5 Practical Ways to Quickly Improve Your SMB's CX

Having been at the forefront of customer service teams for 20 years I’ve seen the whole spectrum of CX. I am always amazed by how complicated companies make the topic of CX, and the weird lengths they will go to so that they can stand out from the crowd.

No matter what industry you are in, who your customers are or what product you sell, there are some fundamental truths to delivering a great CX. Here are five you can focus on now:

Exceptional CX Stems from Exceptional EX

If your business relies on people to drive and deliver your CX, then you must pay attention to your employee experience (EX) as much as your CX. If your employees are happy, engaged and motivated, that will translate into them striving for excellent CX. On the other hand, a low or poor EX will often result in apathetic or disengaged customer service.

Audit your EX to ensure that your employees are well-trained, engaged, empowered by technology rather than encumbered by it, and that they have the autonomy and ability to make quick, CX-decisions when needed.

Takeaway: take the pulse of your EX as much as, if not more often than, your CX.

Understand Your Customer

One of the reasons I love working in CX is because people are fickle, diverse and challenging. This means that delivering a great CX is rarely a one-size fits all plan. You must understand who your customers are and what their expectations are from your business. Map your customer personas and journey, talk to customers, live their experience as objectively as possible and feed this information back into your processes and policies on a regular basis.

Takeaway: understand and constantly reassess what customers are expecting from you and build your CX around it.

Principles First, Processes Second

A common mistake businesses make is thinking that the key to delivering a great CX is buying a CRM or support desk tool, often in the form of a chatbot, and then pushing that out to customers. Often, this is counter-productive because the tools are not backed by CX-driven principles. The obsession with AI-driven tools is exacerbating this problem across the industry.

As an SMB, the principles you apply to delivering CX are exceptionally important and how you build a foundation of trust and loyalty amongst your customers. For example, a principle might be that you want to resolve every customer complaint within 48 hours. If you setup a complaints mailbox with convoluted routing mechanisms that is only occasionally looked at and doesn’t have a clear path to resolution once an email is received, your process is going to break your principle. Instead, setup a process that allows you to quickly capture and respond to complaints as they come in.

Takeaway: establish and write-down your driving CX principles and ensure all your processes empower their achievement.

Stop Sweating Small Stuff

I saw an anecdote recently about a company that wanted to cancel a long-standing software subscription. The subscription had auto-renewed for a year just a few days before they gave notice, but they were expecting that to be forgiven. Instead, the software vendor responded by saying that nope, you are now locked in for another year even though you no longer want to use the software. An executive at the buying company published this on LinkedIn, drawing negative press to the company enforcing the subscription.

Now, you might be sat there thinking that the software provider was well within its rights to enforce the subscription and it’s not their fault the buyer failed to abide by the terms of the contract. That’s true. However, what have they gained by enforcing this policy? An extra year subscription from a now very disgruntled and noisy customer.

If I was advising the software company on this, I’d tell them to use this as a chance to prove that they were CX-centric. Yes, you could enforce the contract, but instead tell the buyer that as they’re past the notice period required you should be charging for another year, but in this case you will charge 1-month pro-rata and refund the remaining 11 months as a gesture of goodwill. Most likely the buyer would happily accept this, and now you have gained a small amount of money back but retained the goodwill of a customer who may well refer others to you in the future.

Takeaway: don’t sacrifice your CX for small gains because over time the poor CX will mount up and quickly outweigh your perceived gain.

Reward Loyalty as Much as New Business

We all know what the loyalty penalty is. Everyone recognizes it, everyone accepts it, everyone hates it. But it doesn’t have to exist in your business. It is MUCH easier to get an existing happy customer to spend more money with you than it is to attract a new spender. It’s fine to have a discount for first-time spenders, I encourage that. But I also like to encourage repeat business, and you want your customers to buy several items from you in a short time so that they become repeat customers.

Extend your first buyer discount to repeat purchases in a set time window e.g., 10% off your first 4 orders, valid for two months. And then have discounts for loyal customers…’hey, you placed 10 orders with us in the past six months, to say thanks for being a great customer here is a 10% discount off your next one’.

Takeaway: avoid taking your loyal customers for granted. They are more valuable than new ones and their loyalty should be regularly rewarded.

Engage XCXC for support in implementing these and other CX-driving initiatives in your business to rapidly accelerate your business’ growth.