In the fast-paced world of beauty, Glamnetic transformed a simple idea—better eyelash extensions—into a $50 million business in five years. Their success stemmed not only from an innovative product, but also from their approach to customer engagement.

For 25 years, I've worked with and helped build some of the most popular B2C and B2B brands – from LinkedIn to Yahoo!, Coca-Cola, Home Depot and now BILL brands. I've seen a consistent trend that Glamnetic co-founders Ann McFerran and Kevin Gould instinctively understood: customers are changing.

A new generation of customers

Changes in customer behavior have implications for businesses of all sizes. However, small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) that are particularly time-strapped — and resource-constrained — can face unique challenges in understanding and responding to changes in customer expectations.

For B2B and B2C brands, customers are no longer satisfied being passive recipients of products and services. Increasingly, they seek active engagement with brands and a consistent experience throughout their journey with a brand. Advances in technology and AI are the main drivers, raising expectations for new innovations in e-commerce or self-service tools. Also, with more competition, switching costs are lower, making retention even more important. And with a more agile business presence, online and mobile, customers expect to see their feedback reflected quickly.

Here are four simple and effective strategies I've seen SMBs use to respond to these changes in customer behavior and use them for success.

1. Build a seamless customer journey

A customer's journey begins before the sale. From the moment they signal intent, you want to deliver a coherent, holistic and seamless experience. Creating this experience can be difficult because, typically, different teams take care of different parts of that customer journey. This process can cause friction or missed opportunities as customers move through the customer funnel.

If you can align your sales, marketing, customer support and product or engineering teams and point them towards the same north star of a 'seamless customer journey', you can deliver a great experience at every touch point.

Some companies, like BILL, have merged GTM (sales and marketing) teams to drive greater reach and focus from the beginning of the customer journey. Creating circular feedback loops is critical to ensuring that customer insights gained at any given moment can inform business strategy, product and engineering, marketing or support.

Your leadership team plays a central role in facilitating this interoperability COOPERATIONbut creating a culture of empowerment at every level is key to ensuring all employees feel ownership of the customer journey.

Related: How to nurture your leads and create the right customer journey

2. Communicate with CLIENTS

Big brands are not marketed alone THE customers — they open a two-way dialogue with them that targets their needs and interests and is authentic to the company's values ​​and voice. To do this, they start by listening to customer needs and then building a brand and marketing strategy around them.

An effective two-way communication approach meets customers where they are — and in the mode they choose. Focus on how your communications can add value to customers' lives. For example, share educational content to help customers optimize your product or service. Community building between customers is a fantastic way to deepen emotional connections with your brand.

Glamnetic did this extremely well. They took advantage the power of Instagramuser-generated videos and real customer interaction to grow a dedicated “Glam Fam” community. They took advantage of the social media discovery trend.

Through this, they identified a growing demand for more natural-looking eyelashes and nails and expanded their product line. Glamnetic curated a space for authentic customer interaction and leveraged this community to ensure that every interaction was an opportunity to learn and strengthen customer relationships.

Related: 5 ways to communicate more effectively with your customers

3. Make technology a competitive advantage

Technology is a game changer for SMBs looking to better understand and serve their customers. As automation and AI become more powerful and ubiquitous, so does the ability of SMBs to incorporate technology into every part of the customer journey.

For example, financial automation software can help you improve operational efficiency and productivity and ensure teams spend more time with customers and less time in the back office. Customer relationship management (CRM) tools track interactions and gather customer insights to spot trends that can feed into any part of your business.

Analytics platforms help you understand customer behavior on your website or app so you can better target your customer communications. And AI-powered chat can equip SMBs to provide 24/7 customer support.

Take Amy Liu, founder and CEO of Tower 28 Beauty. Amy started her business with a mission to sell pure beauty and skin care products. But she found herself spending time on manual office tasks. By upgrading their technology and investing in financial automation software, Amy used the time it saved to focus on expanding their retail footprint. Their products are now carried in Sephora stores across the US and Canada. Automation also helped Amy stay focused on what mattered most: customers.

4. Live by your values ​​to foster confidence

In a competitive landscape, trust is the most valuable asset an SMB has. To build trust, you must first deliver on your product or service promise to customers. You also have to create emotional connections with customers to translate that trust into long-term loyalty. Do they believe in your mission? Do they understand your commitment to innovate for them? Can they feel your sensitivity to their needs?

Trust starts with a company's values ​​and culture. Values ​​guide who you hire, the products you build, the service you provide and how you communicate. Values ​​provide security, safety and security to customers. If something goes wrong, customers need to trust that you will put their interests first and be accountable to them. It's also not enough to write values ​​on a wall or website – you need to embed them at every level of your organization.

Related: 4 Reasons why values ​​matter so much in business

At BILL, our five values ​​(Authentic, Responsible, Humble, Passionate and Fun) inform our priorities and business decisions and guide our engagement with customers. We measure and reward employee performance against our values. We repeat them at every company meeting and discuss them with customers, investors and partners.

Focusing on agile, empathetic and customer-centric approaches can help SMBs reap the benefits of an increasingly engaged, tech-savvy and community-oriented customer base. By instilling strong company values, leveraging technology, building a seamless customer journey, and engaging in two-way communication, SMBs will not only earn customer loyalty and trust—they will, too.