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In the rapidly changing world of beauty, Glamnetic turned a easy idea—higher eyelash extensions—into a $50 million business in five years. Their success stemmed not only from their modern product, but also their approach to engaging customers.
Having spent 25 years working with and helping build some of the most iconic B2C and B2B brands—from LinkedIn to Yahoo!, Coca-Cola, Home Depot, and now BILL—I saw a consistent trend that Glamnetic co-founders Ann McFerran and Kevin Gould intuitively understood: customers are changing.
A brand new generation of consumers
Changes in customer behavior are impacting businesses of all sizes. But small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), which 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 now not content to be passive recipients of products and services. They are increasingly looking for energetic engagement with brands and a consistent experience throughout the brand journey. Technological advances and artificial intelligence are key drivers that are raising expectations for recent innovations in e-commerce or self-service tools. Furthermore, with greater competition, switching costs are lower, making retention all the more necessary. And with a more agile, online and mobile business presence, customers expect their feedback to be reflected quickly.
Here are 4 easy and effective strategies that I imagine help small and medium-sized businesses reply to changes in customer behavior and leverage them for success.
1. Build a seamless customer journey
The customer journey starts before the sale. From the moment they signal intent, you must provide a consistent, holistic, and seamless experience. Creating that have will be difficult because different teams typically handle different parts of the customer journey. This process can create friction or miss opportunities as customers move through the sales funnel.
If you may align your sales, marketing, customer support, and product or engineering teams around the same “seamless customer journey” principle, you may deliver a great experience at every touchpoint.
Some firms, like BILL, have combined GTM (sales and marketing) teams to extend alignment and focus from the starting of the customer journey. Creating cyclical feedback loops is critical to be certain that customer insights from any point in time can inform business strategy, product and engineering, marketing, or support.
The leadership team plays a key role in facilitating this cross-functional collaboration, but the key to making sure that every one employees feel accountable for customer support is creating a culture of authority at every level.
2. Communicate withthis is customers
Big brands don’t just advertise Down customers – open a two-way dialogue with them that is aligned with their needs and interests, and authentic to the company’s values and voice. To do this, they begin by listening to their customers’ needs, and then build a brand and marketing strategy around them.
An effective two-way communication approach meets customers where they are—and in the way they need. Focus on how your communication can add value to customers’ lives. For example, share educational content to assist customers optimize your product or service. Building a Community between customers are a unbelievable solution to deepen the emotional bond with your brand.
Glamnetic has done this exceptionally well. They have leveraged the power of Instagram, user-generated videos, and authentic customer interaction to grow a dedicated “Glam Fam” community. They have capitalized on the social media discovery trend.
Through this, they identified a growing demand for more natural-looking lashes and press-on nails and expanded their product line. Glamnetic created a space for authentic interaction with their clients and used this community to be certain that each interaction was an opportunity to learn and strengthen relationships with their clients.
3. Make technology a competitive advantage
Technology is changing the game for small and medium-sized businesses trying to higher understand and serve their customers. As automation and AI turn out to be more powerful and pervasive, so does the ability of small and medium-sized businesses to include technology into every a part of the customer journey.
For example, finance automation software can enable you improve operational efficiency and productivity and be certain that teams can spend more time with customers and less time in the back office. Customer relationship management (CRM) tools track interactions and collect customer information to identify trends that would impact every a part of your business.
Analytics platforms enable you understand customer behavior on your website or app so you may higher goal your customer communications. And AI-powered chat can equip small and medium-sized businesses with the ability to supply 24/7 customer support.
Take Amy Liu, founder and CEO of Tower 28 Beauty. Amy began her business with a mission to sell clean cosmetics and skincare products. But she found herself spending time on manual back-office tasks. By improving her technology and investing in financial automation software, Amy used the time she saved to focus on expanding her retail network. Her products are now available in Sephora stores across the U.S. and Canada. Automation has also helped Amy focus on what matters most: her customers.
4. Live your values to build trust
In a competitive environment, trust is the most useful asset an SMB has. To build trust, you first must deliver on your product or service promise to your customers. You also must build emotional connections with your customers to translate that trust into long-term loyalty. Do they imagine in your mission? Do they understand your commitment to innovating for them? Do they feel the empathy you have for their needs?
Trust starts with your values and culture. Values guide who you hire, what products you create, what service you provide, and the way you communicate. Values provide customers with confidence, security, and peace of mind. When something goes unsuitable, customers must trust that you simply put their interests first and are accountable to them. It’s not enough to only write your values on a wall or a website—you want to instill them at every level of your organization.
At BILL, our five values (authenticity, responsibility, humility, passion and fun) define our priorities and business decisions and guide our engagement with our clients. We measure and reward worker performance against our values. We reiterate them at every corporate meeting and discuss them with clients, investors and partners.
Focusing on agile, empathetic, and customer-centric approaches may help SMBs capitalize on an increasingly engaged, technology-savvy, and community-driven customer base. By embracing strong company values, leveraging technology, building a seamless customer journey, and engaging in two-way communication, SMBs is not going to only earn customer loyalty and trust—they may win, too.