How to develop a customer experience strategy 101
Companies that focus on developing strategies for the customer experience reduce churn and increase revenues – leading to higher profits.
Trying to improve your customer experience strategy? You’re not alone. It’s no surprise, since CX overtook product and price as the top brand differentiator.
Improving your customer experience can lead to stronger customer relationships, improved brand perception, and increased revenue.
But getting there requires ongoing work, and a clear, focused strategy.
Why you need a customer experience strategy
Too often, companies approach CX as an intuitive, instinctual practice. And while the best experiences feel effortless and intuitive, they’re built on a well-designed strategy.
Your CX strategy is not a hypothetical or theoretical idea. It’s a digital document that clearly outlines:
- Who your customer is
- What the customer journey looks like
- Your brand promise
- How you define and measure success
These four elements are the foundation of your customer experience. Invest the time and energy into outlining and aligning your team around them, and you’ll set yourself up for long-term success.
Improve your customer experience strategy: 4 common mistakes to avoid
Of course, not all strategies are created equal. Here are four common mistakes companies make that you’ll want to avoid.
Mistake #1: Ignoring the employee experience
Great customer experience starts with a great employee experience. In fact, high employee engagement can boost profitability by 21% and customer ratings by 10%.
This is true for a few reasons:
- Your employees are the ones interfacing with customers. From sales staff to customer service, they’re the face of your brand. When they feel valued and buy into the brand experience, they’re more likely to deliver a great experience to customers.
- Investing in tools that help employees do their job more easily and effectively reduces how often customers get passed around from department to department.
- Engaged employees are more collaborative and better able to find solutions to CX problems that come up.
Not to mention, improving the employee experience reduces turnover.
If you’re trying to improve your customer experience strategy, start by looking at your employee experience. Identify any roadblocks or bottlenecks keeping your team from working effectively. Empower them to deliver the best possible experiences to your customers.
How to improve employee well-being: Humanity enters the workplace
By making wellness a priority and leading with compassion, modern HR leaders are improving employee well-being and boosting morale.
Mistake #2: Assuming your customers are just like you
If you want to make an outstanding customer experience, you have to know what your customers want. And unless you are your target audience, be careful not to assume you instinctively know what that is.
Use common sense and empathy when building your CX strategy – put yourself in the user’s shoes and make note of how you’d choose to engage. But you also have to check your own biases.
The best way to do that is to turn to your customer data. Use it to build comprehensive customer profiles that help you know your audience on a deeper level. Identify their pain points and priorities and use those insights to improve your customer experience strategy. And remember – they may not be the same as yours.
Discover customer pain points – then fix them: CX will soar
Once a business uncovers customer pain points, immediate action must be taken to improve CX, thereby building loyal customer relationships.
Mistake #3: Operating with a channel mindset
CX strategies that break down the experience by department or channel will continue to miss the mark. No matter how your company operates internally, your customers experience your brand as a holistic entity – and will judge it as such. A bad customer service interaction won’t leave them thinking, “Man, their service organization is not well run.” They’ll think, “Man, this company doesn’t care about customer service.”
Improve your customer experience strategy by seeing the forest through the trees. How does the entire experience flow together?
Design your strategy with an omnichannel approach. Use journey maps to:
- Understand how your customers move from channel to channel
- Identify the various touchpoints they engage with, and
- Create a seamless experience across all those touchpoints
Omnichannel examples: Brands creating their own luck
Online retail and e-commerce require an omnichannel strategy. How do you create one? Learn some of the best omnichannel examples out there.
Mistake #4: Neglecting metrics
One of the biggest CX mistakes is failing to define clear, measurable goals and success metrics. You can create as many campaigns and engagements you want, but if you don’t know what success looks like or how it’s measured, you’re not actually in control of the experience.
Not only that; failing to align on success metrics can lead to internal conflict, too. If your teams aren’t working together with a clear understanding of the goals and KPI’s, they could end up working against each other and creating experiences that are disjointed and inconsistent.
- Identify your business goals. Which are the most critical for you to achieve?
- Work with your data team to determine what goals you can and cannot measure. If needed, adapt your success metrics to reflect what’s actually measurable.
- Make sure your entire organization is aligned and rallied behind these metrics. If necessary, rank your goals and metrics so your teams know which tasks take top priority.
This part of the process can take a lot of time and energy, but without it, your customer experience strategy is not truly complete.
5 next-gen marketing KPIs to enhance the customer experience
Which CX metrics are most important for B2B marketers? By keeping a sharp focus on these top five KPIs, brands can evolve with their customers’ needs.
Improve your customer experience strategy, improve your brand
Customer experience is too important to be left to chance. Its impact on your brand and its ability to succeed long-term is too great. Arm yourself with a solid customer experience strategy and take control of your company’s future.
