Every business is looking for a way to differentiate itself from its competition. There are several ways to do so, but they are not all advantageous or easy to accomplish. The best way to differentiate your business is by improving customers’ experiences.
How a Business Differentiates Itself from Its Competition Matters
One way a business can differentiate itself from competitors is to be a low-price seller, but that is not a sustainable strategy. It is a race to the bottom.
Another way is to differentiate your products or services from the rest of the market. However, this is extremely difficult because of the Internet and social media.
Equipment World’s article “The Adaptable Motor Grader: Models Change to Accommodate Contractors” illustrates this point when it notes that although motor graders’ fundamental functions remain the same, “the industry’s four major manufacturers have stepped up to bring in a host of technologies to make them easier on operators and more productive.” It goes on to explain that sizes and features are evolving to meet the changing demands of contractors.
Focus on Customer Expectations When Improving Customers’ Experiences
Every business has customers who buy, use, or resell the products they purchase from you. These people all have a say in whether their company will continue to purchase products from you. Also, they expect how your products and your team should interact with their teams. Therefore, to grow, customer experience improvement should be integrated into your continuous improvement efforts.
Every day, customers are exposed to experiences from your company and other companies they do business with. They mentally compare their experiences and rank their partners from best to worst. If a company is at the top of the bad list for a while, customers start looking for ways to replace the offenders.
Recently, when the agency Merkle examined 7,000 business-to-business (B2B) purchasing experiences of 3,622 B2B buyers it surveyed, it found that only 34% of buyers give repeat business to a B2B they have previously purchased from.
“It is much more likely that buyer expectations have moved on and that they are now outstripping the speed at which B2B brand experiences are changing,” Merkle says. “B2B brand experiences are failing to keep pace with buyer expectations.”
“Customers are divinely discontent. Their expectations are never static,” Amazon founder Jeff Bezos said in 2018. “Yesterday’s ‘wow’ quickly becomes today’s ordinary.”
Why Customer Satisfaction Is Difficult to Manage
Other than luck, which is not a strategy, the only way to keep your customers continuously satisfied is to collect feedback from them, analyze their data, and implement corrective action programs. Up to a few years ago, this was an easy process to manage. Unfortunately, two things have changed:
- Expectations now increase rapidly (see above).
- People feel overwhelmed by their “day job.” They defer customer experience (CX) improvements work to focus on their primary responsibilities.
This is a deadly combination. It is like when community members get together to paint a shared building, and it starts raining. The rain quickly turns into a thunderstorm, yet the painting continues because the painters are committed to their agreed task. They ignore the new challenge, the storm. Everyone is working on an old, out-of-date task instead of the latest job.
6 Ways to Improve Customer Experiences
There are several changes a business must make to ensure it retains a high percentage of its customers and closes a high percentage of its prospects:
1. Move CX improvements high on employees’ priority lists.
2. Collect customer feedback at short intervals and at a steady rate. Depending on the workgroup, feedback should be collected after transactions, after a specific time has passed, or after significant events. For example:
- After completing each critical transaction, technical support, accounts receivable collection calls, and e-commerce orders should initiate a customer contact.
- Sales, marketing, customer success, and service should survey a set number of accounts each month.
- After an order is booked, a product is delivered and made useable, or when an item reaches the end of life, someone should interview the critical person in the account and create a case study with high and low experiences compared to their expectations.
3. When any feedback data is analyzed, it is essential to identify new issues that impact your customers. If employees have a choice of correcting new or old problems, try to prioritize the new ones. You can stop an annoyance from becoming a significant issue easier than fixing a long-standing minor issue that the customers may have already passed on.
4. Remember that perfection is the enemy of good enough. Try to close action items quickly yet wholly. Satisfying 95% of customers on every issue is better than meeting 100% on a few problems.
5. Clean up some of the old but relatively unimportant issues if the opportunity presents itself. It will make your employees feel better.
6. Customers should feel that your business is their partner and not a vendor. If your business is perceived as a vendor, you may benefit from outside help identifying actions to improve your customers’ experiences.
Related article: Consistent Experiences Drive Customer Retention
About Middlesex Consulting
Middlesex Consulting is an experienced team of professionals with the primary goal of helping capital equipment companies create more value for their clients and stakeholders. Middlesex Consulting continues to provide superior solutions to meet the needs of its clients by focusing on our strengths in Services, Manufacturing, Customer Experience, and Engineering. If you want to learn more about how we can help your organization create or retain more customers, please contact us or check out some of our free articles and white papers here.
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