Your clients are the lifeblood of your business. The strong relationships that you can maintain with every single one are among the core strengths of your small business. However, you’ll only be able to keep up that level of connection if you manage your clients’ experiences effectively.
Customer experience is crucial nowadays, and everyone has high expectations. 84% of customers say that they’ll abandon a brand after they have 3 poor experiences with them, but 17%, or around 1 in every 6 customers, say they’ll walk after only 1 bad experience. That means that you can’t afford to put a foot wrong with your client management.
When you’re a small business with a limited workforce, it’s vital that you make the best use you can of every employee. You want to provide the tools your employees need to punch above their weight in delivering excellent client experience management.
1. Wix: A professional website
Providing outstanding customer experiences begins with setting up realistic client expectations, and your website is the best place to do that.
According to reports by PWC, there’s a mismatch between customer expectations and what businesses deliver. At a time when 46% of consumers will abandon your business, if your employees are not knowledgeable and only 38% say that the employees they interact with understand their needs, it’s vital to make promises that you can fulfill and communicate clearly what your clients can expect.
Use Wix to design a professional-looking website stocked with information about your business. Include an easy-to-find and well-built FAQ section so that clients can find answers for themselves about frequent questions like your lines of service, pricing, special offers, etc.
72% of consumers expect a navigable website, and 56% prefer to self-service with online resources.
2. vcita: Instant, online appointment scheduling platform
It’s important to show that you respect your clients’ time by making it quick and frictionless for them to book, confirm, and, when necessary, cancel their appointments online. With vcita’s integrated online appointment scheduling platform, there’s no need for clients to wait for someone to pick up the phone or waste time emailing back and forth trying to find a convenient time.
The platform also generates automated reminders that help your clients remember their appointments, saving you from wasting time on sending them reminders yourself. vcita also offers a CRM system which integrates with its appointment scheduling platform. Therefore, you can always keep track of your most frequent customers, tap into data about who prefers the morning slot vs. afternoon slot, etc. Since you’ll know your clients’ preferences, you’ll always be able to respond from a place of insight and suggest offers that match their needs.
3. Mention: Social media monitoring
Consumers increasingly see social media as another channel for communication with your business, and they expect responsiveness. 61% of consumers agree that it’s very or extremely important for a brand to respond to their feedback on social media; 59% use it to ask questions about a product or service; and 52% use social media to resolve issues with a brand.
Social media monitoring tools like Mention help you meet these expectations by alerting you whenever your business is mentioned on social media. In this way, you can:
- Improve your customer support by dealing with complaints and criticism in a timely manner;
- Encourage more happy clients to leave positive reviews, because they’ll see that you respond with appreciation;
- Amplify the reviews you receive to boost brand awareness and raise your brand reputation.
Mention notifies you whenever your business is mentioned anywhere on social media; on review sites like Yelp and TripAdvisor; and on marketplaces like Amazon and Booking.com. Mention makes it quick and easy for you to troubleshoot complaints and amplify praise whenever someone tags your business.
4. Trello: Integrated customer support across multiple channels
Every business needs to deliver customer support quickly and smoothly. When your customers get in touch with a question or complaint, they want it to be resolved fast. Consumers expect you to respond to an email within 3-4 hours; a text message within 4-5 minutes; and on live chat, in under 1 minute. If you’re going to meet those deadlines, you need an effective way of organizing customer service tickets between your agents.
Additionally, your clients don’t want to have to retell their story multiple times as they get handed on to different agents. 86% of consumers expect that the next customer service representative they talk with will know their previous interactions, but only 24% find their expectations are met. To be one of the 24%, you need excellent project management to support collaboration on tickets and help your teams share information about each case.
Use Trello project management software to ensure all your customer support agents can share information and transfer tickets smoothly between representatives, helping you to deliver swift and relevant responses to customer support tickets on any channel, without dropping the ball.
5. Fivestars: Loyalty program for top customers
Fivestars is a great choice if you’re looking for an app that makes it easy to customize a loyalty program for your small business. You can use it to create personalized rewards for different customer segments, speed things up with templates for various industries, and automate birthday and anniversary bonuses and gifts for all your clients. Finally, you can manage the entire thing digitally wherever you go.
Successful small businesses know how to maximize client management
Every small business can deliver outstanding customer experiences, as long as they have the right tools for client management.with a well-stocked toolbox, you can delight your customers by communicating clearly, streamlining the process for booking and changing appointments, responding quickly to resolve customer support requests on social media and omnichannel, and providing appealing rewards schemes.
