Whatever your small business does, if your product or service is popular, your business will grow – and potentially, quite quickly. While that’s an exciting proposition and deserved reward for all your hard work, when scaling your business there are various considerations with regards to your customer experience (CX).
With a growing business comes a growing customer base, and if the adjustment isn’t addressed properly, there can be challenges. When your small business is, well…small, it’s easier to provide unique, personal and memorable customer experiences. While it can be a challenge, a growing customer base doesn’t have to come at the expense of an inferior experience. Here are a few strategies to help you manage the transition.
Technology, a helping hand
When you have an influx of new leads or orders and not enough staff to handle them or products to deliver, you’ll have more to do and in a shorter time frame. It can be difficult to fulfil that demand, but that’s where automation can help. Having tools that can ease your load will prove invaluable while your company is scaling up.
After all, if you’re understaffed or don’t have enough product to fulfil the demand, you’ll find it more difficult to address the needs of your customer in a timely manner. When there is so much competition, if you’re slow to address their concerns, you run the risk of losing them to a competitor.
Engagement software such as chatbots which have predefined answers to routine questions and handle conversations even if you’re not around will help you deal with a huge volume of customer requests in a short time.
As your customer base grows, so too will the wealth of information you collect. So let a CRM (Customer Relationship Manager) system do a lot of the heavy lifting for you.
Think like your customers
Without customers, your business doesn’t exist. Understanding them and their needs on a deeper level helps to refine and shape your business accordingly. Visitor tracking and engagement software can help you understand where prospects spend time on your site, and how they navigate it. With this information, not only can you improve your site experience but also keep track of your high-priority pages – those that visitors land on often. See how much time users spend where and how they reach these pages. Then, with this information at hand, you can easily fine-tune your site layout to improve the customer’s journey.
A more holistic customer experience
Good customer service is about good communication and an effortless interaction between the customer and business. Great customer service, however, is about providing all the additional extras that help you stand out from your competitors. For example, customer education is an important part of improving customer experience. If people are unsure of something, they’ll need assistance figuring things out. If you aren’t able to help, you’ll find that you could lose them to a competitor quite quickly. Regular blogs on your product updates, videos, podcasts, webinars and testimonials are a great way of providing a wealth of information and educate your customers. Not only that, but it helps to share your vision and position you as an authority within your field.
As your small business scales up and your customer base grows, it’s an exciting challenge that could help safeguard your long-term success. It doesn’t mean you have to overhaul what made you popular in the first place, though. Instead, by retaining what made you appealing in the first place, and having the right systems in place you’ll be able to offer a genuinely positive customer experience no matter how much you grow.
