For all businesses and organizations, regardless of size, the experience that the customer has with your business from start to finish – from the moment they meet you via marketing or word of mouth until the moment they cease to be your customer – must be flawlessly consistent.
When small businesses pull off this hat trick of “consistency” especially well, they reap generous rewards on the bottom line. Consistency in a desired customer experience that makes your customers feel like insiders is a sure meal ticket to success – the magic formula that all businesses are looking for – and few achieve. A desired customer experience is one that is remarkably different (for a true understanding of “remarkable” – read some Seth Godin books), convenient, and most of all creates a simple, easy-to-understand and experience…well, experience.
What does consistency look like in small business?
Merriam-Webster.com defines “consistency” as “a condition of adhering together” and as an “agreement or harmony of parts or features to one another or a whole.” But this is the part I really like… Merriam-Webster says “specifically: ability to be asserted together without contradiction.”
That’s really the bottom line. Examine your business today and look for anything that might contradict the specific and remarkable customer experience that you want for your customers to get from your small business. Marketing is only one piece of that puzzle, but it is critical that everything from your social media messages (including the tone and frequency of your posts) to your visual advertising to your visual merchandising and in-store way-finding to your employees’ dress, attitudes, personalities, expertise and ability to serve the customer… to the shopping bags, the after-the-sale service and follow-up to the on-going e-mail marketing, customer loyalty and retention efforts to yes, most of all, the experience that you put forward through your 24/7 presence on-line through your web site and blog – it all must be CONSISTENT. It must go together without contradiction.
Customer experience
Are your employees confusing your customers? Does your marketing message contradict your in-store experience? Is your in-store experience confusing – do all of your sensory experiences not play together to make a “harmony of parts or features to one another or a whole” in your small business?
Then, when you’ve created a system of customer experience that is consistent – you must replicate that system of customer experience every single day. It is this repetition that will grow your business.
Set your sacred cows aside today and look at your business in an effort to banish inconsistencies and create systems and experiences that grow a consistent customer for your business. A great customer experience is not an optional exercise.
What are you doing today to improve your consistent customer experience?
GREAT reminders, Marianna! I think one of the biggest mistakes we make in marketing small businesses is letting the “marketing” stop at the Facebook page or the storefront window. You really highlighted the OTHER areas that most impact customers. One of the barriers to consistency I find in working with small business clients is follow-through. It’s so easy to “bite off” more than you can reasonably accomplish with every customer. That’s why I think your question of “what can you do today?” is so valuable. It helps us focus on one thing at a time that can then become ingrained in our core systems for customer experiences.
Great thoughts – and so true, Haley!