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5 Customer Experience Strategies for Small Businesses

Posted: 29 Dec 2019 06:00 AM PST

Customer Experience (CX) plays a crucial role in your business's relationship with a customer. CX is all about how customers perceive you from the sum of all their interactions with your business. 

You need to play an active role in shaping these experiences to build a positive impression of your brand to the public. You can be proactive and manage your customers' perceptions by launching CX strategies. The aim of any CX strategy is to create positive experiences at every touchpoint. Touchpoints are places where the customer interacts with your brand. These touchpoints start from when a customer first notices your business. For example, the first time a customer sees an ad on social media is a touchpoint.

When they land on your website, there are several touchpoints there too. You can improve CX by making sure your website is user-friendly. It's essential to create a website that's easy to navigate. Make sure your site's speed and performance are good so it downloads quickly.

Your customer support team is another significant touchpoint. Offering great customer support often plays the greatest role in shaping CX. Improving customer experience benefits your business in many ways.

These things matter because, in the end, customer experience impacts your bottom line. When you create superior customer experiences, you differentiate yourself from your competitors. Your unique interactions with customers will result in greater loyalty. They are also going to be more willing to pay higher prices. Here are some effective customer experience strategies that will help your business. 

Co-create with customers

An effective way to boost customer experience is to co-create with them. LEGO is an example of a company that co-creates with its customers to great effect. LEGO has created LEGO Ideas, a site that's dedicated to allowing people to submit ideas that can turn into future products. Its Mindstorms initiative has also co-created robotics products with insights from its user-base. Today, the company has a thriving community of people who give feedback and share information. LEGO's engaged user-base makes a powerful impact on its branding and has a positive impression on people's minds. 

You can ask your customers to co-create with you by reaching out to them. You can do this by creating a forum or an online community using membership site software. By giving your customers a space to voice their ideas, you show you're listening to them and care about their opinion. You'll also build a strong relationship with them. 

Build actionable insight

You're only as good as what you know. Understanding your customers is the foundation of building great customer experience. You can learn more about your customers by using helpful online tools. You can add Analytics tools to your website to learn more about how people interact on your site. The time spent on a page, the clicks and the keywords people use to get to your site tells you a lot about your customers.

Additionally, a great CRM tool can transform your relationship with a customer. Use CRM to get a 360-degree view of your customer base. It will make it possible for everyone in your organization to contribute information about a customer. Sales personnel can provide critical information that customer support can later use to personalize their communication.

Using tools that report on customer behavior and trends will give you insights into actions you can take in the future. 

Another way is to get information is to ask your customers for feedback directly. You can build a survey form and ask customers to fill it after a significant interaction. Surveys and feedback requests will give you data that lets you know what's working and what isn't. Using such rich data, you'll have the knowledge needed to improve interactions with customers. 

Use content to boost CX

Today, your customers are conducting their own research online before making a purchase. People will very likely visit your website first to get information before deciding to work with you. It is vital you provide great content on your site that gives them value. 

Content plays a powerful role in boosting CX. It is the medium through which your business becomes "real" to your customer, especially when your interactions are largely online. There are many ways you can leverage content to manage CX.

You can create a blog to provide your customers with information regularly. Regular blog posts have a strong impact on your customers' purchasing decisions. Research shows that 60% of people buy a product after reading a blog post about the product. 

Adding video content and images makes content attractive and easy to read. By creating helpful posts that inform users and don't self-promote, you'll be able to connect with customers. You can build an email list and send a weekly newsletter with helpful blog posts. These newsletters are also useful for sending offers and informing people about events.

Build an emotional connection

Unlike more prominent brands, smaller businesses can connect at a more emotional level to customers. Emotions can create powerful memories that last, and you can leverage them to leave an impression. A great way to build an emotional connection is to personalize your interactions with customers. Your CRM software and automation tools will help you personalize email communication. You'll be able to make product recommendations based on purchase histories and activities. Such personalization makes people feel like you're interacting with them one-on-one. 

Another way to build an emotional response is to offer them a free product or a gift. You can do this by sending a discount coupon for something they have browsed. You can surprise and delight them by giving them offers they can use. 

By giving and communicating more personally, you'll be able to build an emotional connection. Creating experiences that are positively charged at different touchpoints will convince customers to buy from your brand. 

Involve your whole business in driving CX

It makes sense to involve only those employees to work with customers to drive CX. However, you won't be driving CX effectively unless you share your vision across your entire business.

This means you need to train staff who do back-end processes to support your customer experience strategies. Departments that don't directly deal with customers also play a role in shaping customer interactions.

For example, in a travel agency, the sales team usually works with customers directly. However, the department handling visa applications and other functions also impact customer satisfaction. By removing silos within your organization, you'll be able to make your entire organization more responsible for driving positive interactions. 

Training and motivating your employees to care about customers is essential to making your CX strategies work. 

Building great customer experiences are challenging. You need to put in considerable and consistent effort to see positive results. It's important to realize that great CX is not an overnight activity. Your aim is to build a positive impression on customers over several touchpoints over time. 

By gathering data and getting feedback, you'll be able to make better decisions to improve CX. This is why your CX strategies need to be long-term. After all, you're probably looking for client relationships that are long-term as well. Use the strategies given here to boost the customer experience. BY doing so, you'll be rewarded with customer loyalty and business growth. 

 
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