Refining Your Craft: 3 Ways You Can Provide a Better Customer Experience

October 4, 2019

Customers who have positive, satisfying experiences reward companies with referrals and repeat business. Small-business owners sometimes fail to do everything they can to ensure their own customers’ experiences are as smooth and enjoyable as possible.

Fortunately, there are some simple, proven ways to improve customer experiences and keep raising the bar higher as time goes on. Business owners who take customer experience seriously will always enjoy plenty of associated benefits.

People who own and run smaller companies sometimes feel as if there was not a lot they could personally do to cultivate richer, more rewarding experiences for their customers. Actually, though, being so personally involved with the operation of a business can make it much easier to achieve such goals.

The first and most important step will always be to get your business connected appropriately, in order to ensure that feedback can flow freely. That will allow a business owner or manager to keep a close eye on the experiences that real customers are actually having.

Once the right types of channels have been opened up, it will then be possible to start making progress toward higher-quality customer experiences. Large companies often commission or participate in surveys, but smaller ones can just as well obtain the required information elsewhere.

Given that customer experience is set to become the number-one brand differentiator, holding back will never be wise or helpful. Fortunately, businesses of all kinds and sizes can refine and enhance the experiences of their own customers by:

Getting to know them better.
Opening up new lines of communication with customers is always a positive step. Actually using those avenues to learn more about what customers are experiencing, though, is equally important. Whether when taking old-fashioned phone calls or engaging on social media, being inquisitive about customers’ experiences will always be enlightening. Passionate small-business owners and other entrepreneurs are often especially well-equipped to engage in revealing and natural dialogue with customers. While it can take some time and effort to learn about customers’ experiences, the information that results will provide a foundation for future efforts to build on.
Developing a comprehensive customer experience strategy.
Once data about customer experience has started to flow, certain specific responses will suggest themselves naturally and obviously. It will always be useful to look beyond these clearest of opportunities and to think about the larger picture. When a customer reports having a particular problem, resolving that particular issue and dealing with the conditions that enabled it should be a priority. Still more important, though, will be to think about how a more general, encompassing strategy could rule out analogous difficulties in the future.
Keeping track of progress.
It is possible to become overly negative about customer experience, particularly for those who are naturally inclined to spot problems and solve them. Positivity ultimately needs to prevail to ensure that the right type of focus will be maintained over the long term, however. Highlighting how particular measures have led to sustainable, concrete improvements in customer experience will give rise to an especially appropriate perspective. Even a simple timeline that details how a company’s customer experience has evolved over the years can serve as a useful reference.

Simple strategies like these can be used by companies of any size to improve the experiences of their customers. Companies that do so will always benefit in ways that make running any type of business significantly easier.