Are you looking for ways to minimize churn rates and win more loyal customers? Or perhaps, you want to boost the return on investment (ROI) of your marketing and sales efforts?

In either case, overly pushy sales tactics won’t get you too far in a competitive market where your potential customers have a sea of options in front of them. In a consumer-driven market, it’s only natural that customers don’t have the patience to deal with negative purchase experiences or service limitations during the purchasing process. Did you know? 76 percent of consumers will stop doing business with a company after one negative customer experience. 

In today’s competitive climate, how do you differentiate your business and attract and retain customers? The key is to embrace a customer-centric attitude and impress customers at every stage of the buyer’s journey. It’s easier than it sounds!

Let’s take a closer look at what customer-centricity is and how you can develop a customer-centric business strategy.

What does a customer-centric company look like?

Customer-centric organizations put customers at the heart of everything they do. It’s in sharp contrast to the traditional approach of prioritizing revenue and profits and treating customers as numbers in sales reports.

This type of approach involves outlining and implementing a positive customer experience from the first interaction with your brand to post-purchase. The idea is to build long-lasting relationships by supporting customers at every stage of the sales funnel.

The best customer-centric companies use tools like customer relationship management (CRM) platforms to make customer data accessible throughout the organization and eliminate departmental silos. Additionally, they use cutting-edge tech innovations like artificial intelligence, predictive analytics, and virtual or augmented reality to improve customer experience.

From Amazon and Apple to IKEA, some of the world’s leading brands are built on customer-centricity. For instance, Apple strives to anticipate customer needs and builds products that address those needs.

Why does customer-centricity matter in 2024?

Did you know that improving the customer experience boosts sales revenue by 2 to 7 percent and profitability by 1 to 2 percent? Still, high revenue and profits shouldn’t be the only reason to prioritize customer-centricity.

Instead, keep in mind that 63 percent of consumers are willing to pay more for better customer service. A customer-centric business strategy helps you impress potential and existing customers and win their trust. Also, when you value your customer base and address their pain points, you foster customer loyalty by building trust and this becomes a key differentiator for your business.

The core of customer-centricity is long-term relationships, which, in turn, help you turn loyal customers into brand advocates. It provides a cost-effective way to drive brand awareness and sales through word-of-mouth recommendations. Additionally, it can help improve your product/service offerings and harness new business opportunities.

With 80 percent of business leaders planning to prioritize customer experience, it’s high time to define and implement a customer-centric business strategy.

How do you develop a customer-centric strategy?

A customer-centric approach involves more than building excellent products or providing prompt customer support. Instead, you must focus on delivering an exceptional experience across each touchpoint before and after a purchase.

Here are a few effective tips to build a customer-centric marketing strategy:

Make it a part of company culture

First things first—customer centricity isn’t the responsibility of a single department. Instead, you must treat it as an organization-wide initiative and make every department accountable.

The best way to do that is to build it into the company culture. Define customer-centricity as a core value of your organization and communicate the same to employees to help them align their goals and processes with your company’s overall vision.

Focus on future customer needs

Understanding customer needs and pain points is the foundation of delivering a frictionless purchase experience. However, when it comes to customer-centricity, you must take things up a notch by anticipating what your customers might want or need even before they know it. 

Start by mapping the customer journey to understand how they move across the sales funnel. Collect customer behavior data and purchase history to identify seasonal patterns. Additionally, monitor and analyze market trends to understand how customer preferences and needs might evolve in the future.

Ensure easy access to customer data

Did you know that 86% of B2B and 71% B2C customers expect businesses to be familiar with their personal details during a service interaction? They don’t want to spend time repeating basic information about their purchase, service request, or complaint every time.

It’s up to you to ensure seamless transfer of customer data among various departments and eliminate friction from the purchase experience. And that’s precisely where a solution like Act! CRM steps into the picture.

With Act!, you can create a centralized dashboard of customer data to serve as a single source of truth and provide marketing, sales, and support teams with a unified view of every customer. That, in turn, ensures seamless interactions, regardless of whether a customer is talking to a sales rep or chatting with a customer service executive.

Be there after the first purchase

How do you treat new customers after they purchase from you? Customer-focused companies strive to deliver a personalized onboarding experience and prompt after-sales support. The idea is to make every customer feel valued, not like just another item you ticked off a to-do list.

You can even use a digital adoption platform that integrates with your CRM system to trigger hyper-personalized onboarding flows. This is a great way to make a stellar first impression on new customers and win their loyalty.

Rewarding customers for purchasing from you is yet another way to win them over. Send free products, offer a service upgrade, or set up a loyalty program — any of these approaches can drive retention rates and repeat sales.

Collect customer feedback

What’s the best way to improve customer experience? While there’s no one-size-fits-all winner, feedback collection is a strong contender. It helps you identify gaps in your existing sales processes and onboarding flows and improve your customer-centric strategy.

From live Q&A sessions and polls on social media platforms to email surveys, there are various ways to ask customers for feedback. You can even conduct in-person interviews or host community events for deeper insight into customer expectations.

Make customer support accessible

If you’re trying to build a customer-focused company, you’ve likely already built a top-notch customer support team. But do customers have to jump through hoops before they can reach out to support reps? If that’s the case, you must look for ways to make support more accessible.

Start by implementing a multi-channel customer support strategy that includes chatbots, social messaging apps, live chat, email, and phone calls. Next, outline the details in a “Contact Us” page that customers can easily access from anywhere on your website. 

It’s also a good idea to add your contact details to social media profiles. Lastly, consider using a ticketing system to organize customer requests and provide timely resolution.

Monitor the right metrics

Implementing a customer-centric business strategy isn’t a set-and-forget process. You have to keep an eye on the customer experience and determine whether things are headed in the right direction. The metrics that come in handy here include:

• Churn rate
• NPS (Net Promoter Score)
• CLV (Customer Lifetime Value)
• CSAT (Customer Satisfaction)

Make customer-centricity a reality with Act!

The business benefits of customer-centricity make a compelling case for implementing a company-wide rollout. A system like Act! CRM can help you understand customer needs and purchase patterns to create personalized experiences for your customers. 

You can even use Act! to eliminate departmental silos and ensure seamless customer interactions that help build long-term relationships. It also comes in handy for personalizing the purchase experience and monitoring customer-focused metrics like NPS and CSAT.

Start your free trial to see Act! in action and understand how it can help you achieve customer-centricity. No download or credit card is required.

The post Fostering a Customer-Centric Strategy: Your Guide to Delighting Customers in 2024 appeared first on Act!.

What happens when businesses stop listening to their customers? Better competitors replace them.

Blackberry, Yahoo!, MySpace, and, more recently, Facebook are classic examples.

The data confirms it: 80 percent of customers prefer working with companies that offer a personalized user experience that aligns with their customer preferences. To create new products and services that solve real problems and optimize customer retention, you must listen to customer feedback and base your decision-making on what users want.

Truly innovative companies use customer feedback loops to inform their critical product decisions and create a roadmap for business growth. In this article, we’ll describe the different stages of these customer feedback loops and show you how to create one for your business.

What is a customer feedback loop and why is it important?

A customer feedback loop is the process of improving your products and services based on continuous feedback from your customers in an effort to reduce churn and acquire new customers. It’s a cycle in which you gather user feedback, analyze it, make changes, and then follow up with your customers to see if those changes hit the mark. Ultimately, feedback loops represent ongoing dialogue with users, involving them in the product creation process to fine-tune your offerings and meet customer needs more precisely. 

Consider a customer feedback example: If a high percentage of an invoicing tool’s users never create invoices after signing up, the product team should seek customer feedback to understand why. Based on customer responses, they should change specific product features and follow up with the same users to see if they’re satisfied with the new version.

The primary goal of this exercise is to simplify product usage, ensure customer success, and create a product that provides actual value to the users. It also shows customers that you care about them and genuinely want to create something useful. This increases customer loyalty to your brand and gives users a sense of ownership of your product because they play a part in its development.

The stages of the customer feedback loop

You can divide the typical customer feedback loop into four broad stages. Each stage has distinct goals and should ideally involve the key stakeholders from your customer service, product development, data analysis, and marketing and sales teams.

Stage 1: Feedback collection

The feedback loop begins with collecting customer feedback about specific aspects of your product and user experience. You can use various tools like feedback surveys, interviews, focus groups, live chat, and support tickets to collect customer data.

If you need more actionable insights, you can use secondary feedback sources like forum discussions, online reviews, social media posts, website analytics, and user behavior tracking tools like heat maps and screen recordings.

Stage 2: Data analysis and interpretation 

Once you have the required feedback data, it’s time to organize it to find trends and valuable insights. Since customer feedback loops focus on specific product aspects, most positive and negative responses will have common themes and a few outliers.

You must carefully review all the responses and prioritize the issues most impacting customer satisfaction and product usage.

Stage 3: Implementation and testing

Once you’ve identified what’s hurting customer experience, it’s time to make changes to your product.

Since the customer feedback loop is a collaborative process, you can contact users for more detailed feedback if you aren’t sure about their pain points or how they want to see your product. Based on their feedback, create multiple product versions and use A/B testing to find the winner.

Stage 4: Customer follow-up

To close the feedback loop, brief your customers about your changes and seek fresh feedback. 

If they’re happy with the results, request a positive review. However, if they think it still needs work (and you agree), keep improving the product until you resolve the problem.

How to build a strong feedback loop for your business

The effectiveness of your feedback loops depends on the details of your process. Here’s what you need to ensure your feedback loop gathers valuable customer insights and helps you enhance user satisfaction.

1. Identify clear feedback goals

Every feedback loop must have a well-defined problem and cover a specific product feature or benefit that customers want. But your customers won’t always explicitly tell you what it is. It’s your job to understand their problem and identify the functionality that must be improved.

To achieve this, you need to ask the right questions in your surveys, questionnaires, interviews, calls, or any feedback collection method you use.

2. Use a CRM to track customer behavior

One of the best ways to collect and interpret user feedback is to use an integrated customer relationship management (CRM) solution that provides a 360-degree view of customer interactions with your company and helps you make data-driven decisions.

Act! is a complete marketing automation, lead generation, and CRM system. You can use it to track pre- and post-sales conversations and user activity metrics to understand what your customers want from your product and where they believe it isn’t delivering.

Act! also simplifies data analysis by providing feedback from all stages of the customer journey in a centralized dashboard and highlighting trends, giving you a holistic view.

3. Track product usage to find problems

Improving your product based on customer survey responses, emails, or chat conversations is a reactive approach. You must complement this customer feedback strategy by proactively tracking real-time user behavior and engagement with your product. 

Why? Because research shows only one in twenty-six customers share product feedback. Others simply switch to a competitor after just one bad experience without sharing negative feedback.

So, it is crucial to actively engage with users and continuously improve their product experience without waiting for customer complaints.

4. Encourage feedback through incentives

Since customers don’t always speak up, encourage them to share feedback by offering incentives. For example, a SaaS company can offer a free product upgrade or limited-time access to higher-tier features for feedback.

Similarly, companies can offer discounts, vouchers, or anything else to motivate users to share their thoughts.

5. Involve product teams in feedback analysis

It is crucial for your company’s key decision-makers, especially the product teams, to analyze and understand customer feedback. 

Startups with small and closely-knit teams may find this easier than large tech companies with distributed teams or multi-layered hierarchies. You can resolve this by creating cross-functional teams to handle customer issues with representation from all departments involved in delivering value to your customers.

Make customer feedback a core part of your business

Change is the only constant in business. To stay relevant and on top of the customer’s mind, organizations must continuously innovate and find ways to enhance their customer experience.

By using an integrated CRM and marketing automation system like Act! and making customer feedback a pivotal piece of your product and services development, you can easily build actionable feedback loops that help you gather timely information and stay ahead of your competitors.

Ready to see how Act! can help you build better customer feedback loops? Sign up for a free 14-day trial today. No credit card or download is required. 

The post Leveraging Customer Feedback Loops for Enhanced Understanding of Customer Needs appeared first on Act!.

Professional services span a vast range of businesses, from legal, financial, and business consulting to creative designers and architects. Although all of these business models are completely different, they have one thing in common: They primarily sell services instead of physical products, and their businesses are based on building loyal, long-term relationships, not impersonal transactions. 

Why are relationships so important?

Of course, every business must strive to earn a customer’s trust, but it’s even more important for professional services businesses, where customers place their confidence in something that is oftentimes intangible and future-focused. In addition, the services themselves can be complex, such as a long-term IT consulting project or investment planning with a financial services professional. As a result, building loyal, long-term customer relationships is increasingly important to gaining a competitive advantage and depends largely on your ability to establish trust and confidence over the entire course of your customer experience.

In the professional services industry, it can be extremely difficult to build customer relationships due to a number of factors. It all starts with how well you attract and nurture leads, convert them into customers, and meet (and hopefully exceed) their expectations. As a result, professional services companies are increasingly forced to find new ways to retain their customer base and attract new ones. 

For instance, according to Gartner, 89% of professional services businesses will compete on customer experience in the foreseeable future. Another study by SuperOffice found similar results: 9 out of 10 businesses that prioritize the customer experience will eventually beat the competition to win the largest share of loyal customers due to increased customer satisfaction. As a result, the customer experience is now a top priority. It’s now considered the main factor driving the growth of the professional services market.

Are resource limitations hurting your business?

So what’s holding professional services companies back from attracting new customers, building deep relationships and delivering an exceptional experience? Some of the most common challenges include:

Hiring and onboarding inefficiencies

For many companies, finding and keeping the right skill sets can be difficult in a tight market. Plus, getting those people up to speed quickly is key to ensuring they can provide a seamless customer service experience. How can new employees get what they need to start working without relying on other employees?

Lack of sales and marketing expertise

Not every small business can afford to hire full-time sales and marketing experts. And, since business owners already wear multiple hats, it can be difficult to find adequate time to create and execute successful sales and marketing activities.

Too many time-consuming, repetitive tasks

Many companies still rely on manual data entry, such as customer contact updates and sales order entry. This can take valuable time away from focusing on customer needs.

Mismanaged customer data and insights

All too often, companies lack a centralized, integrated way to capture and manage customer data. This means that vital client information might reside in email and other apps, such as Outlook, Gmail, or spreadsheets. This lack of integration can make it impossible to track how well you’re meeting sales, marketing, and customer service targets.

Ongoing challenges with customer retention and upselling

Without the ability to manage all your data and metrics in one place, it can be hard to build upon existing customer relationships. To meet customers’ needs (and keep them happy and satisfied), it’s critical to know what they are asking for at any given moment so you can share the right services at the right time. If customer data resides in multiple, unintegrated platforms and apps, it can be almost impossible to anticipate future needs based on past purchases and interactions.

Overcome resource limitations and set your business apart 

Although every step of the customer journey involves multiple actions and touchpoints, the good news is that much of this can be automated with a customer relationship management (CRM) platform. And when you combine CRM with marketing automation, you have an integrated, robust, and reliable tool that will save you time while providing a consistent and seamless customer experience. This can be a key differentiator for your professional services business as it leads to improved customer engagement, new business growth and the ongoing fostering of those much coveted, deep relationships.

What is CRM anyway?

Customer relationship management (CRM) software helps businesses manage all of their interactions with their existing and potential customers. With CRM, customer details and preferences are recorded and all customer activity and engagement is tracked. This enables you to provide a fully personalized and consistent experience to all of your clients, every time they engage with your business.

A CRM platform also helps businesses streamline their processes and workflows so that every part of the business is on the same page. Sales and marketing functions, especially, rely on CRM to create collaboration and improve their productivity.

The overall aim of a CRM platform is to provide more engaging customer experiences, increase customer loyalty and retention, and drive business growth and profitability.

Learn more about what a CRM is and how it can help your business.

What will marketing automation do for my business?

If you’re emailing newsletters, new product updates, announcements, and reminders to your prospects and customers, you’re already using email marketing. Marketing automation simply lets you streamline these activities by automating all of the tedious and repetitive tasks. You set up your communication touchpoints once and then your marketing automation software ensures they take place as scheduled. This automation increases the generation of new leads and improves your sales and marketing ROI — all while freeing you up to focus on other, more important tasks.

How Act! CRM and Marketing Automation will help you build deeper client relationships

Act! CRM provides an ideal platform for professional services companies of all types, such as financial advisors, brokers, consultants, lawyers, accountants, engineers, architects, creatives, and more. With Act! you can continuously build your pipeline of new leads, attract and convert prospects, and nurture existing customer relationships over the long term. As a result, you can achieve steady, predictable revenue through committed client relationships that also drive referral business and brand loyalty.

For example, consider a small financial services company whose clients have a broad range of investment needs. Some may be looking for aggressive growth portfolios, while others may want to buy a house or plan for a child’s education. The financial services business strategy includes offering a number of planning services at various price points but needs an easy way of messaging these services to all of their leads, prospects, and current customers. Act! is an ideal solution to accomplish all of these tasks without taking valuable time away from serving your target customers.

This is because, with Act!, you can build a complete view of your clients and prospects through a customizable CRM experience that tracks their key information. Act! ensures your sales and marketing efforts are always unified, which makes it easier to stay organized, manage your customer relationships, expand your sales pipeline, and meet strategic business goals. 

And, because Act! is a full marketing and sales solution, it will help you easily take care of everything you need to manage your relationships and drive business by helping you to:

Stay on top of your data.

With Act!, all of your customer details are easy to access, whenever you need them. You can totally customize the dashboard to fit your workflow, and easily pull in customer contacts from integrated apps like Zoom and QuickBooks and email including Outlook and Gmail. This means your communications and calendar are always in sync without having to switch back and forth between apps and email. You can also use relationship and activity management features to automate communications and reminders so you never miss an opportunity to stay in touch with customers and prospects.

For instance, the small financial services company mentioned previously may have fewer than 10 people on the team, but they all need a way to access and update client information from a single source. Act! enables them to follow a consistent workflow to ensure that new client information is captured fully, accurately, and automatically thanks to integration with corporate email. Team members can also track every communication with clients and schedule calls or email follow-ups in a timely and consistent manner. Best of all, every associate can see these interactions and easily pick up where another team member left off before they went on vacation, for example. 

Market and sell like a pro.

With Act! you don’t have to be a seasoned marketing professional to achieve great results. Act! provides all the tools you need to capture prospects and usher them effortlessly through the sales and conversion process. Tools such as email marketing provide professional and customizable templates to help your email campaigns stand out in a crowd, improve open rates, and generate results. Act! marketing tools are designed to help you go beyond the initial sale to drive repeat business and upselling. Plus, the opportunity and pipeline management features help you stay on top of leads and other sales opportunities to ensure nothing falls through the cracks.

For example, a financial services company can use Act! to capture leads generated from a web form. Based on the target demographic and offer (such as a retirement planning guide), the company can then create an email campaign to nurture these leads to download additional content with the goal of eventually setting up an initial meeting with a financial planner. 

Work smarter, not harder.

Automation is the key to accomplishing more in less time. As your business grows, you need to shed time-consuming manual tasks so you can focus more on what really counts. Act! Marketing Automation (AMA) helps you eliminate tedious data entry and other management tasks that can consume valuable hours. Instead, AMA helps you create targeted marketing campaigns and other communications. Best of all, you can schedule emails in advance to ensure they go when and where they’ll make the most impact — whether it’s following up with prospects or offering relevant new services and promotions to existing customers. 

For the financial services company, the ability to schedule and automate timely communications is critical. Sudden changes in the housing market, interest rates, or other market changes could trigger a series of emails to a specific prospect or customer demographic. For instance, an email might link to a report or prompt the recipient to schedule a meeting to discuss their financial planning goals in light of new market developments.

The result?

You’ll be able to capture, track and respond to the key engagement information you need to build and maintain deeper customer relationships and gain the competitive advantage you’re looking for to grow your business.

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The needs of the modern customer aren’t satiated by merely the provision of a high-quality product or service, they also want to be treated with the utmost respect, care, and attention, whenever they get in touch with a company. “Word of mouth” marketing can really benefit any business, and its true effectiveness is realized by companies that accept the true vitality of customer service. If a customer loves the way you treat them, not only are they likely to come back for another purchase, but they are also going to mention you to their friends and family looking for recommendations. Esteban Kolsky claims that 72% of customers will share their positive experiences with 6 or more people; whereas around 13% of unsatisfied customers will talk about the unpleasant incident with 15 or more people.

Engaging and helpful customer service can often provide businesses with a strong competitive advantage over its counterparts. By increasing the levels of customer satisfaction and retention, the customer service department helps a company in maintaining positive cash flows. In this article, we mention some of the tips that can help any business in improving its customer service:

1. Being fast is as important as being right

The customer doesn’t care if you have a user base of billions; to them, their call is the most important and time-sensitive. Even though it can sometimes be impossible to answer every customer immediately, that’s the type of efficiency a company should aspire to achieve. According to HelpScout, 41% of consumers expect a response to their email within 6 hours, and only 36% of retailers manage to do so.

When a customer receives a response within the ideal timeframe, they start believing that your company cares for them and it paves the way for a healthy, long-term business relationship.

2. Personalize the experience; know your customer

The more you know about the needs and wants of your customer, the better your engagement with them will be. Modern CRMs provide the ability to store supplementary information against every customer which can help sales agents have meaningful, friendly conversations with the customers. For example, if a customer mentioned that their dog Lucy was sick, the last time they called, you can store that in the CRM and ask about Lucy’s health the next time you meet or talk to them. By creating personalized experiences, a company can cement its place in the hearts of its clientele.

3. Show empathy and be an active listener

Sometimes, a customer service agent just wants the call to be over with; they end up listening less and speaking more. However, to understand the customer’s needs astutely and to ensure that you have completely satisfied them, it’s important that you practice the art of active listening. First of all, you should ask questions of them if you are unclear about anything; if they start having a casual conversation, reflecting on feelings and showing empathy can go a long way in indicating that you are being attentive (e.g. phrases like “That must have been tough” and “You do seem pretty thrilled about this wedding”). Lastly, it’s also important that you end the conversation by asking them whether all their queries have been answered or problems resolved.

4. Learn to say “I don’t know”

A good customer service agent knows that it’s okay to say “I don’t know”. Sometimes, you might be tempted to conjure up a story regarding something you are not sure about, but it’s not the right way to go about it. If you are unsure about an issue or a process or anything else, just admit it to the customer and tell them that you will get back to them once you know more.

5. Make use of professional and positive language

Usage of positive language is an essential tenet of an engaging customer service experience. By slightly changing your words, you can avoid drastic repercussions. For example, a customer’s product got lost in shipment, and you need to resend it to them, adding 3-4 extra days to the delivery time. Consider the following two sentences:

Negative language: Your product will not reach you for another 3-4 days. It got lost in transit.

Positive language: The product will reach you within the next 3-4 days, and it has already been dispatched from our warehouse.

6. Realize your mistakes and prevent their repetition

The true importance of customer service is realized by companies that are ready to accept their mistakes and rectify them. Instead of hiding your mistakes, it’s more professional and reassuring of your honesty, credibility, and trustworthiness that you agree that you were in the wrong and are taking steps to right the wrong.

This counterintuitive approach is important in a company’s bid to provide excellent customer service, and it goes against the historical notion of branding to promote a flawless of perfection. In the modern age, customers want authenticity and transparency.

7. Go the extra mile (or two)

When it comes to customer service, being complacent and doing the bare minimum is never enough. If a customer asks you where they can find a product, don’t just give them directions, but take them there. If they had a reservation regarding your store which you ended up clearing, send them a follow-up to see if they are satisfied with their experience now. By walking the extra mile, you make your customer feel in their heart that they are loved.

8. Keep the whole company informed and involved

Providing good customer service is not just the job of the support department, hence the entire company should be involved in the effort. This ensures that everyone in the workforce feels the pain (and the love) of the customer. You might want to keep your development team segregated from the customer interactions (with them being expensive resources) but how are the developers going to realize the problems faced by the actual users of their applications if they aren’t kept in the loop?

Final Word

The importance of customer service is realized by companies that believe in building long-lasting, healthy relationships with their customers. Not only does good customer service help with customer retention, it also helps in the acquisition of new customers by word-of-mouth marketing. By showing customers that they matter and by listening to their concerns with attention, you build a strong brand reputation and ensure that your customers always remain satisfied. An engaging customer experience can lead to a happy customer; happy customers mean more sales and more sales mean better revenue streams.

The post Tips for improving your customer service appeared first on Act!.

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We have covered the powerful process of customer journey mapping in a series of articles which include details on what a customer journey map is, some different types of customer journey maps, and examples of effective customer journey maps. This article will cover how to create a customer journey map.

In brief, a customer journey map is a mindfully created diagram that documents the mental and emotional processes your customers go through when interacting with your business. It is a way of capturing your customers’ experiences from start to finish, enabling the prediction of future behaviors and outcomes. An effective customer journey map is a tool that helps company employees to align with the business mission and goals. It encapsulates customers’ motivations and expectations so that you are best positioned to meet their requirements and improve their overall experience of your brand.

It is worth noting that customer experience is one of the major factors in business growth now. This idea is backed by The Temkhttps Group, which found that companies earning $1 billion per year can expect to earn another $700 million (on average) within three years of investing in customer experience. Take it also from digital analyst Brian Solis, who said in his book X: The Experience When Business Meets Design: “Experiences are more important than products now. In fact, experiences are products.”

If you are wondering how to map customer journeys, check out our detailed pointers below:

A precursor to customer journey mapping

The right mindset must be cultivated and used in combination with collected data. These two factors will become the foundations of your customer journey map. Remember that a customer journey map is simply a guide; one that highlights the best possible courses of action.

Action is equally important, and your map will be the catalyst for refined and considered actions that take your business to the next level. The more you tailor actions to improve the experiences of your various customer demographics, the better.

Most successful businesses are already accustomed to data collection for marketing purposes. Yet although necessary, data is only one part of the equation. It must be analyzed and translated into a concise story, and that story is your map.

How to create a customer journey map

1. Set clear objectives and profile your personas

Firstly, decide on your reasons for creating a customer journey map. What goals do you plan to realize through it? Which business processes will it relate to, who will benefit from it and how? Once you have decided on specific and measurable objectives, you will use them to profile personas.

It helps to create buyer personas so that you have a picture of whom you’re dealing with, characterized in a ‘typical’ buyer profile. To achieve this, you may study metrics, communications, patterns, marketing campaign results, survey results, and whatever else gives insight into customers’ current behaviors and expectations.

These kinds of questions should help you profile your customers and define their expectations and goals:

• Do they prefer to speak with company representatives or are they happy to do this via email or chatbots?
• What motivated them to look for the product or service they got from you?
• How did they conduct research on it?
• Where did they buy it? (E.g. website or store)
• What criteria did they have for making a purchase?
• Which online channels did they use to evaluate products?
• Why did they choose your business and product/service over competitors?
• What do your metrics say about preferences?
• How do they use your website/app, and how do they interact with your business offline?

Ultimately, you are aiming to get an accurate picture of customer demographics, their behavior patterns, motivations, and goals. Don’t forget that asking customers direct questions via surveys is one of the most useful ways of gathering this kind of data.

2. List all the touchpoints

Touchpoints are the points that allow customers to interact directly with your business or brand, before, during, or after purchase.

Examples might be:

• Through social media channels
• Downloading resources from your website
• Calling a customer service line
• Stepping into a store
• Responding to a marketing email
• Review sites, or other third party sites
• Joining a webinar

Some good questions to help pinpoint these are:

• Did they find you through an online search, via an advertisement, or printed marketing materials?
• Did they visit your website after reading reviews, or stop by a physical location such as a store?
• What methods of contact are available to them?

3. Define which type of map you want to use

You will need to decide upon a convenient and easy-to-follow method of representing the customer journey. This can be as rudimentary as a series of sticky notes or whiteboard diagrams, but serious customer journey maps will be created in a digital format so that they can be easily shared around. It needs to be simple enough that the appropriate employees can understand it.

They often take the form of spreadsheets or infographics. Infographics tend to be the most popular as they are aesthetically pleasing and easy to understand. You need to know which types of customer journey maps will help you reach your objectives. This might be a current state map, a future state map, or a day in the life map.

For example, if you decided on using a current state customer journey map, you would need to consider where prospects are coming from, and how they are finding your business in the first place. Which touchpoints were they using? What steps were taken for them to become your customers? How did they begin to use your products?

It could also be useful to take a look at some examples of effective customer journey maps, to give you an idea of what works well. You might wish to check out online map-building tools such as UXPressia and Canvanizer for a little extra assistance.

4. Take the customer journey yourself

Now that your map is taking shape, it is time to study the results. Consider details such as:

• How was their experience on your website or in your store, and how user-friendly were those processes?
• Are they following through with a purchase after evaluating products?
• How happy are they overall, and have their needs been met?
• Do they plan to return as a future customer?
• Is it obvious how they can reach you for assistance and is that process convenient?

Put yourself in the customers’ shoes and pinpoint any holes that detract from a positive experience. Taking on the mindset of each persona you developed, run through the processes you’re analyzing (such as social media activity, or online searching) and see what obstacles you meet.

5. Make the necessary changes

Once you have a clear picture of how your customers are currently experiencing your services, you are ready to implement the necessary actions you’ve pinpointed. The changes might be related to website user-friendliness or customer service options. Perhaps you need to open more social media channels or define products more clearly.

A good way of measuring the probable success of these changes is to take the customer journey again afterward, comparing the new experience against the pain points you found last time. Each time you repeat this you can make refinements that take your brand from strength to strength.

Now that you know how to create a customer journey map, you should find that processes are streamlined, sales are climbing, reviews are improving and most importantly, customer acquisition and retention is consistently on the rise. For consistency, keep on top of analytics to measure the success of your maps, and remember to repeat the process as regularly as is necessary.

The post How to Create a Customer Journey Map appeared first on Act!.

Chatbots have been around in various forms since 1966. Only recently have companies learned to use them for numerous business purposes such as Customer Support, Sales, payment collection and increased social media engagement. Are chatbots only feasible for big businesses with large budgets and a large number of customers or should SMBs seriously consider them? According to a study by Oracle, 80% of businesses already use chatbots or plan to use them by 2024. With this much popularity and their benefits why not have one working for your business too?

What is a chatbot?

Chatbots are interactive software platforms designed to mimic normal human conversation. They’re often incorporated into apps, live chat, email, and SMS platforms. It’s common for them to interface with most major messaging platforms such as Facebook Messenger, Slack, and more for communication. Integration with CRM platforms to capture leads, prospects, and customer data is typical as well. These platforms are guided by a predetermined set of rules. Artificial intelligence is frequently combined with these rules to facilitate informed decision-making instead of simply using scripted material repeatedly.

Why should you consider a chatbot for your small business?

Gartner found that 46% of SMBs surveyed were currently using or planning to use a chatbot within the next two years. Plus, another 21% were evaluating them for use. So why not consider this popular business tool now and take advantage of its benefits? There are several reasons why small businesses should explore chatbots to improve the customer experience:

• 24-hour service – Chatbots never sleep or take a holiday. This allows you to offer customer service 24/7.
• Instant responses to simple questions – No need for your prospects or customers to wait for a live chat agent, hold the line to speak with a customer service rep, or wait for an email response. They can gain answers and assistance from your chatbots!
• Efficiencies – The use of a chatbot frees up sales and support personnel for valuable interactions by addressing routine inquiries, service processes, and orders.
• Good customer experience – Chatbots don’t get stressed from interactions with difficult customers so they’re able to provide consistently good service to your customers. Plus they assist in achieving increased customer satisfaction and retention as well as personalizing the customer experience. With built-in AI chatbots not only capture current customer behavior but also analyze previous conversations to tailor interactions based on history.
• Customers want them – More and more consumers are looking for solutions online. In fact, research by HelpScout revealed that more than half of those surveyed prefer chatbots in the customer service process.
• Gathers business intelligence – AI and machine learning enable chatbots to collect valuable insights around your prospects and customers based on interactions.

Getting started with chatbots

Identify the best use cases for your business

Start by finding the best use cases for chatbots within your business for the greatest impact. Some you might consider are:

• Using a chatbot to route customers to the correct department based on a few simple questions can be very effective.
• To provide possible solutions to Support queries based on knowledgebase articles. Having a chatbot search your KB behind the scenes to present possible solutions can save you and your customer time.
• Streamline the ordering process by allowing customers to type an order and send it to your bot. Your chatbot then guides the customers through the ordering process. This frees up sales personnel and simplifies the process for customers.
• Chatbots can also provide personalized assistance to customers by asking a few key questions to aid in the selection of the best product to match their needs.
• Automate a payment process by integrating your chatbot with a payment solution.
• Adding a chatbot on your social media profiles increases engagement levels and directs prospective customers to the correct pages on your website based on their specific needs or interests.

Having a well-planned and carefully mapped customer journey will help you understand how chatbots can improve the experience for you and your customer. Thinking about your customer journey will help identify the best uses for a chatbot in your business. Introducing a well-built chatbot at various stages can save you time and money, freeing up your Sales or Support to focus on higher-value interactions. For example: Having a chatbot act as the first point of contact for support queries can drive a significant number of customers to your online resources, improving Self-Service and therefore saving your team time and money. Of course, chatbots can’t replace humans entirely. Be sure to include an easy way for customers to contact an agent in your chatbot and website interfaces. This will allow for personalized assistance with more complex questions or issues. Plus, you don’t want customers to become frustrated and dissatisfied by an inability to address their needs!

How are other small businesses using chatbots?

You may be wondering how other small businesses are currently using chatbots. Here are a few examples for your reference:

• Buoy is a digital health chatbot that functions like a health-related search engine and offers helpful advice. It asks a series of questions to provide the most accurate potential treatment options. Buoy bases responses on over 18,000 clinical papers about more than 1,700 conditions.
• TuneBot was created by the Seattle-based marketing technology company, Tune. It helps members of the Tune Multiverse platform interpret data quickly and easily. All users must do is ask the bot questions through the Slack integration. It then responds with data via chat in the form of charts, graphs, and reports. This simplifies data management and analytics for those with limited experience.
• Next Insurance, a small business insurance broker, launched a chatbot on Facebook Messenger. It offers customized insurance policies to users of the bot along with quotes and facilitates the purchase process as well.
• HelloVote is a chatbot launched by the not-for-profit Fight for the Future. It functions via text message and Facebook Messenger to encourage and simplify the voter registration process on mobile devices.

Hopefully these examples, combined with the potential applications discussed previously, have given you a better idea of how chatbots might work in your business.

Create your first chatbot

I recommend starting with a simple Customer Service chatbot, which either searches your knowledgebase or is loaded with FAQs, as this is easy and cost-effective. Another great way to start is by adding a chatbot to Facebook Messenger to increase customer engagement and boost sales. However, you decide to start, focus on one application and add on from there. Once you decided on the best use case for your first chatbot, it’s a good idea to create a mock-up of its design and script. This will help prevent issues as you build your first bot. There are tools that facilitate this process by walking you through a series of questions and generating the mock-up. Chatbots are often available as options with chat solutions and there are also stand-alone software products that simplify the creation of your bot. It’s an easy process either way – no need to know code or be a technological expert! When well-planned and integrated into your customer journey the use of a chatbot can benefit both you and your customers. The immediate response of a chatbot provides 24-hour service while freeing up your teams to focus on higher-value interactions. So start with a basic bot and build from there, the opportunities are endless.

The post Should you use chatbots for your small business? appeared first on Act!.

What is customer loyalty and why is it important?

Building customer loyalty is one of the biggest challenges for every small business today. How do you get customers to buy from you on a regular basis? How do you get them to recommend your business to other customers? And why is it so important, anyway?

First, loyal customers can provide up to 80% of a company’s revenue and typically spend 67% more on products and services than new customers. Second, customer loyalty is also easier to achieve and is more profitable than customer acquisition. In fact, once a company has acquired a customer, the success rate of selling to an existing customer is 60-70%, as opposed to 5-20% for a prospect. It’s also about 5x more expensive to acquire a customer than to retain an existing one, so focusing on customer loyalty ultimately translates to the bottom line.

Happy customers are good for business

Keeping customers loyal means keeping them happy. When you see “churn” across your customer base, it can be a sign that somehow your company is failing to meet customer needs or expectations. Perhaps you need to be more competitive on price, offer new products, improve customer service, or communicate more regularly to stay engaged with customers. If you want a healthy business, you need happy customers, which is why a great customer experience is essential. To get started check out these 10 techniques to build customer loyalty.

Missed our webinar?

No problem! You can watch a recording of our webinar “How to Drive Customer Loyalty with Marketing Automation” here.

The webinar covers:

• How marketing automation can help your business deliver targeted and meaningful interactions
• How to improve your one-to-many communications and rebuild customer loyalty with targeted and personalized communications
• How to strengthen customer relationships

The post How to Build Customer Loyalty with Marketing Automation appeared first on Act!.

As you may know, April 15 is “Get to Know Your Customers Day,” and this national day is the perfect time for business owners to reconnect with their customer base after a particularly challenging year.

Get to Know Your Customers Day is celebrated on the third Thursday of each quarter. It’s a great reminder (and gentle nudge) to think of new ways to engage your loyal customers and learn more about them. Of course, improving customer relationships should be something small businesses strive for every day, but this event is a great way to really emphasize its importance.

For instance, what are some challenges your customers have faced over the past year? Is there something particular about your business that helped them solve those challenges, or at least made their struggles a bit easier? What do customers love most about your products and services, and what could you add or improve to make them even better?

Four ways to personalize customer connections

The past year ushered in a new era of faceless, contactless transactions. For that reason, it’s more important than ever to find ways to connect with customers on a personal level. While having the ability to slice and dice demographic data and manage your sales funnel is essential, it’s only one piece of the customer relationship puzzle. Here are four easy ways to learn more about your customers, and vice versa:

1. Ask them! Create an online survey

Surveys can be a great way to get more real-time information about your customers, including their problems, expectations, shopping habits, and even their complaints — whether it’s about you or your competitors. You can distribute your survey in many ways, such as sending an email, as a follow up after a sale, or through your social media pages. Remember to keep your survey brief and concise — perhaps no more than two or three multiple-choice questions — so customers will be more likely to answer it.

Need some help leveraging social media to engage with your customers? Click here to learn more?

Customers want to get to know the human side of your business as well. Telling your story through an email, direct mail, or social media post can help customers feel more connected to you on a personal level. This is especially true for small and family-owned businesses who have shared many of the same pandemic challenges as their customers over the past year. Sharing your story honestly — with both the ups and the downs — shows the real people behind the products and helps build more personal relationships with customers. And that, in turn, can help foster deeper customer engagement resulting in increased customer loyalty during this new year and over the long term.

2. Old-fashioned conversations (even if they have to be on social media)

The more you can engage with customers on a personal level, the better. Customers really do appreciate prompt and personal responses on social media platforms or through email. Of course, if the issue is about a specific order or a customer service issue, following up one-on-one is probably better. But when you respond personally, customers and prospects see that you care enough to take the time to engage with them.

3. Offer a customer appreciation event

Due to pandemic safety concerns, it may still be difficult to host in-person events, but there are plenty of socially distanced, online options available. For example, you could offer a gift card or raffle a giveaway or discount to the first 50 customers who share or respond to a social media post. You can also spotlight customers on social media (with their consent, of course) who have found uniquely creative or helpful ways to use your products or services.

4. Share updates about your business

Customers want to get to know the human side of your business as well. Telling your story through an email, direct mail, or social media post can help customers feel more connected to you on a personal level. This is especially true for small and family-owned businesses who have shared many of the same pandemic challenges as their customers over the past year. Sharing your story honestly — with both the ups and the downs — shows the real people behind the products and helps build more personal relationships with customers. And that, in turn, can help foster deeper customer engagement resulting in increased customer loyalty during this new year and over the long term.

Learn how to use email to tell your business’ story and keep your customers engaged

Fortunately, with the exception of a giveaway, all of these activities are free (minus the time spent creating and managing them). So even businesses that are still recovering from the pandemic can participate in Get to Know Your Customers Day without spending much money at all. And isn’t that something to celebrate?

Want to see how CRM and emarketing can boost your customer engagement? Try Act! for 14 days for free! 

After a challenging year, please let us know in this quick survey how you’re planning to reconnect with your customers to get to know them better.

The post Ready to celebrate Get to Know Your Customers Day? appeared first on Act!.

The 2020 pandemic affected everyone in some capacity, in every part of the world and now businesses are focusing on ways to reconnect with their customers.. During 2020, businesses of all sizes struggled at least to some extent, but COVID-19 safety measures hit small businesses particularly hard. According to a survey conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau, nearly 53% of small business owners don’t expect to return to pre-COVID-19 operations until the summer of 2021.

 In addition: 

• Only about 25% of small businesses in large metro areas have returned to normal operations (albeit with COVID-19 safety measures still largely in place).
• Barely one-quarter of small businesses have a minimum of three months of cash available (which is generally recommended as a buffer).
• Nearly 2% of small businesses closed their doors due to COVID-19-related profit losses. 

Of course, the pandemic has not affected all companies the same way. Restaurants, schools, arts venues, and travel and tourism companies are among the top industries that have been impacted significantly. While some businesses in these industries have managed to operate in survival mode, others have had to close their doors permanently.

Brighter days ahead: How many small businesses are rebounding 

Even within industries hit hardest by the pandemic, many small businesses and entrepreneurs are starting to rebound. According to a poll from MetLife and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the majority of small businesses (86%) have fully or partially reopened. While this is encouraging news, many SMBs are still figuring out how to safeguard their top asset — their loyal customer base and customer relationships. To get business back on track, SMBs must shift their focus from survival to meeting customer needs with personalized communication and follow-up. Even companies that maintained customer connections through social media and other online platforms should start thinking about how to re-engage with new offerings, loyalty programs, and other incentives.

In addition to renewed customer engagement, networking is another way SMBs can start to rebound. For instance, these Black-owned businesses in Atlanta created a collaborative network to help each other thrive and grow their companies despite ongoing economic challenges. By creatively sourcing funding, real estate, and other local resources, these entrepreneurs are finding whole new approaches to business that support the community as well. 

What’s more, other SMBs have either created or ramped up their eCommerce operations since many transactions can no longer occur face-to-face. eCommerce can support more than just online sales, it can enable training, onboarding, and other key business services. While it’s great to actively connect with customers through social media and messaging apps, enabling your market to conduct business with you in real time is essential. 

Meeting customer expectations in post-pandemic world

Higher customer expectations may be one of the biggest changes brought on by the pandemic. Forced into a socially distanced, contactless buying experience, consumers have come to expect that any experience will be frictionless, efficient, and connected. Meeting these high customer standards going forward will likely require at least some degree of automated business intelligence to drive greater personalization, improve decision-making and customer service, and sharpen communication across the “four Cs”: 

• Content: Such as email marketing or social media posts
• Commerce: Including physical retail, eCommerce, or a mix
• Community: Such as informative how-to webinars 
• Convenience: Including customer coupons and benefits from loyalty programs

Of course, none of this is necessarily easy or fast, but building more flexibility and automation into your business operations will also help your company stay agile even after the coronavirus pandemic ends. Learn more about marketing automation and how it can help your business by clicking here. Plus, there are many innovative companies who are finding creative ways to overcome pandemic setbacks — many of which may help your business to thrive as well.

How has your business responded to the pandemic? Please share your experience in this quick survey. 

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