Why Small Businesses Should Focus on Customer Experience?

I participated in a discussion a few months ago.

One of the first statements made during the discussion was:

Think CX, think contact centers.

Other participants put forth several arguments on the validity of the statement.

I started thinking, who has a contact center platform? Mostly, large organizations or at least mid-sized organizations. So, if the statement has to be accurate, then CX becomes the preserve of only large organizations.

But that is not the case.

Every business is founded on the principle that it solves real business problems for real customers. The moment you have customers, then their journey and experience become important.

Small Businesses and Customer Experience

Every business has customer-facing teams, whether or not they have a contact center. In this context, CX becomes crucial.

Smaller businesses are fairly evolved in digital transformation because the cloud has leveled the playing field. Now, every company has access to cloud applications that they can subscribe to at minimal costs.

The subscription model has opened up the world of services for small businesses by leveraging the cloud. Small businesses now have access to everything like the enterprise customers.

Even full-fledged omnichannel contact centers are available on the cloud for small businesses to benefit from.

How do you go about choosing your cloud contact center?

Cloud Contact Center for Small Business

Today, multiple providers offer contact centers on the cloud. However, what should you be aware of as a small business before subscribing to a cloud service?

1. Do they package everything together – dialers, voice, customizations, and integrations as a part of their offering?
2. Are they really pay-as-you-go? Do you have to sign any contracts or sign up for minimum commitments?
3. Do they charge for the first-time customization? Some of them offer it free before onboarding you.
4. Figure out what is configurable and what needs to be customized. What would be the customization charges?
5. Do they help in integrating the contact center platform with other best-of-breed applications? Does it support API-based integrations?
6. Do they already have existing integrations with industry-leading CRMs like Zoho, Salesforce, Zendesk, ServiceNow, Freshdesk, and Leadsquared?
7. Do they have analytics and intelligence as a part of their offerings? Does it provide you insights from the data?
8. What are the customer service SLAs the vendor provides? Are they in hours or days, or weeks?
9. How easy is it to generate reports? Would it be done in minutes or hours?
10. Do they support work-from-home options? What if the bandwidth is low? What if the agents don’t have access to enterprise-grade systems?
11. How do you handle data from multiple sources? Do they provide something to slice and dice the data – sort, filter, parse, enrich, review, and prioritize?
12. Do they provide a single view of the customers across all channels?
13. Does it support blended dialing? – both outbound and inbound
14. What are the training requirements for me to use the platform? Would it take me hours or weeks?
15. Do they onboard you within 24 hours, or does it take six to eight weeks?

Once you are clear about all these, you can choose the appropriate cloud contact center for your needs.

Democratization of Omnichannel CX

Cloud contact centers have democratized the omnichannel customer experience function. Small businesses have adopted the cloud mainly because of the ease with which it can be used.

Let us take the example of our platform, ClearTouch Operator. We are focused on omnichannel communication – not just for the contact center but for all customer-facing teams like sales, finance, and support.

To date, a true omnichannel CX was the privilege of an enterprise contact center function, but not anymore. A platform like ours has democratized the ability of businesses to provide the best possible experiences.