The Power of Referrals: Driving Customer Growth
Entrepreneurs are always watching their often-limited budgets and figuring out how to keep cashflows alive. Marketing expenses that are a necessity may be prohibitive and thus running on referrals becomes business gold. Referrals though don’ t happen in a vacuum and are as a result of exceptional experiences that cause customer delight. A growth in customer base from referrals makes good business sense.
Exceeding customer expectations is what triggers customers to make referrals by putting their names- that carry their own trust and credibility- behind brands and businesses. Obsessing over customer happiness thus is a two-prong weapon that addresses both customer needs as well as the business needs too.
Early Loyalists: Maintaining CX Love
With a major focus on scaling and increasing the number and diversity of customers, there’ s an imminent risk of dumbing down and diluting the efforts needed to sustain the CX excellence meted upon early customers. This category of loyal customers who provided support and belief in the early days need continuous love.
A special categorization is needed for them, and different ways to honor them devised including personal appreciation, priority treatment, loyalty programmes and customized packages that will serve to not only maintain crucial relationships over time, but also faith and belief that consistency in commitment is a held value.
Systematized CX: The Catalyst for Scale
Delighting customers should not be a hit and run matter. It needs to be a consistent part of the business value proposition. The transition must happen from founder led interventions to the development of processes and systems to integrate delight into the everyday DNA of the business. Beyond just delivering, documentation for sustainability is needed.
Every new player in the ecosystem needs to embody the same modus operandi towards ensuring customer success. Constant delivery that elicits customer satisfaction is a delight, and when customers find that excellence is an everyday fare in the business, they will return, and scaling will not only be possible but will happen naturally and sustainably.
The Consistency Continuum: CX All Round
Consistency is said to be King, and business growth and scaling requires this mantra to carry across‘ all and sundry’ in the business. With expansion comes delegation- yet another high-risk situation that can cause dilution of customer service( s). Founders need to ensure that all parties both internal and external mirror the businesses’ commitment to exceptional customer experience.
To have this come alive means that relationships need to be built with all level of third parties be they outsourced services, suppliers, partners or any other gateway to the customers. Clear communication of expectations and outlining of zero tolerances is mandatory. Customer experience is only as strong as the weakest customer centric link. These need to be identified and fortified in advance and over time.
Internal Culture: Shaping External Experience
How a business treats and handles its internal customers no matter how few, has direct impact on the external customer service to the end users / consumers. Staff cannot produce what they don’ t have, and if there is a toxic work environment and so shall it spill over onto customers. Internal rot cannot beget external excellence in any way, shape or form.
Internal customer experience needs purposeful intention, and the team however small it may be, must not feel disenfranchised and lower in the pecking order in comparison to buying customers. Culture does eat strategy for breakfast, and the business strategy to grow and scale can be brought to its knees by uncooperative staff. Excellence must start from within.
Learn From the Best- Benchmarking Brilliance
Aspiration and having an audacious vision provide the energy to keep going even when the vagaries of entrepreneurship come calling. Various brands and businesses world over are renown for delivering world-class customer experiences and there should be a conscious effort to learn from these examples by benchmarking and adapting for local excellence.
The voice of the customer provides another key source of learning. Customer feedback constitutes a treasure trove of incoming market research towards refining products and services. Proactively seeking the voice of the customer creates a platform for great learnings and progress. Customers actually don’ t expect perfection, they expect responsiveness and pivotal change as a reaction to their feedback and complaints, and this forms the bedrock of loyal customer relationships.
The Entrepreneur’ s Well-Being: Personal CX
The most important factor to wade through the entrepreneurial jungle and to deliver customer experience excellence starts with the entrepreneur’ s own well-being. A founder’ s empty cup that’ s operating from being stressed, overworked, and burnedout cannot generate leadership with empathy or build a culture of customer delight.
Self-care in all its forms- physical, emotional, psychological- is not a luxury. It is a business success strategy. When entrepreneurs are centered and clearheaded, they can dig in to their internal resources to keep things alive, maintain calm in the face of chaos, and demonstrate the consistency needed to steer matters towards all round success. The health of the enterprise is often a direct reflection of the health of the entrepreneur.
In the jungle of entrepreneurship, where competition is fierce and resources are limited, customer experience is the X-factor that keeps things afloat and cause survival against all odds. It’ s the ingredient that is a must-include in all product and service servings. No matter the business growth stage- start up or power scaling, entrepreneurs who build their businesses on the foundation of internal and external customer experience excellence will live to stand the test of time. Choices have consequences and it is at the behest of the business owner to choose to lean positively in the direction of customer value at all times.
Customer experience excellence isn’ t just a silver bullet- it’ s the whole armor.
Carolyne Gathuru is the founder and director of strategy at LifeSkills Consulting. She has several years of experience in customer experience strategy development and training. You can commune with her on this or related issues via mail at: CGathuru @ life-skills. co. ke.