What makes your SME different from the tens or hundreds of similar businesses in Malaysia? A great product? Sure. But if a slightly better product comes on the market — and one will — your customers will leave. That is, unless you can differentiate yourself with outstanding customer experience.

What? Customers will choose a good experience over a better quality product? Not exactly. But 67% of customers say that they prioritise customer experience (CX) just as much as the quality of products or services when doing business with a company.

And in today’s business environment, it is easier for your customers to choose your competitors’ products or services instead of yours. To stay ahead of the competition, companies are optimising customer experience to keep existing customers happy and attract new ones.

Here are 5 ways you can use customer experience to differentiate your brand and business:

1. Know your customer

We know, this keeps repeating. That is because knowing who your customers are is crucial. And in this case, it goes beyond just having an idea of where they live or their ages.

It means using this information to personalise experiences and recommendations to different groups of customers. In Malaysia, for instance, this might mean that you provide different experiences for your customers from different races or religious backgrounds or just different age groups.

2. Technology should be your friend

If you manage an online-only business, using technology to provide great customer experience is even more relevant. Physical stores can and should adopt technology too to make it easier to create a personalised experience.

However, don’t use technology just because. If a piece of technology — a website, chatbot or messenger — is making things more difficult for your customers to reach you, remove or replace it. Technology’s role is to make things easier not more difficult.

3. Build an emotional connection

More than just providing a product or service to customers, building an emotional connection with them improves the overall experience. This can involve recognising your customers online or offline with something as simple as remembering their names.

Customers with an emotional attachment to your brand are more likely to return and recommend your brand, and are 44% less likely to look around for other options.

4. Be where your customers need you to be

Just be easily accessible. Easier access to the Internet means that many of your customers will be online and are probably looking for you there. Will they find you or your competitor?

This might require that you create your own website where your customers can easily find you or list your business in a widely accessible business list like Yellow Pages Malaysia. Whatever it is, your contact details and working hours should be easy to be found.

5. Whatever you do, be consistent

Be it technology, your website, social media or your physical store, customers want to have the same experience everywhere that they have contact with your brand. Imagine how you would feel if your experience and identity on a brand’s website is completely different from what you get in their store.

You should have customer experience measuring systems in place for all the channels that you have with customers to understand how satisfied they are with your service. If a channel is lower or higher, then you know that you need to make changes to improve the other approaches.

Generally, technology is helping businesses improve their customer experience. But you need to have the right technology and be able to use it effectively.

Some digital tools make setting up easy enough for anyone to do. For example, unifi SurePay POS is packed with features that can help you improve your customers’ payment process.

We’ll be back soon to bring you up to speed on how you can use digital tools to enhance your customer experience. Don’t miss our next post!