A Clear Guide to Create & Improve a Customer Experience Strategy
For every business, the customer is key. This means it is vital that your business provides more than just a desirable service or product.
To get and keep the customers you want, you must also offer an excellent customer experience as well.
But what if you have a poor or non-existent customer experience strategy? Most companies without one experience low customer satisfaction, negative reviews, and unsuccessful business outcomes.
Following the right steps makes creating and improving a customer experience strategy relatively simple. In this article, we discuss how a successful customer experience strategy should look and how to create one for your business. We also provide some ways for you to develop your CX strategy further.
What Should a Customer Experience Strategy Look Like?
A strong customer experience strategy illustrates and establishes how your business should interact with customers at every level of their journey. For a quick snapshot of how this should look, here are some elements that should make up your digital customer experience strategy:
- Customer journey maps that provide a detailed outline of how your business engages with customers at every touchpoint. We discuss how these are made and used later on.
- Standards and procedures for customer service interactions. These should cover your entire customer journey, including physical and digital channels.
- Buyer personas that describe the demographics, traits, and behaviors of your ideal customers.
- Clear, measurable objectives matched with relevant metrics to ensure your teams can keep track of your progress.
- Feedback systems collect customers' viewpoints about your business. This includes online review submissions and social media profiles they can interact with.
- Analytics tools and customer relationship management systems that aggregate and place all qualitative and quantitative data in a centralized source.
These are just some of the different elements that should make up your CX strategy. Also, consider working with experts to develop a full, robust customer experience strategy. They will help you create a strategy that improves customer satisfaction and achieves your business objectives.
How to Create an Engaging Customer Experience Strategy
Now it's time to learn how to start building your CX strategy. There are numerous steps to take in this process. Below, we offer a few significant ones to get your strategy started:
Gain a Clear Vision of Your Customers' Identity & Purpose
First and foremost, you need to know who your customers are and their reasons for interacting with your business. Delving into these details will provide a solid foundation for the rest of your strategy.
This step mainly involves collecting data from various sources. These could come from your analytics tools, sales data, focus groups, surveys, and more. All that data should provide enough information for you to segment your customers into groups.
From there, you can develop a clear and full profile of your ideal customer's persona. You'll be able to understand what they want from your business, This step can also lead to strategies that induce high rates of customer loyalty, leading to a better reputation and revenue for your business.
Create a Customer Journey Map
Once you've developed a solid set of customer personas, you should then produce customer journey maps for each of them. A customer journey map outlines every touchpoint a potential customer will reach throughout their buying journey.
This starts with awareness of your business's offerings and ends with where and how you provide support after customers make a purchase. Outlining your entire customer journey helps you gain a clearer idea of your current customer experience strategy. It also helps you identify opportunities and areas for improvement in your customer journeys.
Gather, Interpret, & Engage With Customer Feedback
Feedback is a treasure trove of customer data that you can use in your customer experience strategy. From it, you can learn what parts of your strategy are producing positive results.
And even when it's negative, feedback like poor customer reviews and complaint emails can help indicate ways to improve your customer experience. More than that, it can present improvements that will matter most to customers, further creating positive results for your business.
Identify Pain Points of Your Most Loyal Customers
The next step you can take is to find pain points that affect your ideal customers. It helps to have your customer journey mapped and customer persona profiles filled by this point.
And even when it's negative, feedback like poor customer reviews and complaint emails can help indicate ways to improve your customer experience. More than that, it can present customer preferences, further creating potential opportunities to produce positive results for your business.
Plan Out Your CX Strategy
After identifying ideal customer personas, laying out customer journey maps, discovering pain points, and collecting feedback, it's now time to plan your strategy. Based on everything you've learned from your customers, first lay out your objectives. Are you looking to increase engagements from a certain customer segment? Or do you want to improve your business's mobile revenue?
With these goals in mind, you can then utilize the customer data you've collected to develop a strategy that can reach them. For example, perhaps creating personalized experiences for each customer segment can help increase engagement across the board. In addition, designing your website to be more mobile-friendly and accessible can increase sales.
With the goal and approach of your strategy planned, you should then list each step you and your team must complete. Once these actions are assigned, all that is left to do is track progress and results. Throughout this process, remember that you can test and tweak your strategy to ensure a higher chance of success.
Ways to Develop & Improve Your Customer Experience Strategy
It's important to remember that your customer experience strategy exists in a continuous process. There are always going to be things you can do to further improve your strategy and produce better results. Here are a few we recommend you use to further develop and improve your strategy:
#1: Be Available Across Multiple Channels
An excellent part of a strong customer experience strategy is to expand your company's presence. This doesn't necessarily mean that you should exist in every single channel out there. Instead, you should appear where your customers are.
Not only that but also be active across these various channels. Ensure your company responds to comments, reviews, and replies. This not only shows your customers that you are seeking to connect with them but that you are available for them to share their experiences with you.
#2: Monitor & Analyze Proper CX Metrics
Your customer experience strategy should evolve over time. This should be based on tracking the key performance metrics from the changes involved in your strategy. These metrics should provide insights into how effective your CX strategy is, as well as provide ways to make them better.
Some of the metrics you should track include:
- Churn Rate
- Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)
- First Contact Resolution (FCR)
- Average Resolution Time
- Net Promoter Score (NPS)
There are many others, but the above are just a few metrics to consider when seeking to improve customer experience strategy.
#3: Train Your Customer Support Team
Whether they are frontline employees or remote customer support representatives, the team members who connect directly with your customers are the ones you should invest in. They work and interact directly with your customers and address any issues customers have with your services or products.
Your customer support team should be fully aware of all your latest customer service policies. They should also be trained to provide a consistent quality of service for every customer, no matter what point of their journey they are in. They should also know to provide valuable information that can help you further assess and improve your current customer experience.
#4: Lean Into Technology
Employing technologies like AI automation and machine learning can further improve your digital customer experience strategy. These can help create more personalized and responsive experiences for customers. One example of this is website chatbots.
Such technologies can also reduce your company's overall workload, allowing your teams to work more efficiently while earning effective results. AI-enabled analytics can organize and interpret huge swathes of data for you. This provides immediate insights so you can make data-driven decisions that are more likely to lead to business success and great customer satisfaction.
Exceed Customer Expectations With Experts from MCorpCX
Are you looking to maximize your company's business success? Then consider optimizing your customer experience with help from MCorpCX. Our seasoned team of experts will help you develop an effective customer experience strategy.
We'll also provide valuable and actionable insights about your business and its ideal customers, ensuring you maintain a competitive advantage in the long term.
Let us help you experience immense growth and success by ensuring your business offers an unforgettable customer experience. Contact us today to learn more.