Customer experience: 8 tips for optimizing CX at your business

Customer experience, or CX, is a major catchword for small businesses this year, largely because it’s so crucial to competing in today’s business environment.

The idea isn’t really new: It refers to businesses’ efforts to enhance interactions with customers so they keep coming back for more. But these days the concept has expanded to encompass all online and offline elements of business operations, such that every function is highly strategized toward making customer touch points efficient and enjoyable. In one U.S. survey, CX was named by both B2C and B2B marketers as the top way to differentiate a business.

“Meeting customer expectations in the new decade means shifting from being ‘customer focused’ to ‘customer committed,’” explain the authors of a Walker study. “This deliberate transformation requires fundamental change in how B2B companies think, act and collaborate.”

With all that in mind, here are a few ways small businesses can work to create superior CX.

• Overtrain employees: Don’t assume your workers understand the principles of excellent customer service. Impart to all the importance of going the extra mile to be friendly and helpful.

• Automate where needed: Look for ways technology can make your processes more efficient; for example, chatbots can help guide your website visitors to save everyone time.

• Seek constant feedback: Continually survey customers to better understand what they do and don’t like about your business, products and processes.

• Optimize content marketing: To drive more customers to your website and build trust, offer customers free, well-written content that’s entertaining, informative, solves a problem or provides something else of value.

• Work your social media: Post valuable content on a regular basis to foster credibility. Treat social media presences as two-way streets that foster engagement.

• Stay mobile-optimized: Avoid annoying tech-savvy customers by ensuring you’re ultra-easy to engage with via mobile.

• Design your website strategically: Streamlining your site for ease of customer use is a category of CX known as user experience or UX. You’ll ward off user frustration if you streamline your site so it’s attractive, uncluttered, fast to load, easy to navigate, responsive, free of unusable links and very selective in its use of intrusive ads. All forms should be easy to complete, and online purchases should be lightning fast and super transparent.

• Evaluate data: Use today’s cutting-edge data-gathering tools to continually learn as much as you can about your audiences, then craft business strategy accordingly.

Custom Toll Free can contribute to better customer experiences by providing easy-to-remember phone numbers that enable customers to reach you easier.  Why wouldn’t you make it easy for people to call your business?   Call us to find out more at 1-800-CUSTOMIZE.