5 Pocket-Friendly Ways To Improve Customer Experience

Small businesses don’t need to break the bank to improve customer experience.

Visiting Macy’s in New York during the Christmas season is magical. The joy and warmth of Christmas flow in abundance.

Decorations and music are a-plenty and the sales on gift-worthy items do help. Customers feel special — they want to visit again, be it Christmas or not.

In summary, customer experience is the perception your customers create after they interact with your business.

It can be positive or negative and the affluence of either leads to some form of word of mouth.

A small enterprise does not need to go full throttle, such as Macy’s, to improve customer experience. They can start small and work their way up slowly.

5 Pocket-Friendly And Effective Ways To Improve Customer Experience

With the simple steps listed below, any business can improve customer experience while retaining the weight of their wallet.

1. Understand Who Your Customers Are And Target Them Efficiently

Businesses should first understand their buyers to improve customer experience.

Know their age, how often they visit, what they buy, what their interests are, what they like and dislike about your business.

All these questions can be answered by something as simple as an offline survey, or by analyzing your demographic using the Facebook Business Manager.

Both methods are effective and can give meaningful results.

This data can then be used to make crucial decisions about your customers. Businesses can put their core market’s favorite items on sale, for example, or remove a certain service that seems obsolete.

These decisions can lead to smarter investments and greater profits, all the while influencing your customers to interact more regularly with your products and services.

2. Customer Service Is The Fulcrum Of The Customer Experience Train

The importance of customer experience cannot be emphasized enough. It is impossible for customers to interact with your products and services in a vacuum.

They will have to interact with your employees and this is especially true for offline businesses.

Customer service happens before, during and after a sale- and Starbucks is phenomenal at this. The coffee giant’s staff knows the a to z of every product.

They also personalize every sale — small actions such as calling people by their names and conversing during the transaction — these strategies by Starbucks help improve customer experience.

If an order is incorrect, or there’s something wrong with it, the staff fixes it.

For small businesses, implementing a culture that prioritizes customer service is much easier and more pocket-friendly than for a Starbucks. The earlier you start, the stronger the culture.

Furthermore, having an online social media customer service presence can be phenomenal in helping improve customer service.

It not only becomes convenient for your customers with complaints, but it also lets your stakeholders interact with your business regularly.

3. Dig Back To The Grassroots

In B2C businesses, the management and executives don’t interact with customers on a daily basis, the staff and employees do.

These regular interactions and observations can lead to insights that even the customers might know or want to acknowledge.

It is always beneficial to gather ideas and data from your employees on the front line. This can be done in the following ways:

• Holding company-wide townhalls, if your numbers allow.
• Asking middle management to talk to their team about customers and possible customer feedback.
• Creating a culture in which employees are free to discuss something they feel is important with management.

All these methods are easily achievable and inexpensive. However, your employees’ contributions are absolutely free.

So, lend an ear to their insights, complaints, and ideas — they may prove invaluable in helping create assets that improve customer experience.

4. Employ Social Media & User Generated Content

Social media comes with the perk of providing publicity to just about everything.

It essentially lengthens your arms and lets you interact with stakeholders who can be on the other side of the globe, with ease.

It is efficient and can be used as far as your creativity allows.

• Feel like showing off the excellent review your customer shared on Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook.
• Create a makeshift video to show your customers how to assemble or use your product and upload it on YouTube.

Social media platforms are omnipresent and almost all internet-using individuals know how to navigate through them.

Moreover, with the help of user-generated content, you can let your audience improve the customer experience for themselves.

85% of Instagram users believe that user-generated content is better than brand stories. Businesses can use this to their advantage by asking their customers to put up a post with a hashtag if they liked their products.

You can also take the help of a local influencer who is interested in your product to spread some positive word-of-mouth.

These steps are almost all free and can help improve customer experience by creating a friendly image of your brand and its products or services to the masses.

5. Be Proactive And Practice Continuous Innovation

Stagnancy during good times can quickly become the Achilles’ heel of any business.

You may have created a positive environment for your customers, but where do you go from here?

The answer is in continuous innovation, which is essentially showing proactivity by making minute changes to your products and services repeatedly.

This can translate to trying out different product packaging, sampling an additional ingredient to your product, or even marginally changing how your employees interact with your customers.

By making continuous changes a business creates an environment for the customer that shows that it cares for their evolving needs and also helps in increasing sales.

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Explore more strategies on how to delight your customers at https://get.online