Customer Experience for SMEs

In the modern age, customer experience (CX) has become more and more important. As we moved into the digital world, face-to-face interactions have become less common, with some businesses becoming totally online. In 2018 just under half of organizations in a Gartner survey claimed they could track the financial benefits of CX projects, while over 80% of marketing leaders expect to compete mainly based on CX. Seamless applications and websites can make or break a brand; however, this can be challenging for small/medium-sized businesses. In this article, we will explore why CX is an important factor for SMEs to consider and what the main focus points can be with a smaller budget.

What is Customer Experience?

It is worth mentioning that “customer experience” should not be mistaken with “customer service”. Customer experience includes a lot of combined elements, but in essence, it really comes down to the perception the customer has of a company's brand. Although businesses should not have to solve every issue just to keep customers happy, CX should be used to help customers feel good about choosing to use and/or work with the company over its competitors.

PWC’s Future of CX report found that customers are willing to pay up to a 16% price premium on products and/or services, with an increased loyalty with a positive experience. On the flip side of that, the same study found that one in three consumers (32%) will walk away from a brand they love after just one bad experience. This makes investing in building a strong customer experience imperative to small businesses in today’s increasingly competitive business landscape.

What is a Customer Experience Strategy?

A great CX strategy is all about really listening to your customers. Being emotionally intelligent and reacting professionally to their issues, even if you don’t find the issue important or relevant. This can be achieved by collecting customer surveys and developing customer strategies based on those results. Implementing best practices, systems, and processes to address future issues.

Unlike large corporations that have the capital to provide the best possible customer experience, SMEs tend to overlook its importance or simply can’t compete with their limited resources. Unfortunately, failing to have a CX strategy in place doesn’t just inhibit growth, it can also have a negative impact on a brand.

A positive CX strategy improves customer satisfaction, customer retention, builds brand advocates, and increases cross-selling/up-selling. According to a survey by the State of Small Business, 43% of participants considered improving existing customer experience and retention as the strategy to adopt if you want to improve revenue growth.

Factoring in Customer Experience Design

Unlike advertising campaigns, CX is designed to deliver exceptional end-to-end experience throughout a customer’s journey from check-in experience through to customer service, ad campaigns, and even how a store or office smells, looks, and sounds.

CX design is often mistaken for User Experience (UX) design simply because they both deal with product or service interaction. However, UX design primarily deals with individual products or services, while the CX design adopts a broader and commercial view. This approach helps businesses to develop empathy and purpose in everything they do. A report by The Good indicated that 86% of consumers will spend more on companies deemed to have excellent customer service. With that in mind, possible CX activities might include:

Creating support channels (live chat) to make it easier for customers to get the answers they need

Increasing the volume and accessibility of helpful information on a company website by building out blog content, FAQs, or knowledge-based articles

For product-based/eCommerce businesses, minimizing friction in the checkout process by removing unnecessary steps or condensing form fields

Building policies around the speed of response with questions and/or issues and positive communication/active listening when interacting with customers (such as instant video conferencing availability)

One of the biggest benefits of a CX design is that it can help to better map a customer’s journey. Customer journey mapping gives a detailed timeline of how customers interact with a brand at various touchpoints, simultaneously describing their motivations, emotions and even giving context.

These customer insights help to identify gaps in CX design and provide the ability to measure customers’ loyalty and commitment towards a brand, which is important in developing a better customer journey blueprint.

The Importance of Employees in Customer Experience

Every employee plays an integral part in implementing a company’s customer experience strategy. Whether that be interacting with customers on a daily basis or designing and developing product features.

A solid CX design helps when hiring customer-centric individuals as well as setting a precedent on the customer experience. It also allows you to align your resources accordingly for purposes of training.

Sometimes, employee conduct is not obviously measured by good or bad feedback, subtle signals can indicate challenges as well. For example, the number of interactions required to resolve a customer’s issue can indicate an employee is offering perfunctory service, rather than proactively anticipating a customer’s needs in a way that’s truly valuable. Offering a friendly and helpful service is one of the most cost-effective ways to improve a small company's customer experience.

Less is Sometimes More

It may be tempting to make dozens of CX changes all at once, however, adopting a more analytical approach could produce better results long term. It will ultimately boil down to which improvements will have the greatest impact on a business.

Making changes to a limited number of variables also helps to determine whether or not certain actions are having a positive effect, whilst making smarter use of the smaller number of resources available to an SME.

Many factors can contribute to the overall perception of a company, including but not limited to, the quality of a product, the cleanliness of a store, or the ease of navigating on a website. Making sure every step of a customer’s journey is easy and enjoyable will create positive perceptions and make it more likely for customers to become regular users and recommend to their friends/family.

Why not be proactive and take it a step further and partner with a qualified staffing agency like us, to help you with your CX strategy. At Savant Technology Recruitment, we pride ourselves on our consultative approach towards the current marketplace.

Savant Technology offers a range of recruitment and search services across Salesforce, Cloud, Transformation & Change, Analytics & Data, Security & Architecture, Development & Testing, and Infrastructure & Operations.

For more information please visit www.savantrecruitment.com or contact the technology team directly at technology@savantrecruitment.com

Please do not hesitate to get in contact for a consultative discussion on how we can help you recruit top talent.

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