Customer Experience Strategy and How Should Businesses Define It?

What should businesses do to get ahead in the game? How can companies increase their revenue and make higher profits? How can businesses reduce the friction of customer complaints and returns?

These are some questions asked frequently in the business market. The answer to these questions is simple. All businesses need to do is implement a well-executed customer experience strategy that is focused on improving customer experience.

According to Gartner, 81% of companies expect to compete mostly or entirely based on CX by 2020.

But What Exactly Is Customer Experience?

Customer experience is defined by interactions, touchpoints, and engagement between the customers and the brand. Customer experience is an integral part of customer relationship management (CRM). The reason why CX is essential because the customer who has had a positive experience with the company is likely to be a returning visitor. 

What Is Customer Experience Strategy?

Customer experience strategy serves as a framework to ensure the quality and bring a businesses’ CX vision to life. It is the process of defining, planning, and documenting a customer experience approach to help companies to meet their goals.

In this article, we study why a CX strategy is essential for a business’s goals and also customer strategy best practices for 2020!

Why Is It Important To Have A Customer Experience Strategy?

Since customer experience is the sum of every interaction a customer has with the business, it becomes essential to develop a strategy to achieve the desired goals. A CX strategy is also important to step into the shoes of the customers and take an outside-in-customer-centric approach to customer experience management.

Common Elements Of A CX Strategy-

According to Forrester Research, the common elements of a CX strategy are –

• A CX Vision
• Customer Description
• Gap Analysis
• Road Map
• Accountability Outline
• Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

Now let’s learn about some practices to create exceptional customer experience strategy in 2020:

Understand The Audience And Create Buyer Personas

The first and foremost thing to create an exceptionally great customer experience strategy is knowing the customers. Knowing and understanding the customer’s needs helps a business create customer-centric goals. When a business knows what exactly their customers want, then they aim to work in that particular direction.

Once the business collects ample information about their customers, they must create buyer personas.

Buyer personas describe the ideal customers based on market research and real data related to the existing customers.

Build A Customer Friendly Culture

As discussed above, customer experience is the sum total of all interactions during a customer lifecycle. In the B2B context, it means brand discovery, sales experience (sales and finance team), onboarding and product experience, and post-sales service.

And even in the B2C context, customer experience applies to all interactions through ads and social media and online customer satisfaction. But whether it is B2B or B2C, every customer-facing employee, representative, and the channel has a role to play in delivering excellent customer experience.

Be Within The Reach Of Your Customers

Business communication plays a significant role in shaping a customer’s experience. When talking about reachability, businesses must identify the channels where the customers are most active. For this, the companies must determine the channels on which their customers are engaged.

Businesses need to get familiarized with the channel, whether it is email, live chat, and so on. Reachability can serve as a helpful competitive tool; therefore, the businesses need to have a handle on customers’ preferred channels.

Eliminate Bad Design

Great user experience is the key to an excellent customer experience. So, one of the most crucial customer experience strategies is to create consistent brand experience across all channels- website, apps, emails, and social media channels.

Businesses must also eliminate unnecessary hurdles and streamline the purchasing process. For example, Wufoo introduced emoji faces in their app; then, the customers were asked to rate how they were feeling based on the emoji scale.

Cater The Needs Of The Customers And Use Feedback Loops

According to a survey, 86% of buyers will pay more for better customer experience. Therefore, it is of utmost necessity for the brands to cater to the needs of the customers.

But what is more important is to create feedback loops. An excellent customer strategy is the one that prioritizes the feedback received from the customers. Businesses can use post-interaction and real-time feedback surveys. Following up with the customers over phone or emails is a good idea to stay in touch with them continuously.

Know The Customer Experience Metrics

As it is said, “if it can’t be measured, it can’t be improved.”

Analyzing customer experience metrics is one crucial factor that helps in building a sound CX strategy. Every company must focus on some quantitative insights to have a more significant impact on its customer experience. These are-

• Net Promoter Score (NPS) – It shows the percentage of customers that would or would not recommend the business to their friends, family, etc.
• Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) – It is a transactional metric that shows how satisfied customers are with a recent interaction.
• Customer Effort Score (CES) – It depicts the score expended by customers in accomplishing a task.

Streamline Your Sales Processes 

SaaS-based businesses and organizations with an inside sales team must develop a streamlined sales process. It is always a good idea to consult the head of sales or senior sales associates directly about preparing the sales process.

The sales team must be able to provide timely and accurate responses to highly specific questions.

Designing a CX strategy can be tricky at times. Every business must know and understand the type of customer experience they are trying to create. They must also have an understanding of how they are going to build it.

Companies can start with improving on areas like the website. Once they achieve the fundamental objectives, then they can begin formulating a more complex CX strategy.

How Long Does It Take To Build A Full Proof CX Strategy?

Customer experience is a journey. The interactions between the customers and the business define what strategy to implement. Thus, companies must streamline the above points and focus on creating a customer-friendly CX strategy.

 

“Perfect CX strategy doesn’t exist. It is continuous and subject to evolution.”