In the hyper-connected digital world, customer experience has become the top priority for businesses. The loyalty of customers no longer depends on the pricing or brand name, but rather on the experiences they receive. With the growing number of devices and online channels, maintaining a consistent customer experience is a challenge for small businesses.
While a study shows investing in customer experience can double business revenue in just 36 months, a majority of customers are now willing to pay more for a better experience. Irrespective of the nature or size of the business, focusing on customer experience has been proven to increase satisfaction, revenue, and retention while helping businesses retain a competitive advantage.
Providing good customer service also entails staying on top of the finances and maintaining healthy cash flow. Small businesses cannot afford costly lawsuits and claims that arise as a result of a professional error, omission, delay, or breach of contract. However, there is Professional liability insurance to help your business survive by covering the financial costs of defending against malpractice or negligence lawsuits for businesses and professionals such as lawyers, doctors, engineers, architects, IT consultants, or retailers.
Four ways to help your business provide good customer service
Here are some strategies to help provide a great experience to your customers:
Set customer service goals for all: Irrespective of their designation or role, every employee works to ensure customers are happy with the product or service. Establishing clear goals with respect to the customer experience is important. Creating and using metrics that can measure whether these goals were achieved helps clarify what the business expects in terms of customer service. Benchmarks such as Net Promoter Score (NPS) can help get insights into customer’s happiness.
Ensure the right tools are available: Customers expect businesses in the digital era to resolve multiple issues across various platforms. Disconnected systems, multiple applications or outdated user interfaces, slow websites, and so on can hamper customer experiences. To provide a consistently positive and seamless experience across platforms to your customers, it is crucial to ensure service agents have all the necessary tools required to address and prevent such problems.
Invest in customer service: Improving customer service can entail increased spending. While many business owners may consider the increased expenditure on customer service to be prohibitive, statistics show otherwise. A study shows poor customer service to be the reason behind businesses in the U.S. losing $62 billion annually; 51 percent of consumers do not return to a business after a single negative experience. Investing in customer service is, therefore, a priority for business owners.
Hire and manage talent: Regardless of the size of the business, employees play a central role in providing good customer service. Hiring the right people is even more important for small businesses with limited resources as a single mistake from one employee can have serious consequences. Equally important is customer service training that every employee should receive.
Good customer experience is about treating your customers right and creating a positive perception of your business. These perceptions, in turn, impact their memories, behaviors, and emotions that drive brand loyalty.
