Your customers are the cornerstone of your business growth, which is why you must prioritize your relationship with them. To drive sales and generate more revenue, you must continuously find ways to foster a great customer service experience. In other words, you don’t just reach out to your customers only when you want them to purchase your product. Instead, you should strive to build a long-lasting connection that promotes loyalty and prevents customer churn. In today’s podcast, Colin Shaw from Beyond Philosophy and Stephen Halasnik from Financing Solutions discuss how hidden customer experience drives growth.
Summary
How the Hidden Customer Experience Drives Growth With Colin Shaw
Good customer service experience is the pillar of every sustainable business growth. Every small business owner should aim to build a positive customer experience that promotes trust, loyalty that retains customers, and encourages brand advocacy. In today’s business world, customers have power as there are plenty of available options for them to make purchases. Consequently, you should find ways of making your customers happy by striving to create a great customer experience that will make them see reasons to patronize your business.
If your current customer service experience is below par, it’s time you redefine how you handle your clients because a happy customer is a loyal customer, which means a lot to your business. For example, a good customer relationship helps boost revenue as your customers will help advocate for your brand, product, and services. In other words, people who are loyal to your business will readily promote your business by letting other people know why they should buy from you instead of your competitors.
Read on to know why you should prioritize your relationship with your customers.
What Is Customer Service Experience?
Customer service experience is your customers’ overall impression of your company throughout the buyer’s journey. This experience can either take place online or in person. Notwithstanding the touchpoints, customer service experience plays a significant role in business branding and revenue generation.
An experience that satisfies customers would make them come to you again and even refer people to your brand. On the contrary, when customers feel that they’re poorly treated, they might walk away and leave critical feedback that will negatively affect your business. 
To ensure you secure a customer, build loyalty, promote regular purchases, and get word-of-mouth marketing from people, you must engender a customer service experience that resonates with people. In addition, retaining your customers over the long term is more cost-effective than acquiring new ones.
How Can Small Businesses Improve and Manage Customer Experience
To avoid customer churn and ensure they stick with your company, you must create a long-lasting impression that fosters healthy relationships. So how do you do this? You should start by developing a customer journey map, creating buyer personas, building a connection with your customers, and putting in place a feedback mechanism. In addition, you create helpful content and build a community.
Develop a customer journey map
A customer journey map is a diagrammatical representation of the overall interactions and processes your customer go through in engaging with your company. This can be a product, online experience, brick-and-mortar experience, or any combination.
This map helps you understand the path and touchpoints your customers take to purchase your product. A customer journey map is important because you can use it to forecast the path of future customers. Additionally, it can provide insightful information by making you know the best way to interact with potential customers and the outlets they use most.
Creating buyer persona
It’s essential you have a research-based profile that represents your target customer. In other words, having a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on market research about your existing customer will help you understand what they really want and how they make decisions.
The reason for creating a buyer persona is that it guides your activities of acquiring and serving your customers so that you can provide the ideal solution to their needs. In other words, it helps you to know where to focus effort when developing your product so that you will be able to attract valuable customers and retain them.
Build connection
Don’t just reach out to your customer when you want them to purchase your product; finds ways to always be in touch with them.
As a small business owner, it’s important you develop a close connection with your customer as this will dramatically improve your customer service experience and play to your advantage. You can build customer connections by offering special discounts for customer loyalty.
Have a feedback mechanism
By building a feedback loop, you will know when customers are dissatisfied with your product so that you can assuage their ill feelings and improve.
Customer feedback brings mutual benefits to your customer and company. First, your customer will feel valued and respected and is more like to become an advocate for your brand. On the other hand, you will want to improve your product to optimize customers’ satisfaction.
Create helpful content
Content creation is an effective means of engaging your target audience. By producing educative and insightful content, you can build trust and develop a relationship that will generate leads and improve conversions.
Quality and consistency will convince your customers about your level of expertise and knowledge about your business. Plus, it shows that your business is reliable and credible.
Final thought
Customer service management is critical in business growth. As a business owner, your primary goal should be how you can improve your customer experience by leveraging effective strategies and measuring outcomes. By analyzing customer satisfaction survey results, identifying the reason for churn out, and asking customers for product or feature requests, you can build a customer service experience that will dramatically impact the growth of your small business.
About Colin Shaw
LinkedIn has recognized Colin Shaw as one of the ‘World’s Top 150 Business Influencers’, where he has 291,000 followers. Shaw’s Customer Experience consulting company, Beyond Philosophy LLC, has been recognized by the Financial Times as ‘one of the leading management consultancies for the last four years. Shaw is the co-host of The Intuitive Customer podcast, rated in the top 5% of all podcasts by BuzzSprout.
About Financing Solutions
Financing Solutions provides an easy-to-setup unsecured business line of credit to small businesses. The small business financing product is a great cash backup plan that costs nothing to set up, nothing until used, and is inexpensive when needed. Financing Solutions is rated A+ by the Better Business Bureau and 5 stars by the BBB/Google Reviews.
Unlike a traditional business bank loan, our business credit line requires no collateral or personal guarantee (except in the cases of fraud) making it an excellent alternative business financing option. Small businesses often used their line of credit for short-term expenses, working capital, to make payroll, or for a business investment especially when business cash flow is temporarily down.
Get a free, no-obligation business line of credit quote by filling out our simple 2- minute business line of credit application here.
Remember: The time to set up a credit line is when you don’t need it.
