No business can ever survive without providing a positive customer experience. But what happens when you have a limited budget due to poor sales, increased expenses, etc.

The first thing that businesses try to tighten their purse strings on during such situations is marketing and customer experience. However, customer experience delivery needs to be a top priority for businesses to improve in this competitive business landscape. Customer experience is the communication you have with your brand across their customer journey. In case your company is running on a budget, you can still offer a grand customer experience.

You can still create a profound impact when you look at improving customer experience on a budget.

Here are some of the strategies you can adopt while trying to deliver a great customer experience on a budget. 

Use voice-of-customer, which is almost free 

You can improve customer experience by giving sales, marketing, technology, and product teams relevant insights about what customers think to guide their policies, strategies, and processes. This means one needs to piece together customer info across formats- surveys, reports, internet, complaints, etc. Through this, we can find and work on valuable customer experience insights. This simplifies aspects of the non-customer facing groups and bridges gaps in customer reality-expectation patterns. Customer feedback is the most important asset that can help you improve your understanding of the product and customer.

Maintain a customer-centric mentality that does not cost a penny 

If your team has to reduce the CX budget, there are still certain ways to drive returns for the company. Establishing a customer-centric mentality will help improve CX in a great manner. Analyzing customer information can give you ideas on connecting with customers by chat, self-serve, or messaging. This will help improve the campaigns’ quality, messaging, effectiveness, and targeting. A customer-centric mentality will help the company in the long run. It is important for customer success. You can, for example, work with the marketing team to create customer-focused plans for messaging, social media, and campaigns. The product team can also take customer suggestions to create better quality products that match customer requirements.

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Focus on building your internal brand 

Engaging employees is important to make a difference in customer experience. The point is not about adding taglines, or logos, or images. It is about making everything about customers. You need to ensure customer insights form a core part of your internal brand. This means CX is viewed as the basis for business existence. Internal branding means ensuring employees are customer-centric and invested in customer sentiment streams. This means accepting customer feedback and complaints. It also means motivating and following up on specific programs and criteria.

Keep your ears open to actively listen to the customers’ needs 

Customer listening is important to assist businesses in using CX insights for daily decision-making and strategic accountability. These will offer useful insights that describe customer circumstances, goals, needs, and experiences. This will help set expectations around customer experience. The main points you need to evaluate for customer sentiment include-

• Is the customer aware of the experience methods?
• Has the customer been reached out to?
• Are customer segments represented correctly?
• Are employees involved in customer listening?

These questions, once answered, help understand internal branding, investment, innovation, and development.

Provide self-service options to the customers 

Did you know that 81% of customers look at solving a problem by themselves before reaching out to support personnel? A whopping 71% of customers look to solve a problem by themselves. Customers like to be responsible for their own solutions. This self-service option will help improve customer sentiment. This is a scalable, efficient, progressive, and cost-effective solution. You can provide great content and customer education to help customers look at answers proactively. Customers can always get in touch if they have more questions. So, quick guides, walk-throughs, and videos can help improve the company’s understanding of customers.

Creatively resolve customer problems 

Nearly 80% of customers do not do business due to bad customer service in the company. This is why customer experience and customer service need to be a priority. Creatively solving customer problems will help gain a loyal customer for life. Customer service is more than saying thank you, please, or sorry. You need to think out of the box to offer a creative solution to customers. Run specific customer marketing campaigns and see the response. Go local, go hyperlocal, in fact. Come up with interesting aspects to solve problems.

Get your C-Suite to buy in your CX case 

You know who the decision-maker with CX cases is, right? It is the C-Suite. While selling customer success to the C-Suite is tough. Doing that during a budget cut period is even tougher. The key aspects of this include-

• Talk about how the product will transform CX and the company’s future
• Showcase the long-term effects to investors
• Do a data presentation to the senior executives about the CX case
• Keep churn central to the conversation. If your CX gets better, your churn rate will reduce. Also, this will lead to more customers coming in due to improved CX.
• Show the CX plan in a tangible form so that it is easier to understand for others.

By embracing CX solutions that create improved onboarding experiences, you can reduce touchpoints and ensure steady revenue streams.

Conclusion 

Remember, the customer is the focus while delivering a positive customer experience. As long as you focus on this particular thing, you will do well in providing empowering experience to your customers with a purse-string budget. Follow the tips that we have mentioned in this write-up, and you will be able to fulfill your objective of providing an excellent customer experience on a budget!

WRITTEN BYDattatraya Shetty

Dattatraya Shetty is an IT Professional with 2 Decades of experience in areas of Product Development, Implementation & Service Delivery Management. As the Head of Implementations and SOC Compliance in Smartkarrot he is on a mission to provide relishing customer experience.

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