A customer experience strategy is a vital component for any business enterprise, as it has the capability of retaining and transforming first-time customers into evangelist customers, thus ensuring your business always has a steady flow of consumers.
McKinsey reports that 70% of all buying experiences are based on how a customer feels they are being treated. 80% of consumers are more likely to do business with a company if it offers personalized experiences (Epsilon).
Unfortunately, many companies lack any form of strategy, resulting in low conversions within their sales funnels.
What is a Customer Experience Strategy ?
A customer experience strategy or CX strategy usually refers to as a sum of every interaction a customer has with a business, thus it should be those actionable plans that should be put into place to deliver a positive interaction with a customer.
Forrester, a global market research company, defines a customer experience strategy as “a plan that guides the activities and resources allocation needed to deliver an experience that meets or exceeds customer expectations.”
How to Build a Customer Experience Strategy ?
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Take a 3600 Overview of Your Business
Evaluating your company’s values, objectives, brand messages, or promises and processes should be the starting point. Having a 360° view of your business will provide you with the prerequisite knowledge of how you would implement an effective CX strategy.
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Brand Promise
Your business must evaluate itself through a variety of research methods to determine if it delivers on its brand promise and message to its consumers.
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Hire the Right Manpower
Related to the understanding and articulation of your vision is the human resources management. Your business should have effective employee hiring to conduct the best strategy. A company can only be as good as the people who work for it. The hiring process has to be carefully done. Hiring people with the requisite skills and experiences in their respective departments is a must.
“42% of customer service agents are unable to efficiently resolve customer issues due to disconnected systems, archaic user interfaces, multiple applications and not having the relevant training.” – Forrester
All existing employees and new employees should be re-trained to the current service delivery to ensure consistency in service delivery of your business operations. Agile methods and the new working ways are to be taken into account both for hiring and for training the actual employees.
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Analyze Your Target Market, Industry, and Competitors
It is only when you are able to understand your target market, industry, and competitors’ strategies will you then begin to craft better strategies, with an effective CX strategy geared towards achieving similar results.
You will be required to analyze all internal and external factors that affect your business performance. The data you get will be able to identify areas of improvement and develop an effective CX strategy.
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Understand Your Customer
With a perfect understanding of the business and its vision and the right manpower, it is time to get to the next step. By truly knowing and understanding your customer, you can then begin to devise appropriate strategies that are effective and will resonate with your customers. You have to get to understand them perfectly and to be able to classify them if needed.
To do so effectively, you will be required to conduct a variety of research methods both qualitative and quantitative using a range of methods such as: holding interviews, surveys, looking at the market evolution, analysing data from their interactions with your website, making A/B Test, reviewing the impact of marketing campaigns and your communication on the social networks, etc.
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Define Goals and Objectives to Develop an Efficient CX Strategy
By this stage, you should have collected a lot of data on your current data which can now allow you to start developing your goals and objectives. These goals and objectives will lay the foundation upon which your CX strategy will be built. Have you think about using Open Innovation ? An efficient CX strategy is basically a roadmap that will address the fundamental question of ‘How do we get there ?’. It outlines the strategies you should deploy across all your business touch points in order to achieve an exceptionally good customer experience.
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Create an Emotional Connection with Your Customers
Harvard Business Review reports that customers who are ‘fully connected’ with a brand are 52% more valuable to them than those customers who are ‘highly satisfied’. These statistics show that emotions are capable of shaping our attitude which ultimately affects our purchasing decisions.
Emotionally charged customers are never price-sensitive. Again, social networks are an easy way to work on emotional connection with customers, and hiring an efficient community manager can help.
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Establish A Consistent Service Standard
Any area within your business processes where a customer comes to contact with your business is referred to as a touch point. It has the potential to break or build your company, and thus, it is important that your employees provide a consistent, quality customer service experience throughout your business touch points.
“75% of consumers expect a consistent experience wherever they engage (e.g., website, social media, mobile, in person)” – Salesforce
You should provide a standard measurement of service delivery, document it, and constantly use it to gauge the performance of service delivery across all your business touch points. To manage the interaction with current or potential clients, high-quality CRM tools are a must. On the Internet, social networks and chatbots are now fundamental to attract, reassure, respond, and interact with customers or customers-to-be. In order to do so, you also have to show your customer you are taking good care of the data.
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Measure Your CX Strategy
Your measurement strategy must be aligned with your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), and they are categorized into 3 main categories: Outcome-based, Descriptive and Perceptive metrics :
- Outcome-based metrics are used to capture the actions of your customers before and after interactions with your business touch points.
- Descriptive metrics are used to measure the level of interaction with your business touch points.
- Perceptive metrics measure your customers’ perception of your brand.
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Optimize Your CX Strategy
Your measurement results will provide you with the relevant data necessary to making the desired improvements and optimizing the areas with the highest ratio of delivering the best results. The optimization of your CX strategy will ultimately result in an increase in your business ROI.
Benefits of Having a Customer Experience Strategy
An effective customer experience strategy can provide your business with numerous benefits. Econsultancy and Adobe asked companies to indicate their single most exciting opportunity for their organisation, and a whopping 22% of them said it was customer experience. This data is contained in the Digital Marketing Trends Report.
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Increases Revenues
Though obvious, a good customer experience provided to a client will result in repeated sales from that person and from those who will be referred to your business by that specific customer. Research has shown customers value the reviews and recommendations of fellow customers more than those by the brand itself.
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Improves the Customer’s Perception of Your Brand
An effective CX strategy will consist of a mechanism of collecting and responding to customers’ feedback. Businesses that respond to their customers’ feedback in a timely manner will earn a positive review from their customers, and this ultimately results in the business garnering evangelist customers.
Technological advancements within the communication space and the advent of social media channels have provided a platform for consumers to interact and exchange views about a brand’s performance with ease. A bad review from a consumer can damage your brand’s reputation within seconds before your business can issue a statement explaining your side of the story.
A dissatisfied customer will tell 10 people.
A satisfied customer will tell 3.
A successful CX strategy will provide your business with numerous essential benefits, as we have just seen. However, it cannot be developed without a perfect understanding of the goals, the market, the customers, etc. In order to do so, companies and leaders have to keep in touch with the new tools and tendencies and always anticipate to adapt and optimize their strategies.
