How to Deliver an Exceptional Customer Experience: 4 Approaches
It’s often said that accounting is the language of business—and that language is typically numbers and data. But for some firms, serving their customers goes beyond crunching numbers. They want to win the minds and hearts of clients. It’s an ambitious—and highly effective—business strategy.
I’ve dedicated my career to serving small and midsize businesses (SMBs), and some of the most effective leaders I’ve met understand one thing: Success doesn’t just require delivering great products. You need to deliver an exceptional customer experience. In fact, according to PwC, 73% of customers consider a great customer experience a key factor in their purchasing decisions.
What that customer experience looks like will differ for every business. But there are four common approaches any business can take to help deliver a truly great customer experience.
Offer an Exceptional Customer Experience by Focusing on These 4 Things
1. Invest in the Entire Customer Journey, Not Just Support
The first step to a great customer experience is recognizing that support is only one piece of the customer puzzle. Your customer’s journey begins at their first signal of interest or intent. It continues through onboarding, to customer support and beyond, as they leverage new innovation or cross-sell opportunities. The goal is to build a puzzle where all pieces of customer touchpoints fit together to create a coherent, comprehensive, and high-quality experience.
Building cross-functional feedback cycles is key. This ensures information received from customers at any stage is incorporated into how you engage, support, and serve them. Whether it's during a sale, in product testing, or during customer support, a holistic approach to incorporating feedback can help remove friction and ensure you don’t miss signals from customers.
One mistake I often see companies make is "shipping their organization chart" to customers, in other words, exposing the organizational structure to customers as the customers navigate their experiences. A well-implemented set of cross-functional handshakes can help minimize this, so customers feel that they are talking to one provider, not a set of disjointed teams.
2. Empower Your Customer Teams With Data
Customer support teams are the face of your business. Their ability to create positive, lasting impressions is a superpower. By giving teams the right data, you can empower them to reach their full potential.
What is the "right" data? To answer this, you need to first understand what your support team is trying to achieve, then measure and optimize for that "north star." As a leader, bringing a laser focus on what matters most will help ensure your support teams are empowered by data.
For example, when I started in my role two years ago, my team was focused on different support metrics. To drive greater alignment and focus, we doubled down on one "north star" metric: Customer Effort Score (CES), which measured how easily our SMB customers could resolve issues.
With an enhanced focus on this metric, we gathered and segmented data according to customer groups, communication channels, and time periods. This highly targeted and tailored data uncovered new actionable insights and feedback that helped us strengthen and streamline service in a way that mattered most to our customers.
By understanding and measuring the "right" data for your business, your support teams can better anticipate customer needs, resolve issues swiftly, and personalize interactions to drive greater customer satisfaction and experience.
3. Drive Deeper Connections With Customers
Technology tools like customer resource management (CRM) software are a great way to track feedback and build trust with your customers. But it can also be as simple as finding creative ways for teams to hear directly from them. You can invite customers to talk at company meetings, arrange for cross-functional teams to visit customers to see how they experience the product, or invite different teams to listen to customer support calls.
At my company, we recently invited four customers to share their experience with employees about using our platform, as well as challenges and opportunities their businesses face. Their feedback was invaluable because it was heard by every part of our organization, helping us to gain deeper connections and deliver a better product and better customer experience.
And as your business grows, you need to find ways to scale support and services, without losing that vital customer connection. One of our customers, Escalon, is a fast-growing accounting firm that does this exceptionally well. With the growing need to deliver many services virtually to reach more clients, they found a proactive strategy to also engage clients outside the virtual meeting room by organizing networking events, lunches, and other in-person activities.
This approach is helping them serve more clients, while also helping them gain a deeper understanding of clients’ lived experiences and pain points. Importantly, by prioritizing human contact, the Escalon team is driving deeper connections that enable better collaboration, and build trust and loyalty.
4. Embed Empathy
SMBs serve their customers and play an invaluable role in supporting our communities and economies. It’s one of the reasons why I love delivering technology for SMBs: I empathize with their passion and mission. This empathy is also one of the most powerful tools I have as a business and customer leader.
As a consumer, we know instinctively when our experience is driven by empathy. Great businesses understand our pain points, experiences, and goals. And when we feel this empathy, we’re more likely to be loyal customers. As a business leader though, embedding empathy across the customer journey isn’t always straightforward. It’s hard to measure employee empathy, and it’s not something you can easily teach.
One of the best ways to embed empathy throughout the customer journey is through shared company values. By anchoring on a strong foundation of values, you can build a team that shares your mission, passion, and empathy for customers. To do this, hire for your values, talk about them regularly, and reward employees who demonstrate them every day. Incorporate values into performance feedback, and let values guide important business decisions.
Key Customer Experience Takeaways
Delivering a customer experience that is enriched at every touchpoint by data, deep connections, understanding, and empathy will set your business apart. A cohesive, delightful experience implemented across the customer lifecycle can be a significant competitive advantage. And in a competitive environment, investing in this customer journey is one of the best bets you can make.
About the Author
Post by: Sofya Pogreb
Sofya Pogreb, Chief Operating Officer of BILL, brings more than 20 years of experience in operational roles at financial technology companies. Before joining BILL, Sofya was the chief operating officer of NEXT Insurance, where she led insurance, data, and operations functions serving small and midsize businesses across the country. Sofya has served as chief operating officer at TrueAccord, where she built and led the company’s operations and analytics functions. Sofya holds a Masters of Computer Science from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Bachelor of Finance from the MIT Sloan School of Management.
Company: BILL
Website: www.bill.com
