Rarely are you going to be able to have the best price in town or have the biggest marketing budget to out-do your competitors, especially if you’re a small business owner. So how do you make up for that discrepancy between you and your competition? You do it by providing outstanding customer service! You do it by making it impossible for a customer to refuse your businesses products or services!

Shake things up by offering something that no other business can match; give your customers an experience they can never forget. Disney has always done a great job of this. They determined who their target market was and crafted a customer experience that would always leave their consumers feeling like their happiness was the main focus of the company. This in turn leads to customers coming back for more and spreading the word about your company. Word of mouth is huge for growing any company, and what better way to increase that than by giving your customers something worth talking about.

Nordstrom similarly has had a lot of success as one of the leaders in providing customers with great service.

They always make they’re customers feel like they are noticed and that their needs are taken care of. More specifically, their return policy is phenomenal! Customers have literally brought in items that they purchased four years ago and still returned it! On Nordstrom’s website, all they have to say about their return policy is: “Don’t love it? Don’t worry—returns and exchanges are easy. Simply send your item back or bring it to a store near you.” Nordstrom’s has done an excellent job in giving their customers an experience that they wouldn’t be able to find almost anywhere else.

Related Article: Invaluable Insight

A good way to grow your business is to get people to be advocates for you. You need people to spread the word about who your business is and what they do better than everyone else. The best things about word of mouth are that it is free and highly effective; therefore it should take precedence over other things in your marketing budget. It’s easy to say that you can help grow your business by giving customers a memorable experience, but the hard part is figuring out how to do it. How are you going to develop a better customer experience in order to generate that word of mouth and high retention rate? Knowing what to do is easy, determining how you’re going to do it is the hard part. I’d suggest we all get to work and starts brainstorming.