Customers Are Changing – Is Your Business Ready?

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Customers Are Changing – Is Your Business Ready?

By Sarah Action | Edited BY Micah Zimmerman | Entrepreneur Magazine | September 6, 2024

Extractive Summary of the Article | Listen

For 25 years, the author has worked on and helped build some of the best-known B2C and B2B brands – from LinkedIn to Yahoo!, Coca-Cola brands, Home Depot and now BILL.   She has seen a consistent trend how customers are changing.

Here are four simple and effective strategies the author has seen Small and Medium Business use to respond to these shifts in customer behavior and leverage them for success.

1. Build a seamless customer journey.  A customer’s journey begins before a sale. From the moment they signal intent, you want to deliver a coherent, holistic and seamless experience. Creating this experience can be tough because, typically, different teams look after different parts of that customer journey. This process can cause friction or missed opportunities as customers move through the customer funnel.  If you can align sales, marketing, customer support and product or engineering teams and point them towards the same north star of a ‘seamless customer journey,’ you can deliver a great experience at every touchpoint.  Your leadership team plays a central role in facilitating this cross-functional collaboration, but establishing a culture of empowerment at every level is the key to ensuring all employees feel ownership of the customer journey.
2. Communicate with customers.  Great brands don’t just market to customers — they open a two-way dialogue with them that is targeted to their needs and interests and authentic to company values and voice. To do this, they start by listening to customers’ needs and then building a brand and marketing strategy around them.  An effective two-way communication approach meets customers where they are — and in the modality they choose. Focus on how your communications can add value to customers’ lives. For example, share educational content to help customers optimize your product or service. Building community between customers is a fantastic way to deepen emotional connections with your brand.
3. Make technology a competitive advantage.  Technology is a game-changer for SMBs looking to understand better and serve their customers. As automation and AI become more powerful and ubiquitous, so too does the ability of SMBs to incorporate technology across every part of the customer journey.
4. Live by your values to foster trust.  In a competitive landscape, trust is the most valuable asset a SMB has. To build trust, you first need to deliver on your product or service promise to customers. You also need to establish emotional connections with customers to translate that trust into long-term loyalty. Do they believe in your mission? Do they understand your commitment to innovate for them? Can they feel the empathy you have for their needs?  Trust starts with a company’s values and culture. Values guide who you hire, the products you build, the service you provide and how you communicate. Values provide certainty, security and reassurance to customers. If something goes wrong, customers need to trust you’ll put their interests first and be accountable to them. It’s also not enough to write values on a wall or website – you must infuse them at every level of your organization.

2 key takeaways from the article

1. For B2B and B2C brands, customers are no longer satisfied with being passive recipients of products and services. Increasingly, they seek active engagement with brands and a consistent experience along their journey with a brand. Advances in technology and AI are key drivers, heightening expectations for new innovations in e-commerce or self-service tools. Also, with more competition, switching costs are lower, making retention all the more important. And with a more agile, online and mobile business presence, customers expect to see their feedback quickly reflected.
2. Concentrating on agile, empathetic and customer-centric approaches can help SMBs reap the benefits of an increasingly engaged, tech-savvy and community-oriented customer base.   Four simple and effective strategies Small & Medium Business use to respond to these shifts in customer behavior and leverage them for success are:  build a seamless customer journey, communicate with customers, make technology a competitive advantage, and live by your values to foster trust.

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Topics:   Marketing, Branding, Creativity, Customer Relationship Management, Trust, Values, Communication