Keeping Your Customers in Mind as you Update Your Business
Updating your business is an essential part of growth, but you need to be sure that the choices you make regarding these upgrades feel seamless for your client base. People that have been using your products or services for a period of time have come to expect things to function and be presented in a certain way. While you cannot remain stagnant just to avoid rocking the boat, you need to be sure that you are not turning off your existing client base and taking their loyalty for granted.
Tech Updates
Making changes regarding the tech that your business uses may feel exclusively internal, but everything trickles down. Even if you implement new software for your staff, it will impact how they perform the duties of their jobs, which is directly related to the customer experience. For logistics professionals, putting an ELD device inside each vehicle of the fleet means help recording hours of service. This might feel like it has nothing to do with your customers, but the data you get from these devices can show you where inefficiencies in staffing might lie which clearly lends itself to servicing your customers.
AI technology is another way to update your business, having chatbots handle customer service issues that formally had to be dealt with by a live member of your team creates an opening for that person to take on another role. This also give your customers more instant responses no matter the day of the week or time of the day.
Website Changes
People are going to take to the internet before they are going to pick up a phone if they need to know something about your business. You need to be sure that your website is engaging and user friendly. Think about the common reasons that both existing and potential customers would visit your website and be sure that the answers to those questions are easily accessible. People do not want to have to click through five pages just to learn your hours of operation. As you make changes to your website understand how easy it is for people to leave your page in a second if they do not find what they are looking for and hop over to the website of your competitor.
Remote Work
Your business has likely already adopted a work from home aesthetic, but as we get into a period where this is looking to be more permanent than was originally intended, think about what practices you need to put in place so that your customers do not feel the shift. If you need to hold client meetings virtually make sure that getting to the meeting is easy and that everyone has what they need to be able to [participate. You might have to update things like computer cameras and speaker systems for your remote employees so that they can still get their jobs done.
Make sure that you are still closely monitoring your remote team. There is a fine line between monitoring and micromanaging, but it is a function of your job as a small business owner to make sure that everyone is on task. Progress reports, check ins, and casual conversations about their goings on each week are all good suggestions for ensuring that your customers are still being prioritized even if your staff is not collaborating in person.
