14 March
Merry CXMAS 2018 For Small Businesses!
What’s the best gift a small business owner can get from Santa this Christmas. Well, actually any Christmas. It’s not money, fame or name. It’s health & happiness with family & friends. Merry CXMAS is a dream for many small businesses when they cannot save time, money or efforts to sustain their business amidst heavy competition. Maybe that’s why this CXMAS 2018 is very special for Small Businesses.
Introducing CXONCLOUD, an all-in-one app that will help small business manage their bookings, collect & respond to customer feedback, measure customer loyalty, give rewards, send out announcements & personalise marketing too. CXONCLOUD works for all types of small businesses i.e those who sell products in brick & mortar retail stores and through e-commerce portals like Amazon or Shopify or Woo-Commerce. CXONCLOUD is a great tool for tradesmen, trainers & coaches, salons, spas, dentists, restaurants or any service seller really.
Why is it so relevant now?
Word of mouth has yet again ranked to be the most effective & cost-effective marketing technique for small businesses. But, what drives the word of mouth? In today’s market, it’s not just the price, product & promotion. It’s the customer experience. Small businesses are diverted from acquiring & retaining customers organically through word of mouth. It’s all very well, spending money on Search Engine Optimisation, Search Engine Marketing & other forms of paid marketing to generate traffic to the website, but that’s just traffic and not conversions. What converts & has been converting consistently is the recommendations from friends & family who have had an incredible customer experience with a business.
But, what is customer experience?
It’s easy for small businesses to confuse customer experience with customer feedback, customer satisfaction & customer service. Customer service & customer satisfaction are mandatory expectations from any customer in this day & age. Whilst, they contribute to customer experience, they cannot summarise it. Customer feedback is a way of collecting customer emotions, sentiments, preferences & recommendations. It’s an input to the customer experience but again cannot be termed as customer experience.
In a nutshell, customer experience is all about delighting customers at every single interaction. There are 3 key factors that delight customers to refer & repeat business. Ease of doing business, the speed of receiving a response & personalized treatment.
Ease & speed of:
Searching a business on the road or online
Engaging with a business to buy a product or book an
appointment for a service
Rating, reviewing & recommending product & service
Getting personalized:
Rewards for frequent purchases & high value of purchases
Rewards for constructive feedback & converting referrals
Advice to help customers get benefited from their purchases
with a business
Why are small businesses missing out on customer experience?
Lack of awareness, skills, time, budget & new data privacy & confidentiality regulations makes it really challenging for small businesses to focus on customer experience. Customer experience is still seen as an enterprise concept & there are not many tools in the market that sell customer experience solutions for small businesses. Also, it’s natural for small business to get stuck in the day to day challenges. So, lack of time remains a key challenge to focus on CX. Small businesses often work with a limited budget. Using a portion of that to better delight customers easily takes second place to lead generation. The regulations on customer data and interaction are becoming stringent. The penalties are severe & small businesses do not want to take a chance. Add to this the fact that technology is constantly changing, small businesses become insecure to buy/build applications based on advertisements & marketing guru’s recommendations. When they have burnt their pockets once, they wouldn’t dare to do it again!
Is there a way out?
Yes, small businesses need to start collecting customer feedback to understand customer sentiments, preferences & recommendations. There are apps like Survey monkey, Trust Pilot, FeeFo, Qualtrics, Feedbackify, Bazaarvoice to collect the feedback. The feedback collected needs to be analyzed for positive & negative reviews. Negative reviews must be picked up quickly & addressed to please the customer to win back their loyalty. Loyal customers should be updated into loyalty software like iVend, Loyalty Lion, Smile.io & Voucherify for engagement & rewards. Small businesses can also export that list to referral marketing applications like referral candy to reward those who refer their business to friends & family. MailChimp is a popularly used application to send out customer announcements, offers, festive discounts. But yes, a filtered customer list needs to be uploaded to each of the applications.
Or use this CXMAS gift from CXONCLOUD!
In that case, small businesses can try CXONCLOUD, an all-in-one app that can simplify ease of search across all customer touch points, simplify customer engagement, collect ratings, reviews, recommendations, identify, measure & engage loyal customers with personalised announcements & marketing, all in just simple clicks.
CXONCLOUD also takes small businesses to voice commerce to sell on Google Assistant, Home Mini, Alexa, Cortana & Siri. Check these videos below on how CXONCLOUD takes small businesses reach out to every home that has a smart speaker.
In Summary
Word of mouth is the most effective technique. Great CX drives the word of mouth. Ease, speed & personalized experiences deliver great customer experience. If Small Businesses do not have the time, budget & awareness about customer experience, they are welcome to try CXONCLOUD today to delight their customers like never before, in simple clicks & fills.
Small businesses can delight their customers whilst making that precious time for their family & the self this CXMAS too. Effortlessly with CXONCLOUD.
