Tips for delivering a great customer experience

Customer experience measurement is the practice of measuring customer experience – which includes all customer actions – at all “touchpoints” throughout the customer journey.

What is a touchpoint in customer experience?

A touchpoint is any interaction a customer has with your business: a phone call, a website visit, an email, a shipment – any time a customer “touches” your business. The only way we can get a better understanding of customers and their needs is by measuring the customer experience. Not only does measuring customer experience enable you to cater to customers’ expectations, it also lets you measure how effective your customer experience strategy is.

How to measure the customer experience (CX)

Designing a great customer experience is only the first part — you must actually deliver on that experience, and then measure your CX satisfaction to make sure you’re delivering a great CX for your customers.

Highlight all touchpoints

Study your customer’s journey from beginning to end, and sketch the whole customer experience according to the customer’s point of view. Select the touchpoints that are defining moments for the customer, and establish metrics for every touchpoint, or metrics that specifically evaluate each touchpoint’s performance.

Understand your customer

When you understand your customers, you can think like them, and can offer products and services to better engage them and provide excellent experiences. It’s important to know their greatest needs and expectations — what makes them happy and what you should continue doing to retain them. Draw a map by creating a timeline of the customer’s journey and defining what is essential at each touchpoint along the journey.

Solve the key problem areas

Once you’ve identified all the touchpoints, highlight the key areas of concern and start working on them systematically. Identify and highlight each problem, and come up with solutions that will specifically address these problems.

Select the right metrics

When you have all the important touchpoints and have found solutions to key problem areas, you’re ready to start measuring the results of your efforts. To do this effectively you need to choose the right business metrics to analyze. Here are a few common customer experience metrics you can use:

  • Net Promoter Score (NPS): The NPS is an index that ranges from -100 to 100 that indicates how willing a customer is to recommend a company’s products or services to others. It divides customers into three categories: Promoters (loyal + satisfied), Passives (satisfied + unenthusiastic), and Detractors (unsatisfied + unenthusiastic). First Contact Resolution
  • (FCR): FCR gives an indication of how well you resolve customers’ support requests the first time by tracking the number of interactions in a case. Tracking your FCRs helps you see what you can do to keep the average number of interactions low.
  • Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT): CSAT is the average score awarded to your brand according to customer answers on a survey. Small businesses use CSAT scores to determine how satisfied customers were with specific products or services.
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The small business accounting records to keep in Canada

We know it’s not exactly the most thrilling part of being a Canadian entrepreneur, but keeping accurate financial records is important. The length of time your business needs to keep records of all activities is six years. Along with your financial statements (balance sheet, income statement, and cash flow forecast), you’re required to keep records for all the individual accounts that make up those statements.

What accounting records do I need to keep for a Canadian business?

In Canada, the major accounting records that you must accurately keep are:

  • Accounts Receivable: Who owes you, how much do they owe, and for how long have they owed you?
  • Accounts Payable: Who do you owe, how much and for how long?
  • Inventory: How much did you buy; when did you buy; and how much did you pay? How you account for your inventory will affect your cost of goods sold.
  • Payroll: Total salaries paid to employees, payroll taxes and deductions.
  • GST/HST and Provincial Sales Tax: All businesses with an income greater than $30,000 per year are required to collect and submit on behalf of the federal government a goods and services tax (GST) and, depending where your business operates, provincial sales tax (PST) or harmonized sales tax (HST).
  • Cash: Cash inflows and outflows should be recorded to maintain proper control of cash.
  • Fixed Assets: What you bought, how much you paid, and when you bought, along with depreciation amounts.
  • Other Records: Such as insurance, leases, investments.

We recommend you look for accounting software that’s easy to set up and use. You can ask your accountant for their advice on which program would be best for you and your business.

Software can be useful, but remember that outside accounting advice is important to small business success. Accountants see loads of businesses in different industries and can help you understand and manage the financial health of your company. They also remove some of your own stress about important financial details.

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How can you make meetings more interesting?

If your small business holds meetings with any frequency, you might have wondered how you can make them more interesting. Of course, staying professional and sticking to the task at hand is the most important thing, but there are also ways you can help your team feel more alert, creative, and engaged.

Here are four ways you can make your business’ meetings more interesting.

1) Get out of the boardroom

A change of scenery can have a revitalizing effect on your team. Try holding meetings in a different spot if possible. For example, in a local coffeeshop, park, restaurant over lunch, or other location that’s nearby and comfortable.

2) Try short, daily, stand-up meetings

A study at Stanford Business School showed that, when meetings were held standing up and taking 10-20 minutes, decisions took 34% less time to make, with no noticeable difference in the quality of the decision. Why not try regular, super-quick meetings held standing up? These short meetings may sound like a weird idea, but some teams find they improve focus and productivity. Daily stand-up meetings are not intended to replace traditional meetings for strategic, big-picture topics. Instead, they’re best for fleshing out daily tasks and responsibilities.

3) Make it a team effort

Finding ways to foster collaboration and discussion can help your team feel more engaged. For example, you can hold the meeting using your own words and not reading off an agenda. You can also ask the team to help you quickly brainstorm some ideas for a project – one person’s thought might spark an idea in another person.

4) Make one day a week meeting-free

Are you having hour-long meetings every Wednesday just because you always have? Are you hearing feedback that certain employees don’t feel meetings are relevant to what they do, or that they take too much time away from work? If so, you may want to try setting aside one meeting-free day per week. This way, your team can be assured that there’s at least one day where they can put their heads down and work. This way, when you do have meetings (and do try to only have them when it’s necessary), your team will actually have something to contribute.

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How to practice resilience as an entrepreneur

Every day, entrepreneurs are faced with new and shifting circumstances, and need to develop strategies to handle challenges and adapt. For some entrepreneurs, this is one of the joys of being a small business owner. But unfortunately, others find it too overwhelming. This is one of the factors associated with the high rate of business closure, along with lack of key business skills.

The good news is, you can practice small business resilience!

Practice getting out of your comfort zone

The more challenges we overcome as entrepreneurs, the more incremental successes we have, and the more confident we become in doing it again next time. Stretching ourselves outside of our comfort zone is a conscious activity, but if you’re not accustomed to it, it needs to happen one step at a time. Here’s how to start.

Think about the last time you resisted or delayed doing a business activity that made you feel nervous or uncomfortable. What about it exactly made you feel that way?

Then, picture yourself actually doing that uncomfortable activity. Take your time and create a vivid picture of yourself confidently and comfortably doing the activity, as if you’ve done it many times before. This will not only help you problem-solve ways to succeed, but you’ll give yourself a well-needed confidence boost as well.

Taking small steps to get out of your comfort zone as an entrepreneur means that you’ll learn something, and have a deeper appreciation of your true abilities – and that means a more rewarding and enriching entrepreneurial experience.

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