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Creating a Digital Customer Experience for Your Small Business

Digital customer experience (DCX) is a buzzword among tech businesses and online marketers. Oftentimes, we associate the phrase with online shopping and e-commerce websites like Amazon. Nowadays, it’s becoming more popular among traditional businesses to have a web presence and connect with potential customers.

Let’s look at how customer experience has evolved over the years, and later we’ll get into how business owners can modernize customer experience to meet the demands of digitally enabled customers.

Customer Experience Then and Now

Customer experience typically starts with a customer walking by and getting a sense of what’s inside our business. Does it look nice and tidy? Do store people greet customers by the entrance? What about the customer service? Does it make them feel comfortable, important, and cared for? It’s the overall perception about the business during the customer’s journey. A great customer experience can be the turning point from being just a casual buyer to a lifetime source of revenue for the company.

The influx of mobile technology and subsequent growth in mobile users takes customer experience to a whole new level. Innovation gave rise to digital customer experience as businesses take their brand into the virtual space and create a seamless experience for both digital and physical customer engagement.

Bookings for hotel and accommodation are a classic example. A good digital customer experience meant customers could easily find their hotels by price range, ratings, and location, and be able to book their stay and make frictionless transactions all within the app or website. Moreover, they should be able to redeem their points and make cashless transactions through the app on-site and in-store.

Small Business Dream is built around the concept of providing users with the best digital customer experience through its digital marketplace (business directory) which also doubles as a mobile wallet.

Digitizing the Customer Experience

Here’s some way you can create a digital customer experience for your small business.

1. Engage with customers on multiple channels

Multi-channel marketing has a lot of advantages compared to just one type of customer communication. Traditional advertising is pretty much a thing of the past. Today, we need to grab people’s attention through social media, providing useful content (blogs, tutorials,etc.), and using top-of-mind strategies.

Your customers’ journey begins when they pause at your catchy post on Facebook, watch your videos on YouTube, subscribe to your mailing list, or click your page on Google’s search engine results. Webhosting sites, content management systems (CMS), and sales and marketing automation enables small businesses to build an online presence much quicker and easier at a very reasonable cost. Small Business Dream sales and marketing automation provide business owners with a little bit of everything from micro-sites, landing pages, autoresponders, follow up series, Facebook and Twitter integration, and so on.

2. Focus more on inbound marketing

Inbound marketing is more likely to succeed in this day and age compared to outbound marketing particularly among millennials. According to survey it may take around 3 to 18 months from initial engagement before they come up with a decision. It’s a continuous process of educating, following up, and sustaining their interest all throughout the journey.

Outbound marketing still has its place, although they’re still pretty much “hit-and-miss” even on the web. How many times did you have to skip a YouTube ad or got distracted by a Google ad because it failed to reach its intended audience? We call this “interruption” marketing. On the other hand, inbound marketing pulls people in (not push) by giving them exactly what they want, when they want it, and how.

One of the most commonly used methods include content marketing, search engine optimization (SEO), search engine marketing (SEM), as well as using customer relationship management (CRM), and sales and marketing automation tools. Say, you want your potential customers to receive updates specific to their own interests. Small Business Dream’s survey builder will enable you to segment your contacts, as well as sales funnels to quickly assess their levels of interest.

3. Get your business listed on a mobile marketplace

Your small business needs to be searchable. You can work on improving your Google search ranking through SEO. But if you want a faster way without having to wait for months or years to rank, business directories is the way to go. Unlike Google, you’ll have better chances being listed on business directories like Small Business Dream Business Finder app as it allows users to find your business through local searches instead of getting buried underneath in Google search results.

Mobile marketplace appeals to mobile users and digitally enabled customers who want fast and easy way to find businesses around the city. They also help in making buying decisions based on ratings and comments from customers, creating a much better digital customer experience for app users. It can also take advantage of Google or Apple’s push notification service which would allow you to have direct access to your mobile users’ phone screens.

With Small Business Dream, you can have your business listed in the Business Finder app or be able to send push notifications to app users as a Small Business Dream sales and marketing automation software subscriber.

Conclusion

Creating a digital customer experience is more than ever within reach for many small businesses. With better technologies in sales and marketing automation and more people getting access to mobile services, we can bring our businesses closer to people and level the playing field for everyone. You can take your first step by visiting Small Business Dream and learn how you can create a digital customer experience for your small business.

How Alexa Can Integrate With A CRM for Your Small Business

Amazon is making headlines in the business world (again) just a year after Alexa for Business was launched in November 2017. Echo’s lineup of smart speakers proved a commercial success with tens of millions of Alexa-enabled devices sold and over 50,000 skills (and counting) developed for Alexa by a growing community of users and developers across the globe.

Forward-looking companies have already seen the potential of deploying Alexa for Business particularly in customer service, productivity, and workflow. Companies like Air Canada, Telus Corp, Manulife, and TD Bank are working with Amazon in building company-specific skills for Alexa to create a seamless experience for workers and customers alike.

Alexa Skills in a Nutshell

Skills are essentially apps designed to work on Alexa to fulfill specific tasks. Amazon made it open for partners and third-party app developers to build skills which can either be used exclusively by the company who made them (private skills) or publish the skills for everyone to use (public skills) after being certified by Amazon.

Skill engagement has grown by 75% in 2017 and continues to grow by 50% year over year. This is key to Amazon’s success, outperforming tech giants Google, and Apple in terms of smart speaker sales during the 3rd Quarter of 2018.

Building a Smarter Workplace

Amazon goes beyond consumer electronics for smart homes to voice-activated workspaces for small businesses by adding a layer on top of Alexa’s basic features. Small businesses can do a lot more by configuring Echo devices to work with room profiles, calendars, conferencing systems and by creating custom skills to fulfill specific tasks.

Here are some examples of use cases of Alexa being used in the workplace.

Hands-free Conferencing

Conde Nast and Propel Insurance were among the first to use Alexa for Business to schedule and conduct meetings with co-workers. Alexa helps eliminate cumbersome steps when looking up for available rooms, scheduling meetings, and so on.

For instance, you may ask Alexa to schedule a meeting and it will pick a date for you, or have Alexa pull out your company calendar and choose one yourself. Join meetings on the fly by simply talking to Alexa to patch you through – no dialing in or typing passwords.

Owners of small businesses also like the fact that Alexa supports third party conferencing apps like Skype for Business, Cisco, WebEx, and Zoom, making it much easier to transition from screens and keypads to voice-activated systems (or have both at the same time).

Smart Offices

Wouldn’t it be great to have an AI who could tell your way around, pull out specific information for you, or ask maintenance to fix things around the office? Valence and General Electric were able to accomplish this feat by building Alexa skills and configuring Echo devices in a certain way.

What’s really interesting is how these companies came up with these ideas. Normally, they’ll have everything printed out on inch-thick corporate manuals/inventories or have them posted in their company website and people will have to search through them for answers.

But what if they can simply ask and have just the information they want from a voice-activated smart device like Amazon Echo? Using cutting-edge technology in conversational AI and voice recognition, businesses are able to build company-specific skills for Alexa, anything from answering specific questions, providing technical guidance, to sending out requests in a more natural way which is through spoken language.

Voice-enabled CRM

One of the best use cases of voice AI (which also feels more natural to use) is being able to interact with CRMs by speaking to it. Although there are some kind of voice-enabled CRM in the past, it’s nothing close compared to what Alexa for Business has been able to achieve.

Small businesses can now create their own custom skill or API for Alexa to interact with existing CRMs like Small Businesses Dream using their own voice. This can save them a lot of time looking up through each list or typing in new leads. So instead of switching back and forth making calls, typing customer information, inquiring about their leads and prospects, and taking notes on their last call, sales people can stay on their smart speakers and have Alexa and Small Business Dream do the rest of the job.

Stonehenge NYC is a perfect example of how a private real estate company was able to deploy Alexa for Business to create a seamless experience for their employees and rental customers by linking Alexa with their database and CRM service. They have over a hundred skills for Alexa and are continuously building more skills as they go.

Choosing the Right CRM for Alexa

Alexa’s extensibility makes it an ideal choice for a lot of third-party software solutions like Small Business Dream. It has been successfully deployed to work with some CRMs with a little help from the CRM providers, app developers, and Amazon.

Small Business Dream allows first time users to experiment with its email autoresponder, sales funnel, survey setup, landing page editor, and analytics. It’s especially important for small startups who need sales and marketing automation they can easily work on without spending too much on trainings and onboarding new employees. Small Business Dream will guide you through the whole process one step at a time, or you may reach them for consultations and mentoring on the best practices of using sales and marketing automation for your business.

Learn more on how you can successfully build your small business at SmallBizDream.com and start using our suite of tools to increase your sales and profitability like never before.

How Prepared Is Your Business For the Future?

As business owners, we know we live in tremulous times. New industries – such as cryptocurrency – are being created overnight. Jobs are disappearing. Companies are switching industries. Tech companies continue to push the boundaries of automation through deep learning and artificial intelligence.

As modern technology pushes forward into our traditional businesses, the question for many of us is, how prepared are our businesses for the future?

Machines Are Taking Over

Businesses that fail to adapt won’t stand a chance in today’s fast-changing industry. People are now being replaced by robotics and automation for quite a number of reasons. People can only do one task at a time. They get distracted, make mistakes, and buckle under pressure; machines rarely make mistakes, they don’t take breaks, and are incredibly efficient at multi-tasking.

Technology enabled businesses to grow faster than ever, and it only gets better with time. As people put more resources in technology, production costs go down, giving more room to invest in better technologies. Back then, long distance phone calls cost 25 cents per minute or around 2 dollars overseas. Nowadays, we can talk to someone from half a world away through the internet for just a fraction of the cost. (Imagine what this would do to traditional phone industry.)

Soon, nearly every task will be automated. This implies two things: first, most manual jobs that don’t require critical thinking, problem-solving, and creativity are in danger of being taken away by automation. Industries will continue to downsize and low-paying jobs might soon be gone. White-collar jobs aren’t safe from the onslaught of automation. Neural networks might soon replace analysts, accountants, and personal assistants, as A.I. and deep learning continues to evolve.

Second, companies that rely on traditional methods could soon go out of business, unless they keep up with the times and stay relevant with modern-day customers. Amazon and online shopping will always be a threat to traditional retail businesses, and telecom companies are in dire need of a solution against the growing popularity of internet calls.

Uber and Airbnb have redefined travel and accommodation, challenging long-established companies within the industry. Cryptocurrency and blockchain technology is a growing threat to our financial sector with its permissionless, secure, peer-to-peer payment system. Innovation is no longer just an option for a lot of businesses. As a matter of fact, it’s the only way for businesses to survive in this day and age.

Fortunately, some jobs are more resilient than others, particularly those that have to do with complex human emotions. So-called soft skills and out-of-the-box thinking will be more important than ever for businesses.

The World Has Changed, and So Will be Our Businesses

History is littered with the remains of old industries that fell out of use as better technologies emerge. You’d be lucky to find relics of the past in people’s attics like the portable cassette player, VHS, film camera, and encyclopaedias. Yet they remind us of the bygone era when they became a booming business in the late 80s and 90s.

Fast-forward to the present, people do things a lot differently. We spend more time on the Internet and consume online content more than from traditional media. Over 2 billion people connect with each other using handheld gadgets many times faster and more powerful than the NASA computers of the first moon landing. Our world today is vastly different, and so will be our businesses.

Conclusion

Businesses have evolved over the years alongside modern technology. Sooner or later, they’d have to come up with something fresh, something which has never been tried before. It could take the form of a much better technology, a new concept, a better strategy, or a business opportunity. Who knows what the next disruption will be?

Take your business to the next level through sales and marketing automation. Visit SmallBizDream.com and start using our suite of tools to increase your sales and profitability like never before.