Top Actionable Strategies to Improve Local Customer Experience At Scale

Customer experience is no longer a good-to-have factor in your business. It has become central to all business processes and the overall health of your trade. The list of benefits you can avail simply by focusing on the customer experience is endless. For starters, it helps you build a sophisticated brand reputation, gets you brand advocates as lifetime customers, and whatnot. 

Although we already mentioned the benefits of customer experience, it should be viewed less as what it brings to the organization and more as how organizations can build a customer-first approach for all their processes.

Nonetheless, local customer experience is crucial in building a customer-centric approach. 

Do you know that according to Hubstaff, approximately 46% of all Google searches seek local information? This is an exciting statistic to establish the importance of local customer experience for your brand’s success.

Considering factors like:

1. Your local listings on Google Maps or Apple Maps

2. Online reviews on Google or other social media platforms

3. Easy payments and checkouts

Local Customer Experience is a must-have

As a local business owner, providing excellent customer experience is crucial for attracting and retaining customers in your community. In today’s competitive market, customers have a wide range of options and are likelier to choose businesses that offer a positive, seamless, and personalized experience.

By implementing these strategies, you can create a customer-centric culture that delivers a positive and memorable experience for local customers. This helps you stand out in the market and drives customer loyalty and long-term business growth.

Today’s article talks about top strategies for improving your local customer experience at scale and how it adds up to creating a customer-first system for your business.

1. Invest in customer service training

2.  Optimize Business profile 

3. Improve customer retention 

4. Understand your customers’ needs and preferences

Let’s understand each of these in detail. 

Invest in customer service training

A usual customer gets in touch with your customer service teams under two scenarios:

1. If they have queries before making the purchase–which is the brand discovery phase

2. Or if they have issues with the product after they have made the purchase–the post-purchase phase

Regardless of either, your customer service teams should be well-equipped with the right tools and solutions to assist customers in whatever they need and as quickly as possible

As a proactive business, you should work on all customer touch-points like website chatbot, contact forms, and other messaging applications. If you delay your customer service response, you avoid failing to meet customer expectations, resulting in a sub-standard customer experience. 

Another way to amp up your customer service game is by ensuring your employees are trained on handling customer inquiries, complaints, and requests in a friendly, professional, and efficient manner. This could include providing them with customer service manuals, hosting regular training sessions, or offering customer service certification programs.

Optimize Business profile 

An ordinary customer usually researches the product or service before purchasing it–this research can be done online or offline. This is where the real journey of your customer begins.

When he searches for a product related to your business, the search results or SERP shows the most relevant companies. If you’re lucky, you might rank among the top 10 results or on the first page of search engine results. 

Your listing online should include the following:

1. Name of your business

2. Accurate address with the nearest landmark

3. An operational business phone number

4. Working hours and off days

While browsing the search engine, customers would expect this information to be legitimate and authentic so that they can trust your brand.

Imagine how annoying it might be for the customers to want to reach you only to find out your phone is out of coverage or not reachable, implying your company might have wrapped up its operations. 

Even a single field of wrong information can make your customers shift to competitors, leaving a bad impression of your business. 

So, it’s imperative to nip the problem in the bud and double-check all the information mentioned online about your business to avoid any miscommunication with the customers.

However, to update this information at scale, you can take the help of companies offering local listing management to eliminate wrong information and ensure correct and authentic details of your company are mentioned across the entire web and search ecosystem.

Another vital aspect of maintaining a superb local customer experience is the brand identity for telephonic communication. Having a sophisticated brand identity over voice calls is a must-have–especially today when we receive hundreds of spam calls throughout the day. The brands must clear the noise by establishing a credible brand identity to set themselves apart.

For this, services like Truecaller for Business come into the picture. Adding an extra layer of authenticity to your brand helps your business to be perceived as trustworthy. It gives your business a verified business caller ID whenever you reach out to a customer. This enables them to recall your brand and helps improve the call-answer rate of your business. 

Services like Truecaller for Business not only impact your local customer experience but also customer experience in general. 

Improve customer retention

It will be wrong to say that your customer experience ends when a customer buys your product. In fact, it is an excellent opportunity to convert customers into lifetime brand advocates by offering them personalized services. Personalized promotions and discounts can help you attract and retain customers. For example, you could offer a discount to customers who purchase on their birthday or send personalized emails to customers with recommendations based on their past purchases.

Also, providing your employees with regular training and in-depth product knowledge can elevate customers’ trust in your brand and reduce customer churn. This impacts the overall reputation of your brand in your community and improves the local customer experience. 

Implement a loyalty program 

Loyalty programs are a great way to reward your most loyal customers and encourage them to continue doing business with you. Consider offering exclusive discounts, rewards points, or other perks to members of your loyalty program.

Use these platforms to engage with customers, respond to their inquiries and complaints, share updates about these loyalty programs, and build a local community to improve the overall local customer experience. 

To sum up: 

Local customer experience is essential because it can significantly impact a business’s success. Customers who have a positive experience at a local business are more likely to return and recommend the company to others. This can lead to increased customer loyalty and help a business grow and thrive.

Local customer experience is also essential because it can help a business to stand out in a crowded marketplace. In today’s world, there are many options for customers to choose from, and a great local customer experience can help a business to differentiate itself from its competitors. This can be especially important for small businesses, which may need more resources to compete with larger companies nationally or globally.

Finally, local customer experience is crucial because it can contribute to a community’s overall health and vitality. When local businesses provide a great customer experience, they can create a sense of pride and community among their customers and help build a more robust, vibrant local economy.