Your Customer Service Is Killing Your Sales! | Small Business #Marketing Tips

If you want to know where a business is today, look at their sales. But if you want to know where a business will be tomorrow, look at their customer experience. The influence of customer experience touches every department in the business. It's how and where customers are exposed to your brand and your product. It's how your website looks and works, or how friendly and knowledgeable your staff are. It's how your distribution partners deal with retailers. It's how your product or service is delivered to your customers, how they use it, and how after-sales issues are handled. As with branding, customer experience is demonstrable and tangible evidence of an organisation's core values, aims, and goals. Because of this, I think customer experience teams should be part of the marketing department rather than, say, under support. With ever wider customer choice and more effective competition, customer experience is an integral and crucial driving factor for sales. It should therefore be treated as such. Customer experience should be considered a strategic business tenet worthy of attention at an executive level, in as much the same way as any marketing or sales strategy. If suitably defined and executed, an effective customer experience position not only delivers increased perceived business and product value, it helps increase customer retention and provides marketing opportunities in terms of testimonials and brand advocacy. It helps product management and R&D create fit-for-purpose products and prioritizes development roadmaps. It can even boost staff morale as a clear and tangible demonstration of business ethos. Service with a Smile— now more than ever.