Hey, Small Business Owners: Here Are 8 Apps That Will Delight Your Customers

By Abby Perkins

A business’s most important asset isn’t its location, its employees, or even its product; it’s customers that keep it ticking. That’s especially true for small businesses.

Without the marketing budgets or resources of larger companies, small businesses depend on reputation and word of mouth — and those, in turn, depend on happy, loyal customers.

Small businesses are well-equipped to generate customer loyalty; fewer employees (and customers) mean that it’s often easier to understand customer expectations and ensure that those expectations are met and exceeded. In fact, according to small business mentoring organization, SCORE, customers report 94 percent satisfaction from small businesses.

Of course, it doesn’t hurt to have technology on your side, either. The eight apps below can help small businesses delight their customers and keep them coming back. How? By helping them listen better, personalize more, provide great service, and gain insight into how to improve. Check them out:

Tune into Your Customers

Haka Innovate: Haka Innovate helps small businesses engage customers to find out more about what they want, as well as get their feedback about new products. The app allows businesses to run customer experiments at every stage of product development, collaborate with internal groups, assess financial and market feasibility, and more.

Wizeline: Wizeline Product Tracker for Sales and Customer Success connects sales and engineering to ensure that product development aligns with what customers want. The app allows employees from any level of business to contribute product ideas within the Salesforce platform, and automated analytics help managers prioritize ideas effectively.

Personalize and Customize

OneMob: This app helps businesses personalize customer communications, allowing users to record and send individual, branded videomails and voicemails from their mobile devices. Messages can be sent and tracked within Salesforce, and recipients can respond immediately to schedule appointments. According to OneMob, the app can increase email click-through rates by 15 times, and response rates by five times.

Swag IQ: SwagIQ allows businesses to stand out from the competition by sending personalized gifts to customers and clients. The app notifies users about optimal gift-giving occasions, and tracks gifts for easy follow-up. Analytics help senders set and stick to budgets, as well as determine which gifts perform best. The app also handles gift sourcing and fulfillment.

Provide Superior Service

Panorama by Glance: This app helps small businesses take customer service to the next level, providing co-browsing and screen-sharing functionality to put users and customer service representatives on the same page. Panorama by Glance is also equipped with analytics that review session data for best practices and areas for improvement.

FieldExpert: FieldExpert automates and streamlines the field service process, for a more seamless customer service experience. Businesses can automatically schedule and manage employees in the field, as well as track work orders, cases, and leads. The app is integrated with Salesforce Chatter for greater visibility and communication.

Gain Important Insights

GetFeedback: This app allows businesses to create and send surveys to customers on smartphones, tablets, and desktop computers. Surveys can be customized with brand colors, fonts, graphics, and video and distributed via email, workflow, or any email marketing app. Responses are easily mapped into Salesforce.

Gainsight: Gainsight is an all-in-one app that analyzes and manages customer satisfaction and retention. The app, which comes with integrated NPS, uses Big Data to gain insight into group and individual customer health, helping businesses minimize churn, maximize renewals and retention, and identify opportunities to upsell.

Happy, loyal customers can be a small business’s greatest asset — but they don’t come automatically. Take a look at these eight apps, plus others on the Salesforce AppExchange, to find new ways to delight your customers — and keep them coming back for more.

Abby Perkins is a writer from Charlotte, North Carolina whose work has been featured in Entrepreneur and Yahoo! Finance. Abby graduated from Davidson College with a degree in English. She is currently the Managing Editor at GoodCall.com, a consumer information site in the higher education space.