How Does Your Customer Experience Stand out from the crowd?

As an SME Business you may feel that you are doing your best with delivering outstanding customer experiences in your business but is there room for improvement?

In a recent study conducted by McKinsey and Company many businesses failed to see how improving the customer experience can create value. The research revealed that by improving the customer experience sales increased between 2-7% and profit 1-2%

What businesses wouldn’t like to grow sales revenue by 2-7%?

I will briefly touch on two ways you can improve your customer experience journey in your business through having a strong customer feedback process and a customer journey map.

1.??????Customer Feedback

2.??????Customer Journey Map

1. Many customer feedback initiatives don’t get what is needed in-order for the business to profit many times when businesses are collating feedback, they receive this at the end touchpoint the aftersales part of the process. In a recent Harvard Business Review with McKinsey and Company research conducted on the retrieval of customer feedback to be disjointed with the sales journey in that many businesses that conducted feedback did not have this broken down into the various touchpoints of the customer journey.

2. In order to analyze the customer experience there needs to be a clear customer journey map that is measured at each stage of the process by having each stage broken into segments such in your customer journey map you can focus on different phases depending on the key performance indicators in your business:

Phase 1- The Welcome phase- Brand Awareness/Introduction to Brand/Building rapport/First impressions/Body language/tone of voice

Phase 2- The Discovery phase- Recognizing when to approach visual buying signals/Asking open ended questions sales advisor 30% speaks customer speaks 70% the core to this is establishing needs versus wants with the consumer/active listening skills/coaching style questions asked when interacting with customer.

Phase 3- The Buying phase- recommendations made show and tell of products/features and benefits/complimentary products introduced to product being purchase increase average transaction spend/items per customer

Phase 4- The Aftersales phase- customer loyalty program/feedback/lasting impression/reviews

How to counteract this in your SME business is implementing tools and processes to support a more cohesive approach to this. For example, if the first interaction touchpoint a customer has with your business is when they walk into your store.

Now imagine those customers that don’t buy but browse and leave your store how can you improve on this?

By implementing feedback that measures the success or failure of this can be crucial in converting the next customer that enters your store to a buyer. One way you can do this is by having your team involved in this feedback process start by asking them to observe customers that enter the store and the conversations they are having with them ensure you give these frontline team members a structure to follow. This could be a simple 2-3 questions to answer getting this feedback at this stage changes can be made to potential new buyers.

Why should your Customer Experience Journey stand out from the crowd?

Customers' expectations have shifted they need a reason to return to a business although the online consumer has massively increased there is still a place for the bricks and mortar businesses this will be determined on smaller businesses focusing on the one area larger multinationals struggle to get right which is customer experience.?

?In a recent survey conducted during Covid 75% of consumers changed their buying habits and up to 40% of consumers switched brands. The study revealed that the future growth in businesses will be experience-led and customer-centered.?