3 Tools to Help Small Service Businesses Create Smoother Customer Experiences

Customer experience (Customer experience management software) is the impression customers and prospects form of your business, based on every interaction they have with your brand.

Everything — right from stumbling across your social media post to scheduling a consultation or receiving receipts for payments — constitutes a customer experience touchpoint. While CX is, by definition, a subjective phenomenon, which means that as a business owner, you have limited ability to control it, stats suggest that CX is nonetheless a critical aspect of your business’s growth:

• 77% of customers who have a positive CX are likely to recommend the brand to a friend.

• 89% of customers say they would switch brands after an unpleasant experience.

• A business can increase its revenue by 10-15% by improving its CX.

While it largely comes down to the results you help your clients achieve, customer experience has a lot to do with the quality of tools you use to render your services and run your ops.

In this article, let’s check out three top tools that empower small service businesses to deliver a smoother experience for their clients.

1. vcita

• One of the most effective ways to improve the client experience is by empowering them to effortlessly avail of your services.
• When someone wants to book services from a local small business provider, the typical workflow sees them filling out a website form, receiving a note in response that says something like “We’ll get in touch soon,” and then waiting for you to get back to them. But that doesn’t make for a smooth, relationship-building CX, does it?
• Plus, customers often prefer SMS messages over emails or calls, which means providing them with the ability to DM your business but also see and book available appointment slots directly from your website, Facebook page, and Google listing, is crucial to delivering a CX that differentiates.
• So, if you’re providing services like consulting, coaching, wellness, home maintenance, fitness training, pet care, and so forth, then enabling clients to easily make appointments online based on your availability, securely share files and make payments, view recent and upcoming activities, and message your business — all from a branded self-service portal — constitutes a stellar client experience.

• With online scheduling software like vcita, you can do all of that and more. vcita lets clients book Zoom meetings, calls, and in-person meetings and sends automated confirmations for the same. You can send automated reminders about upcoming appointments, and custom follow-up emails after every session.
• With customer-friendly payment options (including Stripe, Square, Paypal, and Venmo), vcita’s client portal serves as a communications hub for all interactions and business activities, helping you forge stronger client relationships based on dependability and transparency.

2. ProofHub

• For service businesses, another important ingredient to a buttery smooth customer experience is seamless collaboration, both internally and externally.
• Again, collaborating over long email threads and time-consuming phone calls is possible, but it’s far from ideal. Important documents and updates can easily get lost in the shuffle.
• If you’re providing long-term project-based services, such as content marketing or social media advertising, then you need a way to maintain an easy and open line of communication with your clients to keep them apprised about their campaigns’ progress.

• With all-in-one project management software like ProofHub, you get a centralized platform to store all files and information, visualize project timelines, host client discussions, manage tasks, get feedback, and share project progress reports.
• It lets you bring together all client and team comms under one hood, which promotes alignment among all stakeholders, both internal and external. Teams can assign tasks by priority and individual expertise, while clients can easily review and approve work. Its calendar allows teams to organize events, tasks, and milestones with automatic reminders, keeping clients in the loop.
• ProofHub integrates with the tools your team is already using (such as Dropbox, Google Drive, and Slack) and is also available on iOS and Android so your team can collaborate on the go. You can customize workflows (such as Kanban) to suit your client’s requirements. Ultimately, streamlined project management and team collaboration go a long way in enhancing the CX.

3. Jotform

• Arguably, the best way to maximize CX is to learn how you can do so straight from the horse’s mouth. That is, sometimes your clients — especially bigger ones who’ve been in the game for a while and have worked with multiple service businesses — can help you refine your processes in ways you may never do yourself. In addition to helping you demonstrate to existing clients that their feedback is important to you, these refinements let you deliver increasingly better experiences for future clients, as well.

As usual, you can get their feedback and insights over email or phone, but it’s better to formalize the process.

• Jotform offers a free drag-and-drop survey maker that’s perfect for small businesses to easily create and share engaging online forms for collecting client feedback. It offers over 800 customizable templates, so you can add your own questions and change the fonts and colours to match your branding.
• You can also use Jotform to improve the client onboarding and offboarding experience. For example, you can ask a bunch of standardized questions (such as “What are your top three goals?”) before kicking things off. At the end of a business engagement, you can share another standardized form with questions such as “Wow can we improve?” and “What did you like the most about our service?”
• What’s more, you can integrate e-signature in your forms and streamline the contract signing process, too. Jotform Sign lets you create legally binding documentation with just a few clicks. Any document you create in Jotform Sign is UETA and ESIGN compliant,, and you can easily track and automate the signing process.
• All in all, a streamlined client feedback collection process helps you tailor better CX as your business grows. Easy-to-sign contracts and documents further help polish the client experience.

Conclusion

Given how easy it is to find alternatives today, for the modern customer, one poor experience is all it takes to switch to another brand. And so, one-person or enterprise, product-based or service-based — customer experience is the success decider for all businesses.

An outstanding experience means a happy client who is likely to stick around and also spread the good word about your business, driving positive word-of-mouth and steady revenue growth. So, give the above three tools a test drive with a free trial, and see how they help you create a smoother experience for your clients.