Among the top trending topics for small business owners in the US is the customer experience (CE). Naturally, there are many other things that portable restroom rental operators need to focus on this year. But, it’s important to be very clear that the customer experience is the highest priority, with no close second. The futility of doing everything else ideally to run a business without being a CE-centric service company cannot be over-emphasized.
Why is Customer Experience So Important?
No matter how sleek and immaculate your rental equipment is, how streamlined your management systems, how strict your cleaning and inspection processes, or how efficient your order fulfillment protocols, unless these business aspects complement a service modality that elevates the customer experience, it’s all rendered meaningless to sustaining your success.
Here’s a helpful quick self-test to get a sense of your current CE outcomes:
- Do a high percentage of your rental sales prospects turn away after introduction to your site, or your staff, or you, apparently uninspired, and move on to your competitors instead of choosing to do business with you?
- Do your current and former customers appear not really to care much whether they ever do business with you again or not?
- Do you suspect that that is happening because, though your team works hard to do a good job, nothing really stands out in a positive way for your customers about their experience with your organization?
If one or more of the above is the case, why shouldn’t people prefer to try someone else if they feel that they’re as likely to receive an equal or better experience than they’ve had with your company?
Where does the customer experience begin? From the moment the prospective customer enters his or her search criteria in the Google field! By the time the prospect dials your phone number, you are already well into the process of creating a winning customer experience, though you haven’t been aware of it — unless you’re hawkeying your ongoing results with your web analytics tools.
To back up a little, what happened on that initial visit to your site by the new prospect? Quick bounce? That’s the worst outcome, obviously. Or, was it a click-through to multiple internal pages? That’s much better. Or, was it the best possible result — a first-visit conversion right there in your online store? Or, nearly as good, was it a call directly from the site to your business phone to schedule service, pay a deposit, or otherwise officially enter your sales pipeline?
How Can You Boost Your Customer Experience?
Below are some key ways to improve the customer experience for portable restroom rental businesses. These can help you increase the number of online reviews and paper reviews that you can paste into the testimonials section of your site, which you can then parlay into foundational marketing and sales tools.
1. It all starts on your website.
If you’re having little success getting beyond the initial visit with a prospect who enters your online place of business, you need to correct that problem first.
- Have a great homepage on your website.
- Make sure all the action buttons and links to internal pages and external sites work.
- Offer interactive fields and forms on the site to gather information.
- Feature other engaging elements, including video clips, photos, and demos.
- Fix or replace all SEO issues with elements that are not getting enough attention. Use free web analytics for this or get a professional SEO firm to help you correct deficiencies.
- Become active in your social media accounts, offering expert perspectives, answers to questions, and advice to establish you as the most helpful go-to expert in your market.
2. What you do next is a make-or-break CE action.
The next phase of the customer experience begins upon attempted contact with you. What happens next is the critical cultivation, mistreatment, or even abandonment of your sales lead.
- Have a live person to answer the phone at all times on the first or second ring.
- Return voicemails quickly, within 15 minutes or as close to that as possible.
- Offer new customer incentives.
- Offer referral incentives.
- Offer extra services at affordable additional charges.
- Provide impeccable rental products.
- Use the best cleaning and disinfection products.
3. Exceptional service clenches your success in creating a great CE.
The third stage of your work to produce an exceptional overall customer experience finally starts when you actually deliver your services.
- Provide exceptional service.
- Maintain total dedication to rapid response.
- Provide highly effective problem resolutions.
- Be utterly reliable.
- Always keep your promises.
- Compensate for negative experiences due to significant problems.
- Have your best professional(s) interfacing with customers on their properties.
- Have enough staff to handle your customers’ needs.
- Provide fresh, appealing equipment for all customers.
- Demonstrate outstanding professionalism in all communications.
- Have all team members dressed immaculately on customers’ sites.
- Have experts perform delivery, setup, and pickup.
- Provide timely billing and payment confirmations.
- Offer discounts for timely payment.
- Offer incentives for return customers.
4. These are the first things to do, though we’re discussing them last here.
The final set of requisites involves using what you learn in business classes or from others in the industry, and from your customers’ feedback to address any systemic issues. Fix any conditions that affect your ability to provide an outstanding customer experience consistently.
- Update services and products routinely.
- Use the best technology to support your processes.
- Find operational cost savings and pass those on to customers.
- Find ways to give customers what they want, within reason, beyond the agreed scope.
- Evaluate your policies and modify them as needed to optimize the customer experience.
- Prevent imposition of unnecessarily rigid rules and limits on customers.
- Only hire people with good soft skills and standard skills required for their roles.
- Offer rapid delivery in response to urgent requests for service.
- Provide free extras to enhance your customer’s users’ experience with your products.
- Enable people to communicate via their preferred channels (phone, text, email, eFax).
So, Just Do 1,2,3,4 and That’s It?
Is it as easy as that? Is the answer to just follow the specific checklists above of mingled industry best practices and other guidelines? If you do that, does it mean you can rest assured that you won’t have a care in the world when it comes to CE? Well, if you do those things, you can certainly gain a lot of ground on your quest to improve your business’s consistency in delivering an exceptional customer experience and generating stand-out reviews and star ratings.
But, frankly, you’re only assured of success in dealing with your customers to the extent to which you make clear to people through your actions that you actually care about helping people. That typically only happens for business owners who believe in and repeatedly demonstrate exemplary entrepreneurial values in marketing, selling, branding, servicing, troubleshooting, billing, and general business administration in your particular industry.
So, do all the right things, as prescribed above, but check yourself. Just make sure you love it. To thrive best on customer experience, you need to love your work. That is the surest way to maintain your own inspiration. Enjoying giving it all you’ve got affords you that incomparable sense of full confidence in your own commitment to succeed long-term in your market.
A leader’s confidence tends to be contagious. Along with hitting all the operational performance marks named in the series of checklists above, it inspires your team, customers, and prospects to share your belief in what’s special about your service business.