Crafting a customer experience strategy that drives growth
In today’s highly competitive landscape, delivering exceptional customer experiences is essential for business success and longevity. However, many companies still take an ad hoc, disjointed approach to customer experience (CX)—if they focus on it at all. This puts them at risk of losing customers to rivals and new disruptive entrants taking CX more seriously.
What is customer experience (CX)?
Customer experience encompasses all interactions a customer has with your business, across every touchpoint and medium, throughout the entire relationship lifecycle. This includes awareness, research, purchases, utilization, upgrades, troubleshooting, and cancellations. The customer experience is shaped by an accumulation of perceptions stemming from functionality, convenience, expectations, emotions, and a more subjective evaluation of your brand.
Why customer experience matters:
Delivering positive, seamless CX provides tremendous benefits:
Customer loyalty and retention
Satisfied customers who enjoy engaging with your company will buy more frequently, try additional product lines, and retain customers for longer periods vs disengaged counterparts—substantially boosting lifetime value.
Increased revenue
Easy, enjoyable experiences signal to prospects your offerings provide superior ongoing value. This drives increased conversion rates plus amplified average order sizes as existing buyers upgrade or purchase related solutions.
Stronger brand advocacy
Customers sharing praise and recommendations with peers via word-of-mouth and social media provides immensely credible marketing that humanizes your brand in authentic ways direct advertising can’t easily replicate. These unpaid evangelists expand reach and consideration.
Competitive advantage
Rivals struggling with disjointed, lackluster customer interactions lose accounts to consumer-centric brands cultivating seamless, responsive relationships across touchpoints through cohesive strategies. Customer experience generates defensible differentiation.
Cost savings
Defect and complaint reductions, lowered customer churn plus greater internal process efficiencies ultimately optimize budgets through mitigating unnecessary operational costs dragged down by haphazard legacy CX approaches.
The pillars of a successful customer experience strategy
Constructing an enduring customer experience strategy necessitates an interplay of capabilities:
Understand your customers
True intimacy through data-driven insights surrounding evolving needs, pain points, and life context enables nuanced personalization differentiating your relevance.
Define your CX vision
Rally your company around an aspirational multi-year CX ambition grounded in your brand ethos but focusing cross-function teams on what matters most to customers.
Set measurable CX goals
Tangible metrics spanning satisfaction, retention, conversions/order values, and operational excellence provide directional mileposts signaling progress transforming initiatives into growth indicators.
Design a seamless journey
Plot peak experiences navigating touchpoints eliminating unnecessary complexity or friction converting interested visitors into lifetime loyalists appreciating your superior value and commitment over time through cohesive engagement strategies.
Empower employees
Inspire your staff through omnichannel content, tools, and leadership embodying customer-obsessed behaviors that make each interaction shine via grassroots brand ambassador activations humanizing your offerings.
Leverage technology
Harness platforms provide data-fueled insights, micro-targeting segmentation, and operational automation enabling responsive issue resolutions plus interactions so effective they feel proactively personalized. Let systems complement teams in amplifying capabilities impossible otherwise.
Continuously measure and improve
Embedded CX metrics tracing effectiveness across areas outlined above feed iterative testing cycles persistently elevating relevancy and experiences through always-on diagnostics managing progress, capabilities, and perceptions over the long term.
Developing a customer experience strategy
How should companies approach formalizing an actionable enterprise CX strategy? While variations exist, common phases apply for structuring initiatives to maximize customer and company value:
Conduct CX audit
Attaining current baselines of procedural, technological, and experiential performance requires completely objective assessments—often aided by external CX analytics partners bringing fulsome vantage points. Know where you stand.
Define vision and goals
Ground strategy in unambiguous CX aims reflecting corporate objectives and brand identity filtered through customer needs to chart targeted maturation states over 3-5 years with milestones defined.
Map journeys
Catalog existing cross-channel customer pathways illuminating successes, hurdles, and upside potential to envisage superior state flows better fulfilling wants at each sequential touchpoint. Design future states.
Identify initiatives
Inventory established strengths to reinforce plus improvement categories requiring innovation across operations, analytics, or automation spheres delivering enhanced experiences, relevance, and personalization capabilities outlined earlier.
Implement and measure
Activate iterative testing cycles strengthening CX capabilities with frequent outcome measurements verifying impact while recalibrating approaches not progressing key performance indicators tied to goals. Maintain momentum.
Continuously iterate
Build institutionalized listening and customer-led innovation mechanisms enabling constant CX enhancements through an ever-evolving understanding of your most valuable asset—people who voluntarily choose you today expecting greater value tomorrow than yesterday. Deliver unrelentingly.
The role of customer experience strategy consulting
For many businesses, partnering with Customer Experience Strategy Consulting | McorpCX can be invaluable. These experts bring deep expertise, industry knowledge, and a proven methodology to help you:
Conduct CX assessments
Attaining accurate comprehension of existing dynamics through outside-in evaluations spotlights where friction exists for remediations whereas strengths should continue being reinforced. Develop plans.
Develop customized CX strategies
Specialist translates learnings into tailored roadmaps aligning proposed CX solution building blocks outlined earlier to client scenarios guided by best practices producing option frameworks versus prepacked theoretical conjecture less relevant to organization uniqueness.
Implement CX initiatives
Proven project management and vendor oversight expertise accelerates capability rollout from personalized starter pilots to staged maturation managing risk while hitting return expectations every interval and vetting sustainability.
Measure and track results
Embedded metrics trace solution efficacy at granular levels enabling teams to monitor individual solution health and ongoing experience improvements celebrating incremental success milestones maintaining constitutency momentum beyond initial implementations.
The role of technology in customer experience
Technology can profoundly enhance capabilities around designing, managing, and improving customer experiences:
CRM systems
Consolidating interlinked data sets provides complete client lifetime views enabling engagement personalization with contextual experiences coordinated companywide.
AI and chatbots
Natural language interfaces automate queries as personal assistants guiding or even anticipating needs through ambient computing lowering efforts and delighting users.
Self-service portals
Online support resources shift service burdens from staff allowing channel preferences with proactive data-integrated notifications urging utilization and nudging additional purchases.
Personalization engines
Propensity modeling builds individualized interactions amplified by machine learning matching signals to appropriate offers and tonal variants keeping relevance high amidst overwhelming market noise.
Feedback and survey tools
Continuous CX assessments feed diagnostics for informing systematic improvements prioritizing targeted enhancements demonstrating customer-centric commitments improving perceptions and relationships exponentially more impactful than disjointed periodic surveys previously limiting agility.
The future of customer experience
Leading enterprises focus on CX innovation across several emerging areas:
Hyper-personalization
Granular segmentation gives way to tailoring singular touchpoints around individual needs and contexts at the moment signaling personal care transcending demographics through custom fit engagement.
Proactive service
Preemptive embedded assistance activated by implicit queues anticipates issues self-solving through ambient automated augmentation preventing problems manifesting maximizing self-service funneling live interactions only where uniquely necessary.
Seamless omnichannel
Consistency, context, and continuation minimize repetition frustrations as experiences traverse the web, mobile, phone, and in-store eventually expanding emerging augmented and virtual channels with ubiquitous ease.
Customer-obsessed culture
A pervasive CX mindset championed by leadership rallies staff commitments elevating creative customer kidding unlocking transformational performance far surpassing sporadic superficial platitudes of years past.
Conclusion
Constructing differentiated customer experiences generates multiplying returns compounding customer lifetime value while securing organizational durability amid intensifying competition. Harness frameworks outlined here for maximizing loyalty and growth by setting ambitious targets, mapping intermediary steps then enlisting technologies and partners accelerating coherent solution assembly. Now is the time for action—those delaying enable disruptors focused on relentlessly cultivating customer connections gaining outsized benefits launching your destiny today!
