Providing a great customer experience keeps customers returning and less likely to switch to your competitor. Being able to provide that exceptional service, however, doesn’t just happen overnight.
That’s where a customer experience strategy comes in.
What is a CX strategy?
A customer experience (CX) strategy is driven by the idea of a customer-centric business. Customers are the core of your company - they’re what drive growth and profitability and further your success. So it makes sense to put them first.
But a lot of businesses don’t understand who their customers are - what they want and why they want it. It’s incredibly hard to create a great product or service when you don’t know much about the people using it.
A CX strategy is about understanding the motivation, wants, needs and pain points of your customer at every point in their journey with your brand, whether it be using a chatbot on your website, interacting with your social media accounts, purchasing a product in-store, or navigating a return through your website. The customer experience entails every interaction a customer has with your business, and your CX strategy is about tailoring those interactions to better meet (and exceed) their expectations.
So why do you need a CX strategy? Whenever a customer interacts with your company, you want them to walk away with a positive perception of your brand. No matter how seemingly small or inconsequential the interaction, even the slightest “poor” experience can be damaging.
Many businesses focus on establishing and building a competitive advantage through differentiation on price or product. But in the digital era, this is simply not enough. It’s easier than ever for consumers to share positive and negative experiences online through online reviews and social media. Take, for example, the following sobering statistics :
- 96% of unhappy customers will share their bad experience with about 9 to 15 people
- 91% of unhappy customers will not buy from a business they’ve had a bad experience with again
- It takes about 40 positive customer experiences to undo the damage done by 1 negative review.
This makes your customer experience design pivotal to the survival of your business. Because, if you’re not putting customers first, everyone will know about it. The idea of your CX strategy is to make a lasting impression that makes customers want to return to your brand (and promote it to others).
How does a CX strategy work?
There are several key steps to building a solid CX strategy.
1. Benchmarking
CX starts with understanding your customer’s needs and wants. While it can be helpful to look at previous performance and what has helped satisfy customers in the past, a successful CX design requires acknowledging the present. Knowing your ideal customers’ current gain and pain points, as well as developing different brand personas, will allow you to idealise the perfect experience for each individual customer.
2. Customer Research
While it can be easy to make guesses about what you think matters to the customer, it may not be as accurate as you think. That’s why your CX strategy should start with gathering and segmenting data. The collection of qualitative and quantitative customer research is pivotal in giving you accurate facts and information about your customers.
3. Journey Mapping
Analysing the data and using it to tell a story using your own human experience allows you to begin asking questions that will lead you in the right direction. For example, who are my customers? What motivates them, and what do they actually want? If you can answer these, it becomes definitively easier to design an effective CX strategy.
4. Activation
With all this in mind, it's equally important to empower the frontline in order to deliver the optimal experience. The best CX leaders understand that a great experience can only be served through their employees. Therefore, it’s pivotal to support your people, train them and give them the right tools to connect them more effectively with customers.
Why you need a CX strategy
A CX strategy is a holistic solution for optimising every aspect of your business. Through the lens of the customer, a CX strategy enables you to uncover what elements of your business you need to improve to deliver a seamless customer experience.
A CX strategy gives you data-led insights into the areas your business should focus on to drive growth, instead of just guessing what you think would help. Whether this is revamping your website, improving your sales process, training staff in customer service or improving your products and services, you’ll be able to strategise and execute on activities that you know will satisfy your customers and improve ROI.
On top of that, other benefits of implementing a CX strategy include:
- Higher customer satisfaction and loyalty: meeting customer needs means they’re more likely to return.
- Increase in WoM marketing: Consumers are more likely to spread positive reviews
- Reduced marketing and service costs: Knowing who your customers are and what they want leads to more effective and cost-efficient targeting and messaging
- Increased profitability: An increase in sales and reduction in marketing and service costs will boost revenue
- Increased brand equity: Your brand value will increases with customer satisfaction
Transform your business with a CX strategy
Give your customers what they want at every touchpoint and improve ROI. If you want to find out more about how we can help your business define and implement a CX strategy, get in touch.
