Summary: In today’s podcast episode, Stephen Halasnik and Ray McKenzie discuss how you can grow and expand your business by maintaining a positive customer experience. There is no doubt that having effective customer management is a crucial part of ensuring your customers come back over and over again. Furthermore, it is important to relay a superior customer experience at your company. Having an average customer experience should be the bare minimum for any business. However, being able to go above and beyond to help your customers is going to increase profitability, and pay dividends. Depending on what your customer’s experience is can truly make or break the future relationship with your customer, so it is important to get it right the first time around.

Word of Mouth Referrals Can Increase Revenue

​When you focus on your customer satisfaction and having a better customer experience, you are going to do many things in this process. The first benefit that comes from focusing on customer experience is customer retention which is going to be a product of the way you treat customers. What else can this do for your company? Having returning customers is also going to churn the wheel of increasing word-of-mouth referrals, which in turn will create revenue growth.

When a company is able to create customer loyalty by having better customer service, they are also able to help a company find new customers through positive references. By using existing customers, you can help lower the cost of expenses for your company’s marketers. Finding new customers can be costly with all the different marketing methods, and paid marketing efforts can add up quickly. Therefore, by having a great customer experience through service, you are actually creating a lifetime value of benefits. Word-of-mouth referrals are not a “one and done” situation, and typically end up with building a customer relationship. Building customer relationships through referrals is personal and is likely to ensure your customers will return.

Having a Positive Customer Experience Gives a Competitive Advantage

It is crucial that your company has a product or multiple products that are able to help satisfy the needs of your customers. In addition, your product should be able to solve the challenge(s) that your customers are facing.

In saying this, you need to analyze your company and products in relation to your competition. Ask yourself “what can my products do better than my main competitors?” If you are struggling to answer this question and can’t pinpoint a differentiator, consider analyzing what your customer experience looks like. If your business is in a highly competitive industry, you are going to need to have top-notch quality, in addition to the best customer experience possible. In order to really grow your revenue with customer experience, it is key that your product quality meets your customer service quality, and vice versa. No matter what the pricing is for your product, you have to ensure the right customer experience to match it.

The most successful companies are those that focus on aspects other than their product. Companies that focus on customer interactions and customer relationships are more likely to drive revenue upwards. Building customer relationships doesn’t happen overnight. Being able to nurture leads and current customers is a process that begins with positive customer engagement but doesn’t end after the first call. Be able to analyze the customer’s needs and see how the company can work together and solve their challenges.

Building Customer Relationships

The dynamic of a customer and company relationship has many layers to it. As a business, you must know how you can positively impact a customer’s journey/ experience. This includes listening to their needs, having a follow-up, and always keeping your clients up to date on the direction you are moving in.

In addition to direct conversations with customers, marketing strategies play a huge role in kicking off the relationship with the customer. Whether it is social media, email marketing, or content marketing, these all can be used to empower your potential customers and promote a digital transformation for your company. Whether your business is a startup or has been around for a while, having effective marketing techniques and knowing how to maximize them will improve customer experience. A major tip to keep in mind here is to never come across as pushy, and always seem as genuine as possible. For example, try sending out personal emails or messages on LinkedIn instead of mass emails. Mass marketing emails can actually hurt your customer relationship by seeming impersonal.

Listening to customer feedback and providing customer support when needed is crucial. For example, pick up the phone and call your clients with updates before they have to contact you with questions. Also, let them talk and express their feelings to you about how they feel things are going. People love to talk about themselves, so let them do this. At the same time, take a genuine approach to how you communicate with them. Let them know you genuinely want to help solve their issue. Be able to listen to your customer’s worries or concerns as if you are a salesperson and their friend at the same time.

Bottom Line for Increasing Revenue Growth

In order to truly grow revenue using customer experience, it needs to become a company culture. It can’t simply be a few people out of a whole company who go above and beyond as salespeople. It truly needs to become the forefront of your business culture. Being a customer-centric culture is going to help improve NPS (net performance scores). In summary, have the same customer treatment and genuine care for your customers behind closed doors too. Lastly, after you are able to work on your company’s culture, you can measure your efforts through customer experience metrics.

Again, building a company that has a great quality product paired with customer satisfaction can take some real time, but is always worth the hard work. Once you are able to complete this process, you can use your business analytics and see your strengths and weaknesses. Having a positive customer experience is something that no other business can take away from you, and that is why it is so unique and important.

About the Guest Ray McKenzie, Starting Point & Red Beach Advisors

Ray is the Founder and CEO of StartingPoint and is the Founder and Managing Director of Red Beach Advisors. Ray has held various senior executive positions with companies such as Verisign, Neustar, State Farm Insurance, TeleSign, and UltraDNS and has served in an advisory role for several start-up companies in Silicon Valley, Los Angeles, and Washington, DC. Ray McKenzie completed his studies in Management Information Systems from San Diego State University in 2001 and is a certified AWS Cloud Practitioner (CLF). Ray is also a certified Lean Six Sigma sensei (CLSSS) practitioner from Villanova University and is a Certified ScrumMaster (CSM) from Scrum Alliance.

About The Host Stephen Halasnik, Financing Solutions

Stephen Halasnik is the host of the popular Entrepreneur MBA Podcast. The Entrepreneur MBA podcast’s purpose is to help small businesses get over the $10 million per year in revenue mark. Mr. Halasnik is the Co-founder and Managing Partner of Financing Solutions. Financing Solutions is a leading provider of Lines of Credit to small businesses and nonprofits

Mr. Halasnik is a graduate of Rutgers University and has an Executive Masters from the MIT Birthing of Giants Entrepreneurship program. Mr. Halasnik has started and built 6 companies over 25+ years with 2 of those businesses making the Inc 500/5000 fastest-growing list. Mr. Halasnik is a best-selling Amazon author on business and regularly tweets about his ideas about growing a business. You can also find Mr. Halasnik on youtube talking about Entrepreneurship.

Mr. Halasnik loves small businesses. He lives in New Jersey with his best friend, and his wife Gina. Mr. Halasnik’s number one purpose is raising his two boys, Michael and Maxwell, to be good men.

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 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.

Note: Financing Solutions donates 10% of its profits to various nonprofit charities