How To Improve Customer Experience for Small Business Owners

How you treat your customers can be a huge game changer for small business owners. Creating a memorable, valuable and faultless customer experience (CX) can lead to more customer acquisition and loyalty. In this blog post, I’ll set out 3 practical ways you can upgrade your CX in a few simple steps. 

Focus on Reviews 

Social proof is fast becoming a priceless form of currency for SME’s. Having a website and social media page full of genuine and quality customer reviews can be a gold mine.  Here are 3 tips on how to approach reviews and What to do with them: 

1. Ask for reviews: It seems pretty obvious, but asking for customer reviews will dramatically increase the amount of responses. Try sending a follow up email a few days after a customer receives their product or service. You could also offer an incentive for leaving the review such as entry to a prize draw. 
2. Join a review platform: Review platforms are a great way to collect, manage and respond to customer feedback. Some of my favourites are Trustpilot for product based businesses and Tripadvisor for hospitality companies. 
3. Use the feedback:  Use customer feedback to make improvements to your products and services. Honestly, you can’t please everyone but look out for trends and commonalities within your reviews. 

Quality Control 

Quality control is all about having a set of standards and measures in place to ensure you provide the very best experience. Every process in your business should be standardised and documented as a Standard Operating Procedure (SOP). 

Here are some examples of business tasks which should have an SOP:

• Customers returning items 
• Packing and shipping items 
• Sending invoices 
• Complaint handling 
• Content publishing 

If you have a team, you can also improve quality by conducting quality checks once a month. This can be done by checking the work of your employees on a monthly basis. Record your findings in a standardised form noting down what went well and how the employee could improve.  

Training 

The Institute of Customer Service recently conducted research about CX. They found a top priority for U.K customers was having companies who employ friendly and knowledgeable staff. To achieve this, it’s important to have a training plan in place for your business. Even if you’re a solopreneur, you should create a personal development plan for yourself. 

Here are some free ways to incorporate training into your business:

• Blogs – Compile a list of industry specific blogs that can upskill you and your employees.  
• Podcasts – Create a list of personal development blogs which can add value to your staff. 
• YouTube Videos – Find a few channels to motivate your team to bring their best every day 

Here are some more ideas that require payment: 

• Books – Books are still an incredible way to learn. Try starting a company book club where the challenge is to read and discuss one book a month. 
• Audiobooks – These are great for learning on the go. Audiobooks can also form part of the book club to mix things up. 
• Courses – Courses are a great way to upskill your workforce. However, the average completion rate of online voluntary courses is between 5 – 15%. Opt for live courses that will engage your employees for the duration of the course.  

Here are five key topics your small business should incorporate into your training plan:

1. Professional communication 
2. Excellent customer service
3. Complaint handling 
4. Time Management 
5. Productivity 

The Experience Courses 
Here at The Experience Corporation we love all things personal development, customer experience and training. To see how we can help you with your training needs, head over to our course page here.