If you’re looking for a straightforward way to easily implement a surefire strategy to boost your small business customer experience (CX). You’ve come to the right place.
We’re keeping it straightforward, effective and looking for immediate results for your business. Improving your business’s CX does not have to cost you buckets of money. You don’t need to get hyper-technological from the get-go. And it’s not extremely complicated.
When aiming to enhance your small business customer experience You might be inclined to starting off by doing things like a CX gap analysis, some UX design changes, get software for omni channel experience management, try to build out a CX centric culture or optimize for mobile device use.
Which by the way, are all great ways to enhance your CX. But, it’s not where to start out if you haven’t got the basics down.
So, we’re going back to basics. Keep it simple, effective and actionable.
Before you go max out your small business credit line with new tech and gadgets. Do this instead.
But first…
What is CX (Customer Experience) and why is it so important for your business?
CX is your customers’ perception of their experience as they interact with your business. By emphasizing on perception means we understand that it’s the customer’s personal view and opinion of their experience in interacting with you.
CX Considers all touchpoints throughout your buyers’ journey or sales funnel. From your marketing, to visiting your website, to buying a product, to reading your emails, your blog, and interacting with customer service. The list goes on and on.
Everything you do impacts your customer's perception of doing business with you. They subconsciously ask themselves things like; Is it easy? is it pleasurable? are you really providing a solution to my problems? – basically, your customers’ will always ask themselves “what’s-in-it-for-me”.
If perception is so crucial to their experience, we should really start by knowing who we are talking to. Why we are talking to him? And ask, where does she interact with us?
So how do we change or even guide this perception of doing business with us? Easy- We go back to the root of our business. The Audience.
- We understand our buyer persona. We go deep past the basic demographics and get deep into their psyche using empathy-based profiling.
- We map out all touchpoints in our sales funnel to find the most important places they interact and engage with us… we’re looking for the moolah.
- Talk to them and only them. After completing the steps above, you know who you want to talk to and why. Personalize all your messaging, design and interaction for that specific person. It’s easier to sell to one specific persona than a crowd of everyone that’s in your demographic.
Follow these steps to increase new sales and sell more to your existing clientele. Compel the right people to take action. Retain, upsell, cross-sell by focusing on conveying the right benefits to their desire.
boost your customers’ experience in 3 straightforward steps.
Step 1. Understand your buyer persona using empathy
Focus on this main point. You are not talking to everyone. The more specific you are with whom you are selling to, the easier it is for you to sell them your stuff. You’ll get insights into their specific desires, precise motivations, where they get their info, how they want to buy and so on. You should know your ideal customer better than they know themselves.
Use empathy to get started in creating your buyer persona. No, not the kind of empathy where you feel sorry for someone when they pinch their finger in the door.
Start by using cognitive empathy. Which is also known as perspective-taking. Basically, you see and understand their worldview form their perspective. Even though you may or may not agree on how they see things. It’s all about awareness and understanding the “why” a person does this or the other. Why she thinks that way or why he believes a certain thing. It’s the form of empathy that negotiators, lawyers and managers use to craft compelling arguments to get desired outcomes.
Start off by creating an in-depth profile of your ideal or best customer. Ask yourself, “who is this person who’ll buy all my stuff and rave about my business?” Go into detail on demographic info, go into motivations, psychographics, desires, what they think, what they do, even their values and beliefs. Just remember to make it specific to your business, it’s easy to get carried away with useless details.
Compile this info in a word document or your wall or wherever. But make it visible. Don’t just stick it in a drawer or lost file. That would be useless.
If you don’t know where to get started. Perform a quick search for buyer persona templates on Google.
Just do it. Commit to getting to know your best customer. Inside and out.
Step 2. Map out all touchpoints for your buyer persona
Once you have created a solid profile on your ideal customer. It’s time to map out the entire journey of where your customer comes into contact with your business and the path he takes from awareness, to eventually, buying and beyond.
Do this in the simplest way. Use a whiteboard, a document or even better yet sticky notes on the wall. It’s for you to get a clear visual of where your client interacts and engages with you. Find out which steps are crucial and where you can optimize and improve.
The important thing is to find out how they go through your sales funnel. Ask yourself- what actions are they currently taking to get to the buy, subscribe or download button?
Where do they interact, engage or touch your brand?
- Some touchpoints include social media, ads, website, email or blog.
- Interactions they have with you are in the form of sales reps, customer service, messaging and sharing on social media.
- Engagement comes in the form of free trials, signing up to your blog, downloading an eBook, contacting you through your form etc.
By mapping out the touchpoints and evaluating its relevance to your buyer persona, you can come up with simple ways to immediately improve your CX. Ultimately making you more sales. Guaranteed.
Use your newly created buyer persona and insights you got form mapping out the touchpoints to optimize the sales funnel and guide your ideal customer to take action through personalization.
Step 3. Talk to them and them only – Personalize your content
By now you know WHO you are talking to and WHY. And what their journey to the Buy Button should look like.
Personalize your content to make sure that you are talking to them. Them and only them. Focus on what that one ideal customer needs to hear. Relate to him, know her and help her buy form you. Focus on pain points, your solution to specific problems.
You see, you can only truly fulfill a need for someone else when you fully understand that person by being empathetic towards them.
Tips on how to personalize your CX
- Identify the most important touch point. Where does most of your bacon come from? Then, set one goal to improve on that specific touchpoint with actionable tasks. Keep it simple.
- Have a clear goal for each touchpoint. If your goal is to get people to send a request for a quote via your site, then all your messaging must drive the buyer to take that action, everywhere.
- Talk to them in a casual way. The way they would talk. Connect with the emotions and benefits of doing busines with you. You don’t have to be sleezy or hyped-up. Just be genuine, sell yourself. Ditch all the jargon. Make it easy to understand. Connect with that one ideal client. Connect with that one person not everyone.
- Inject your own personality when writing to your audience. You have a unique voice, style and selling proposition. Flaunt it and match it to theirs
- Research, research and more research. Go on Google, ask your clients, your team, send out questionnaires, read job descriptions, go “stalking” on social media etc. Just find out who they really are and what they really want.
To wrap things up. Just get started. Get to know your ideal customer on a deeper level. Understand the journey they go on when interacting with you and take actionable steps to improve that journey for the sake of your customers experience and your wallet.
Author: Jean Paul Stahel
