For modern business owners, tracking their customer and related experiences is really crucial to stay a step ahead of the competition. As the market says, customer experience (CX) is the key driver of any businesses’ success. With technological advancements, the business domain is now gifted with social media analytics as-well-as tailored software that track customer experience across multiple channels. In this article, we will be discussing how your small business can utilize these customer experience analytics and drive home your business-critical customers.
What is customer experience?
Customer experience (CX) is the culmination of all the things that are done while the customers complete their journey with your product or services. It starts from them being a lead, it includes communication with them, understanding their core problems and matching your solution to their problems, educating them about your offering, making a price quote, including discount or other offers in that quote, and finalizing the deal.
A world-class customer experience (CX) helps businesses retain their customers and turn them into their brand promoters. In this section we will describe the need of collecting customer data and analyzing the customer experience.
Leveraging the social media channels
Utilising the social media channels in this modern era helps small businesses to interact with the customers and respond to their issues without losing precious time. Always remember, this modern era doesn’t give you much time to address customers’ queries as they have a list of your competitors they can easily go to.
There are various social media tools that can help business owners collect data of their customer interaction and analyse it to form a set of solutions. A dedicated team can always take lead in handling such tools and report to the manager regarding the customer experience to expedite the communication.
Leveraging and streamlining your customer contact points
Providing world class service to your customers is the crucial part of an enhanced customer experience. A customer support manager or support team member must be aware if the customer has interacted with your team on any other channel. Tracking your customer interaction and making it available at a centralised hub makes it easier for the support team to get to the root cause of the issue and come up with an effective solution.
Tracking the customer experience on your points of contact helps your team in creating a sense of understanding in the customer and allows your team to make the customer feel more confident. The customer will always appreciate if your team doesn’t make them repeat their issues or queries. It saves a lot of your time and allows you build a confident relationship with your customers.
You can streamline the communication happening on multiple customer touch points using various tools. We are talking about a CRM software that tracks and saves all your interactions that have occurred over calls, emails, chat support and even the DM’s of your social media channels.
Tracking, saving and analyzing these conversation will definitely help in responding to the customers queries. A CRM software, apart from tracking and saving the communications from multiple channels, also keeps a track of the customers’ purchase history and their post purchase service issues.
Adapting a CRM software will definitely give you an edge over your competition because you can provide a more personalised attention to all of your customers without the manual labour and missed bit of information.
The on-the-go customer experience
Being a small business owner, you must always be aware where your customers and leads generally turn-up. Today’s on-the-go generation is always relying on their smart devices – smartphones and tablets. Creating a mobile presence for your business helps you improve your businesses’ branding, automate functions that your customers are looking for and allows you to stay in touch with them in real-time.
Today’s CRM vendors have made vast advancements in the mobile technology fields and have brought major features on their apps. The all-time accessibility, the synchronization of information, regarding deals, contacts and leads, the automation of calls, meetings, emails and text messages, all these features have brought the customers closer to the businesses.
It is high time businesses, especially small businesses utilise these features and make the most out of it. The in-app purchases facility, the regular push notifications and the privacy conditions have also helped the businesses to keep their customers well-informed regarding any major product-related updates; adding to the overall customer experience.
Answering the customer calls every time
As far as mitigating customers’ queries are concerned, they will use every tool available with them to get in touch with you. If they are not able to reach out to you using online tools, they will try the good old ways; calls.
Try to have a dedicated phone number where customers can reach out to your businesses with their queries. The major part of this service is to be available at all the time for answering the calls.
Major CRM developers have come up with built-in calling features that allow your businesses to have their own dedicated business and personal numbers that can be distributed to your support team. Doing so will help them stay in touch with your clients at every hour of the day.
Businesses that have their teams spread across the globe can easily keep their customers happy and add to their customer experience by distributing these numbers to their respective support team members. The availability of a centralised hub will make the task of understanding the customers’ core issues and coming up with an apt solution easier and less cumbersome.
Leveraging the email automation technology
Email is the customer touch-point which allows your business to stay in regular touch with your existing customers, your leads and other contacts. Emails are also the communication tool that helps you keep track of customer service issues and nurture your leads by sending out attachments that help you teach them about your services and its offers at regular time interval.
Once your business reaches a certain level, managing email conversation and tracking them manually becomes really tough and time-consuming. You may think that by using the big names such as Gmail or Yahoo or Microsoft, you can save yourself from the manual task. We are not saying they are not good email service providers, we are saying that they will not help you with the automation part. Only a smart sales CRM tool can help you with the email automation part and can take the manual woes out of the entire email process as well as helps you in sales.
Data gathering and synchronization tips for SMBs
Let us help you create a customer journey map that will guide you to track and analyze the customer journey.
Below is the map that can be used by the small business owners for tracking their customer experience analytics.
Phases of customers experience analytics
The customer experience analytics for small business differs from enterprise-level customer experience analytics in many ways. The major difference is the type of data that SMBs collect on various stages of the customer journey.
For instance, we would recommend to collect the communication data your business is having with your customers over the phone using call tracking. Modern CRM vendors have features that help you collect this data and make wonderful insights from this data.
SMB owners also play around with survey forms on their website for collecting various data such as customers interaction on their website, the product or services they clicked on, or the prices they checked. This encompassed data helps businesses understand their customers opinions, attitudes and emotions while searching for or using your products or services.
Collecting such a data with the tools that derive statistical data from them is the next part and small business owners can easily rely on smart sales CRMs for the same.
CRM software pulls and maintains all your data, no matter how many sources you have. You only need to synchronize all these data sources once into the CRM. With its automation feature, the CRM software will keep collecting these data sets automatically. After you start collecting and maintaining the customer experience data inside the CRM, the next phase is analysis of this data.
The customer experience data analysis
Maintaining customer experience data is a laborious task. Data is collected in large volume, even if you are a small business. Let’s break down the steps of data analysis for you.
Analysis
Calculate and explore the data sets for trends
1. Framing the problem
Collecting and exploring data is of no use if you do not have a clearly stated problem that you, as a business, want to solve for your customers.
This section must include
purpose of the analysis
the outcome
how you are going to use this analysis
2. Building a competitive team
Yes, apps or tools will be helpful for you when the analysis of customer experience is done. However, you must have a dedicated team which can look over the data analysis process. A team of competitive data analysts will come in handy in this situation.
3. Developing a hypothesis
Using a scientific method, create a clear hypothesis of the methods for revealing the problem statement and the factors that will play their part in resolving the problem.
4. Selecting analytical methods
This part requires businesses to figure out the analytical methods that can be used for solving any particular problem that you have discovered while analyzing the customer experience data.
Having a data analyst or data specialist on your team will help you understand the complicated algorithms and get the results you are looking for with ease.
5. Perform analysis and use those results
Analytical tools within sales CRM today can help you crunch the data without worrying about delays.
Using the data insights
The myth is that big data is just for big companies, what small business owners must understand is that they are not left out of the big data category. Every phone call made, every deal finalized and every visitor that came to your website is part of your data cycle. Segmenting this into customer experience analytics is one of the part SMB owners must realize.
CRM systems of today’s generation come with most sophisticated data management and analytical tools, allowing you to segment and personalize the way you market your offering in front of the customers. Making your offering a daily part of their schedule is the part small business owners must focus on and with all the data collected, compiled, aggregated and understood, you can be assured that it can be a game changer for your business.
Modern customers are not concerned about how fancy your offerings are, fancy for them is an add-on to the service they will get while using your offering. They want a solution that can easily solve their daily problems and derive value for money. Tracking customer experience helps businesses focus their product marketing based on the customers interest, their purchasing patterns and their history with your business.
CRM are the best tools for your business as they easily integrate with your third-party customer experience tracking tools and crunch that CX data so that you can get worthy insights into their experience so far.
For instance.
Let’s presume that most of your customers find out about you via the social media posts of your previous customers, your brand promoters. Based on this, you can easily develop a strategy that will help you maximize the customer interaction on the social media platforms.
You can plan your Facebook, Twitter and Instagram ads, based on the most popular social media platform that is getting you more visibility with the target customers. Connect with the followers, tag them in your ne promotions, based on the posts they have liked previously. All these tactics will make the visitors realize that you notice their action and will make them more involved in the online interactions with you.
Here are a few changes that small business owners can make based on the customer experience analytics:
- Test out new landing pages and lower the website bounce rate
- Provide more or variety of information related to your products
- Change your email marketing content more frequently
- Communicate the order status more frequently
- Invest more on the customer service department
- Purchase or integrate chatbot software for resolving customer queries more quickly
- Automating your follow-up system and keep the customer conversation post-purchases alive
Conclusion
Our target for writing this article was to help small businesses understand the importance of tracking customer experience analytics. We have especially targeted small businesses because majority of the time, SMB owners stop themselves from investing their budget in such smart software because of the financial constraints.
We hope that small business owners understand why employing a one-stop solution such as a CRM can help them improve their responsiveness and visibility.
CRM software built for small business keep the flow of information stable and keep collecting data and store them in a centralized hub. What this smart sales intelligence tool does is, it enables the users to take maximum advantage of its automation feature. This way small business owners and their sales team can maximize their productivity and say goodbye to manual labor.
The goal of your well-planned CX program is to develop customer loyalty. This can only be achieved when you provide your customers with world class experience. There are no shortcuts to such an experience, so plan a long-term goal with a smart sales CRM like Salesmate and streamline your business process to the maximum.
We hope this article comes in handy for all the small businesses who have been struggling with tracking customer experience analytics.
