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Join for freePosted: Fri 18th Sep 2026
Customer experience is more than providing a good product or service – it is the complete experience a customer has with your business across every interaction.
In this practical session, Indira Selvaraj explores how small business owners can intentionally shape the experience they want to deliver.
The session looks at how to understand the customer journey, identify important touchpoints, recognise gaps between the intended and actual customer experience, and make practical improvements that strengthen customer relationships.
Define the customer experience you want to deliver
Map your customer journey
Identify and bridge the gaps
Indira is a business mentor and leadership and management professional with experience supporting individuals and businesses with customer experience, leadership and people management.
She is the founder of Lead With Her, an initiative focused on practical, human-centred approaches to leadership and professional development.
Indira is passionate about turning management concepts into practical approaches that entrepreneurs and business owners can apply to strengthen customer relationships, improve experiences and grow their businesses.
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Lightly edited for clarity.
Caitriona: Hello, everyone, and welcome to today's Lunch and Learn. My name is Caitriona, and I'll be your host today. For those of you attending a Lunch and Learn for the first time, Enterprise Nation is a vibrant community platform for start-ups and small businesses.
I'm pleased to introduce Indira Selvaraj, who is a business coach. In this session, Indira will explore how small business owners can intentionally shape the experience they want to deliver.
If you have any questions throughout the webinar, please post them in the chat, and we'll do our best to answer them at the end of the session. Today's webinar will be recorded, and we'll send a follow-up email with the recording and further resources later today. Over to you, Indira.
Indira Selvaraj: Hello, hi, everyone. I'm Indira, and thank you for this opportunity with Enterprise Nation.
Today, we're going to talk about customer experience – retaining and creating more loyal customers. However, customer experience is a huge subject; we could talk about a lot of things, like technology, service design, personalisation, and AI and CX.
There are so many directions we could go, but today, considering the time we have, I've chosen one current lens – our current operating environment. We all work in a digital world, with lots of messages, notifications, emails, apps, and automated messages that we use for social media marketing and business scaling.
If you think about CX right now, all of this technology is supposed to help businesses and help customers make things easier. But most of the time, what's happening is we don't realise it – we actually make the customer work harder, and their effort is high.
It's not because of digital; it's because of how we understand customers. Today, I'm not here to give you another CX framework or model to think about – I'd rather use this time to help you look at your own CX differently, if that helps.
Before we start, I'm going to begin with a question: what does a great customer experience mean to you? Use just one word in the chat box to say what great CX means to you – whatever comes to mind.
Interesting, easy, simple, achievable, effortless, emotional, deeply personal – those were some of your answers. Thank you all so much.
If you look at these answers, most of these words don't describe a product at all – we're talking about how we feel, the emotions. We're not talking about any kind of product or company; we're only talking about how something made us feel when we bought it.
For the second question, let's flip it. Think about the last time you liked a product you were about to buy, but didn't – something stopped you. Use just two words this time to tell me what stopped you.
Too much effort, too many clicks, unexpected cost, doubts, not having enough clarity, too much friction – those were some of your answers, and unexpected cost is something I've come across myself when something looked suspicious or wasn't clearly advertised.
Again, this isn't necessarily about a product problem – it's a journey problem. The journey is any kind of interaction we have with a business, and what's being registered here is a lack of clarity; it's all about the journey.
So this is why we're going to explore what this means – not only as a customer, but also as a business. How am I handling things day-to-day in CX, with all the commitments I have? What's helping me, and what isn't?
This is what's happening currently: marketing gets people onto the platform. I hear this from many of the businesses I speak to – they've run digital campaigns, had lots of responses, and lots of clients interested in their new business.
Everything sounds fine, and there are plenty of inquiries, but what makes people leave is the friction. Many businesses don't realise that friction can be explained – it's just a matter of understanding where it happens and how we can improve it.
Customer experience isn't expensive, because you've already paid for the marketing, the money, the effort, and the time. What takes you towards success is what we're going to discuss on the next slide.
Here's a simple question to think about: where did you spend most of your time last month? Was it gaining new customers, or retaining and developing your existing ones? There's no right or wrong answer – just think about it, and feel free to reflect in the chat box.
Training, dealing with existing customers, figuring out how to reach new ones, or a bit of both – those were some of your answers, and that's exactly where most of our time tends to go.
This is an area I'm really interested in, and one I work on deeply myself. We have more ways to communicate with our customers now, but that doesn't always mean they have more clarity. If you look at this slide, you'll see different brands, and the way each one communicates isn't the same.
Let me give you an example. When you order something online, you might have their app, their platform, and messages from them, and – this happens even with my own personal experience – the app says one thing, the channel says it's coming today, the app then says it's delayed, and you get an email saying it will arrive tomorrow.
In the past, we simply didn't get much information. Now we get so many messages and alerts that there's a huge amount of information available, but customers – sometimes even ourselves – still don't know what's actually happening. This isn't something we can fix 100%, but more communication isn't necessarily more clarity.
That's why I wanted to bring up this slide: digital ambiguity only creates more confusion. Not having enough clarity across different platforms takes things in different directions, which makes it harder to retain the customer, and that's what we were registering earlier in the journey.
So why did people leave, or not complete their purchase? It's because of the ambiguity we create across different platforms, and it comes down to something simple: what we promise, are we actually delivering it – not from our point of view as a business, but from the customer's point of view?
Let me give you a clear example here. As a small business, you might have this mindset that your client expects 100% perfection from you – that you have to deliver everything from one to 10, the full scale of 100%, perfectly from beginning to end. That's where it gets more complicated.
I had this interaction with one of my clients. She was trying to achieve everything perfectly – gaining more customers, more interactions, more reviews – but when something went wrong, she just went quiet, because she didn't know how to face it. That's why I've included this slide: the retention gap is often nothing more than a business going silent.
When we have to handle a mistake, the business goes silent – and this is something I picked up from Edelman Research. Their statistics show it's not that customers leave because of the mistakes a business makes; they leave because silence speaks louder, and it leads them towards suspicion, or, as some of you said, doubt. That silence is what actually creates the gap in customer retention.
Let me give you an example. Company A sends you a message in the morning saying your product will be delivered at 10:00 – it isn't. Then it says 12:00, then 1:00, and still nothing.
Company B, on the other hand, tells you something has gone wrong, that they're sorry, and gives you an estimate: it will be delivered within 24 hours. Which one do you think is clearer, and which one would you find easier to handle?
My point here is that things can go wrong – deliveries fail. These are human-driven businesses, so operations can go wrong, technology can go wrong, and people can make mistakes too. A mistake doesn't necessarily lose you the customer, but how you handle it might.
This is exactly what Edelman Research recorded in their statistics: 55% of customers stayed loyal even when a brand made a mistake. That's not only true for the top brands – it's just as true for small businesses and local shops. When you give customers clarity and handle things well, you don't lose them.
This is where I've seen small businesses struggle – most of the time, they're afraid of letting the customer down, and they take it very personally. But how can you let your customer know that you, or your systems, have failed?
We'll touch on that as we go. A mistake doesn't always lose you a customer – it's the clarity you provide, how you handle it, how you take responsibility, and how you listen that makes a customer stay with you longer. Transparency is key here.
As I said, having clarity doesn't remove a problem, but it removes the uncertainty – it stops the customer from wondering whether they'll receive it, get a call, or get the guidance they need. I'll give you an example: customers often spend a lot of time not knowing how to get a refund, even when businesses have given plenty of online visibility on how to contact them.
That gap creates real friction in CX. It's not easy, so people either just give the item away or sell it on somewhere like Vintage – that's what happens a lot on the fashion side. Let me take you through an interesting scenario, and you'll see what I mean.
Here's an example. I've got two scenarios here, and I want you to diagnose the problem – imagine you're the owner of one of these businesses.
The first scenario: you run a fitness programme online or through an app. Your marketing is working beautifully, and your initial conversions are great, but by month two, 60% of your subscribers have cancelled. What do you think the problem is?
The second scenario: you run a website design business. Your marketing has brought in plenty of inquiries, and you've had great conversations and given lots of support, but very few of those inquiries have converted into customers. What do you think the problem is here?
Issue in the customer journey and poor product – those are good answers. In the first scenario, it's about whether subscribers got what they expected; that's an issue in the customer journey.
All of these responses are right for a business. This can come from anywhere in the customer journey – it can be any stage where things fail.
But what could the solutions have been? Caitriona, can we go back a slide?
For the fitness example, one way to bridge that gap – as some of you already said – is support. Most of the time, when it comes to fitness or health, what people need is support and to see real change. But change doesn't happen immediately with any health or supplement programme, so people don't get that instant gratification and don't stick with it.
So as a business, can we create some kind of interaction to keep people engaged until they see their first real change? Can we offer interactive support there, and a flexible subscription as a loyalty solution? I'm not saying this applies to every business – it's just one example.
If you can't find the root cause, you can't fix it, because the customer journey involves a lot of things that need to be understood first. Now it's your turn: can you first identify the root cause?
The symptom we mentioned – subscribers not getting what they expected – is just that, a symptom; the root is what we have to figure out. The root can be where your customer is working too hard: are they working hard to find you, understand you, buy from you, wait for their service, or get help after ordering or when returning something?
I gave you the example earlier of how hard a journey returns can be for fashion or clothing. So, where is your customer working too hard? Step away from the scenarios for a moment, and take a few seconds to really think about it.
So what can we do? Small steps make a big impact. Are we taking these small steps in our business, and are we listening to our customers, whatever industry or niche we're working in?
Being able to listen means understanding what they're actually going through and finding ways to make their life easier. Can you reduce their effort? Can you make their purchase easy, their usage easy, and your communication clear?
Can you deliver the experience they wanted, not just the product? What we say and what we deliver is what matters, and that means constantly improving.
Evolving from where we were last time is the next CX challenge worth talking about. So, to make the next step clear: my main focus would be on clarity. When a customer tells you something, can we listen, and can we be clear about how we're helping and improving for them?
If something came to mind when I asked where your customer is working harder, ask yourself: can you make that easier? That's where I'd like to end today's session.
Thank you so much for listening. I'd love to hear any questions you have, and you can connect with me on the Enterprise Nation platform or on LinkedIn if you'd like to hear more strategies.
Caitriona: Thank you, Indira. If anyone has any questions, please do pop them into the chat. In the meantime, we can get started with this question here: what's the best starting point for a small business that has never mapped out its customer journey before?
Indira: The first point is to understand who your customers are, what their current pain points are, and how they can solve them – and how easily they can solve them.
Caitriona: Thank you. What methods can small businesses use to gather honest feedback?
Indira: Honest feedback isn't something you can achieve 100% of the time. You can see when it's genuine through how customers reflect and come back to you, but it's often best gathered once they've received the product – by asking whether they're happy with the delivery, whether they're still using the product, and whether it's still helping them. It can help to build a really personalised understanding of how they want things to improve, not just feedback on delivery.
Caitriona: Thank you. We're heading towards the end of the session, so if anyone has any final questions, please pop them into the chat. In the meantime, here's another question: what are some low-cost changes a small business can make that will have a significant impact on customer experience?
Indira: Low-cost changes can include understanding your order process and delivery, and how long customers spend when they order, as well as how quickly you respond. These are areas where you can spend less while still improving and personalising the experience.
I've seen personalised deliveries, like mentioning the customer's name, as one of the easiest and simplest investments – it doesn't cost much, but when you personalise things, customers notice, and they remember you.
Caitriona: Thank you so much for your presentation today, Indira, and thank you all for joining us. We'll be sharing the resources in a follow-up email this afternoon. Thank you.
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