and the evolution of digital.
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