Customers Are Changing – Is Your Business Ready? | JP

In the fast-paced world of beauty, Glamnetic transformed a simple idea — better eyelash extensions — into a $50 million business in five years. Their success stemmed not only from an innovative product but also from their approach to customer engagement.

For 25 years, I’ve 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. I’ve seen a consistent trend that Glamnetic co-founders Ann McFerran and Kevin Gould understood instinctively: customers are changing.

A new generation of customers

Shifts in customer behavior have implications for businesses of all sizes. However, small and midsize businesses (SMBs) that are particularly time — and resource-constrained can face unique challenges in understanding and responding to changes in customer expectations.

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.

Here are four simple and effective strategies I’ve seen SMBs 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.

Some companies, like BILL, have brought together GTM teams (sales and marketing) to drive greater alignment and focus from the beginning of the customer journey. Creating circular feedback loops is very important to ensure customer insights gained at any point can inform business strategy, product and engineering, marketing or support.

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.

Related: How to Nurture Your Leads and Create the Right 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.

Glamnetic did this exceptionally well. They harnessed the power of Instagram, user-generated videos and genuine customer interaction to grow a devoted “Glam Fam” community. They capitalized on the trend of social media discovery.

Through this, they identified a growing demand for more natural-looking lashes and press-on nails and expanded their product line. Glamnetic curated a space for authentic customer interaction and harnessed this community to ensure every interaction was an opportunity to learn and strengthen customer relationships.

Related: 5 Ways to Communicate More Effectively With Your Customers

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.

For example, financial automation software can help you improve operational efficiency and productivity and ensure teams can spend more time with customers and less time in the back office. Customer relationship management (CRM) tools track interactions and gather customer insights to spot trends that can feed into every part of your business.

Analytics platforms help you understand customer behavior on your website or app so you can better target your communications with customers. And AI-powered chat can equip SMBs to provide 24/7 customer support.

Take Amy Liu, founder and CEO of Tower 28 Beauty. Amy started her business with a mission to sell clean beauty and skincare products. But she found herself spending time on manual back-office tasks. By upgrading their technology and investing in financial automation software, Amy used the time she saved to focus on expanding their retail footprint. Their products are now carried in Sephora stores across the U.S. and Canada. Automation also helped Amy stay focused on the one that mattered most: customers.

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.

Related: 4 Reasons Values Matter So Much in Business

At BILL, our five values (authentic, accountable, humble, passionate and fun) inform our business priorities and decisions and guide our engagement with customers. We measure and reward employee performance against our values. We reiterate them in every company meeting and discuss them with customers, investors and partners.

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. By instilling strong company values, leveraging technology, building a seamless customer journey and engaging in two-way communication, SMBs will not only earn the loyalty and trust of customers — they’ll also win.