You’ll never out-spend the enterprise players on marketing or undercut them on price. But you can absolutely out-experience them. For SMBs, how it feels to do business with you is often the only differentiator that matters.
The good news: the highest-impact CX upgrades don’t require a six-figure budget or a team of consultants. They just require a willingness to remove friction.
Start by Understanding the Current Experience
Before you improve anything, understand what your customers actually experience. Map the customer journey from first contact through ongoing service:
- How do they find you?
- What does onboarding look like?
- How do they communicate with you day-to-day?
- How do they get help when something goes wrong?
- How do they pay you?
- How do they access the information they need?
For each touchpoint, ask: is this smooth, or is it friction? The points of friction are your improvement opportunities.
Digital Self-Service Is the Biggest Lever
For most SMBs, the single biggest CX improvement is giving customers digital self-service capabilities. When customers can:
- View their account status anytime
- Download invoices and receipts
- Check the progress of their order or project
- Find answers in a knowledge base
- Update their own contact information
…the entire relationship feels more modern, professional, and convenient. They’re not waiting for your office to open. They’re not hunting through email for an attachment. They’re not wondering about the status of their order.
A customer portal provides this foundation.
Speed Matters More Than Delight
Research from Gartner shows that reducing customer effort is a more reliable driver of loyalty than “delighting” customers. Customers don’t need to be wowed — they need their problems solved quickly and easily.
Focus on:
- Response time — How quickly do you acknowledge customer requests?
- Resolution time — How long does it take to actually solve the problem?
- Effort required — How many steps, calls, or emails does the customer need to resolve their issue?
Structured support ticketing with clear SLAs and self-service options directly reduces all three.
Professionalize Your Communication
Scattered communication across email, phone, text, and chat feels disorganized. Centralizing client communication through a portal with secure messaging creates a more organized, professional experience.
This is especially impactful for professional services — law firms, accounting firms, agencies, and consultants — where the communication experience IS a significant part of the service.
Personalize Where It Matters
Personalization doesn’t require AI or complex technology. It means showing each customer information that’s relevant to them:
- Their projects, not all projects
- Their invoices, not a billing department phone number
- Their documents, organized and easily accessible
- Their performance metrics, updated in real time
A customer portal inherently provides this personalization through authenticated access and role-based permissions.
Measure and Iterate
You can’t improve what you don’t measure. Key CX metrics for SMBs:
- Net Promoter Score (NPS) — Would your customers recommend you?
- Customer Effort Score (CES) — How easy is it to do business with you?
- First Contact Resolution (FCR) — How often are issues solved on the first interaction?
- Retention rate — Are customers staying?
Collect feedback regularly and act on it. Read about customer retention strategies for more on measuring and improving.
Start Small, Start Now
You don’t need to transform everything at once. Pick the one touchpoint that creates the most friction and fix it. For many SMBs, that’s document sharing (switch from email to a portal), support (add a knowledge base), or billing (enable online payments).
Explore our features guide to identify which improvements will have the most impact for your specific business.