In today’s business world, about 89% of businesses compete solely based on customer experience (CX).
Building a solid customer experience strategy to attract new customers and retain existing ones is even more crucial for business success now. But building your CX strategy from scratch can be a daunting task. In this article, we will discuss CX strategy- what it is, why you need one and how to build one for your brand.
What is a customer experience strategy, and why is it important?
A customer experience strategy is a plan of action to improve the overall customer experience at every touch point in the customer journey, pre and post-sales. A solid CX strategy outlines defined goals and actionable steps to help analyze and optimize CX efforts to increase customer satisfaction overall.
As every brand action affects customer perception directly or indirectly, building a strategic CX plan will ensure a consistent brand experience and help retain customers. In fact, up to 73% of customers assert that CX is a deciding factor while making purchase decisions.
Some key elements that contribute to excellent CX are:
- Timely response with effective solutions
- Effective communication and clarity
- Maintenance of human touch across your CX strategy
- Going the extra mile for your customers
5 Ways to create an efficient CX strategy
1. Define actionable goals
One of the first steps while designing your CX strategy is to set clearly defined goals. You can take actionable steps toward your goals by outlining what you want to achieve as goals help measure, analyze, and optimize your success rate and return on investment (ROI).
While setting goals, ensure they are measurable, attainable, and time-bound. This way, you can keep track of them periodically. You can readjust your strategy accordingly after reviewing your metrics to see what works and does not.
For instance, a specific and actionable goal is to increase the net promoter score (NPS) by 10% in the next quarter. This goal is specific, measurable, and time-bound; hence can be reviewed at the end of a quarter to cross-check targets.
2. Leverage automation and AI
In today’s era of digital transformation, organizations are adopting technology and AI to maximize business potential. As a customer base grows, leveraging technology like Interactive decision trees to automate routine processes is the way to go. But this does not mean robotic CX or generic mass emails.
If used correctly, AI and automation tools can add tremendous value to your CX strategy and prove convenient for your customer support team. For instance, 70% of customers now expect a self-service portal on websites.
Some benefits of AI-powered self-service portals and chatbots include the following:
- Auto responses to frequently asked questions by customers
- Allow agents to focus on more complex tasks by reducing the need to attend to every customer
- Promotes agent empowerment as it deflects large number of calls to self-service channels
- AI chatbots assist in personalized, quick responses. They extract relevant information from a pool of knowledge repository and present customers with specific information like order numbers, recent purchases, and so on.
3. Understand your target audience (TA) and buyer personas
Mapping out your target audience and buyer personas is a crucial step in your CX game plan. These will help you understand your customer base and the pain points they experience while interacting with your brand.
By understanding the pain points of your personas in their customer journey, you can enhance their experience for a smooth and enjoyable CX. Accordingly, you can focus on reachability on their preferred channels of communication to provide consistent, reliable service.
4. Build an omnichannel strategy
Customers today want convenience and personalization while interacting with a brand. According to Epsilon, 80% of customers will shop from a brand that offers personalized experiences.
In the same way, customers prefer to choose their own journeys across multiple channels at different touch points. By creating an omnichannel strategy using a knowledge management system, you can ensure a consistent and unified experience in branding and information.
An omnichannel approach will help:
- Integrate multiple channels – This will allow your customers to access support across multiple channels in a seamless way. Organizations can deliver an omnichannel customer experience as information is consistent across all channels that you support. They can simply pick up where they left off previously on one channel and continue on another.
- Improves customer satisfaction – By having a unified contact strategy, you can offer different support channels for your customers to access. While some simple queries can be solved through self-service, other more complex problems can be resolved by live agents.
5. Measure your CX metrics
Reviewing your CX strategy is just as important as designing one. By analyzing crucial CX parameters, you’ll be able to measure whether your strategy is effective. Some important parameters include:
- Net Promoter Score (NPS) – It measures the likelihood of customers recommending the business to family or friends
- Customer Effort Score (CSE) – It measures the effort customers need to exert to get their problems resolved with a brand
- Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) – It is the degree to which customers are satisfied with a product or service
- Agent Effort Score – It measures the effort an agent has to put in finding the answer to the customer queries. This metric is the result of all other CX metrics like average handle time, average speed to answer, average response time, etc.
Bottom line
Measuring your CX efforts will help you understand how your business is performing as well as your customers’ perception of it. Encouraging customers to share their feedback and reviews is a great way to engage with them and understand how they feel about your brand overall. Accordingly, you can optimize this feedback to build a solid CX strategy and up your customer service game.
