Businesses open their doors every day intending to attract customers.

As you all know, without customers, there is no business. In an increasingly competitive market place, it is those who know how to offer and maintain the best customer experience who will prevail.

As a result, many entrepreneurs are now trying so hard to improve their customer experience offerings to achieve customer delight, satisfaction, and retention.

A satisfied customer will become loyal, buy more, and act as an ambassador of your business.

According to a study by PWC (2018), using low prices to lure customers to your business is becoming outdated.

Instead, customer experience has become the cornerstone of any business success.

A report by Harvard Business Review indicated that customer retention, even as little as 5 per cent through customer experience, could increase your sales or profit by 70 per cent.

But it would be best if you appreciated that customer experience is a process that goes beyond a minute or two of a physical business transaction.

It includes packaging of your goods and services, product use, and reliability. It extends to convenience and even personalised marketing.

That means everyone in the company is responsible for enhancing customer experience, unlike in the past, when customer service was the sole responsibility of the customer service department or salespeople.

Unfortunately, there are glaring blunders that SMEs- that is both leaders and employees, continue to make every day, which hinders customer satisfaction and retention.

In this article, we highlight some of such pitfalls, combined with proven approaches you can adopt to avoid such blunders to help you attract new customers, and enable you to retain both the old and the new.

Treatment of internal customers  

This article will interest you: SMEs and Effective Supply Chain Management Strategies

The face of any business is its employees, who are the internal customers. From making sales to delivering services and attending to customers’ inquiries, employees interface with external customers more than the CEO or business owners.

What that means for CEOs is that they have to ensure that each staff is happy and motivated to deliver excellent customer experience. Of priority is the frontline employees – the customer-facing staff.

A review by CSP on customer happiness indicated that dissatisfied employees run the risk of not only feeling unhappy but channelling that unhappiness into behaviours that worsen customers’ experience and satisfaction.

A CEO or business owner can make employees happy through timely pay, training, and creating a friendly working environment.

Do not hurt your brand by hurting your employees. In the end, the customer will dump your business.

As an SME leader, endeavour to maintain a highly motivated and energised staff and turn them into your effective business ambassadors. The self-motivated and inspired team will serve your business customers with a wide smile on their faces.

Therefore, it is essential that as a leader, you pay extra attention to employees’ physiological and health needs, particularly the post-COVID 19 effects, so that they do not transfer their frustrations to customers.

Avoid confrontation with customers

In the course of your business, you will encounter customers who are hard to please. Some will come to your business filled with frustrations from home, work, or friendships.

Your salespersons then end up as the targets of their unhappiness. But because they are your customers, strive to render polite services.

A backlash with a customer, especially in the age of social media, may devastate your relationship and reputation with several other loyal and potential customers. You may be eventually successful in justifying your reaction by exposing the fault of the customer, but the damage already done may never be repaired.

According to Vala A. (2017) blogs, over 65 per cent of the customers switch brands based on bad customer experience.

To ensure your business doesn’t fall within the above statistics, equip your staff with skills in decision making and handling of demanding customers.

This does not come cheap, though. So do establish early in your organisation a customer-centred culture, and reinforced regularly with training.

Never ignore customer complaints and feedback

We are living in a digital age where decisions are grounded in real data.

If your organisation or company has customers who send in their feedback and complaints, consider it a privilege.

Feedback and complaints are a good measure of the level of customer experience and satisfaction with your product or service.

When you receive a customer complaint about your packaging, hygiene, and or the speed at which you deliver products or services, act immediately.

Failure to act on customer feedback can make you not only lose your customer but worse, lose them on a sour note.

Remember, your business isn’t about you. Doing what delights your customer is what keeps you relevant in the market place. When they are satisfied, they will refer more other customers to you.

Deliver service and product with a human touch

Recommended article: How Superior Customer Service Determines Your Business Growth

According to psychologists, every person has his or her soft spot.

In serving your customers, ensure that you have a human touch in the service and product delivery.

If you are in the take-out restaurant sector, for example, why not personalise the service you deliver to your high premium customers? Why not inscribe the name of your regular customer on the delivery pack, for instance?

Or if you are into service delivery, you can send specially crafted birthday messages to your clients.

An emotional connection with your customer builds loyalty and more spending, which is right for your business.

Remember, you are competing with so many other people in the same industry, and you should have a strategy to outcompete them. The magic will partly be in how you deliver that product and service. So be innovative in your delivery system and make it more humane.

Make your business accessible to your customers

A lot more businesses have in the past decades improved their interactions with their clients.

Sadly though, many more have not taken the initiative to make communication between their customers and the business comfortable.

Even with the upsurge in social media and mobile phone usage, some businesses cannot be found online or contacted by telephone.

Others have websites and social media platforms, but they take years to respond to customer inquiries and requests, or they completely ignore them.

The more customers find you digitally invisible or electronically unavailable, the more you lose business.

Make your physical and digital access to your business easy for clients.

Studies have shown that at least 67 per cent of B2B is now online. Improve your digital presence and move with the trends.

Stay alert to these pitfalls in order to catch them early. Practice the suggestions, and you can be confident that not even the sky will be the limit for your business.