How to Create a Great Customer Experience Strategy
Posted: Tue Dec 03, 2024 7:17 am
Customer experience is critical to the success of any business. Statistics show that the better experience you can offer, the higher your customer retention will be.
A study by Econsultancy and Adobe called the 2020 Digital Marketing Trends Report asked organizations what the most lucrative opportunity was for them this year, and once again, most of them were unanimous in their response about customer experience.
Customer experience is one of the determining factors of a brand’s fate and establishes ultimate customer loyalty. In fact, a study by Oracle revealed that 74% of business leaders say that customer experience affects customer loyalty. A single instance of poor customer experience could drive away nearly 17% of customers , while repeated instances could lead to 59% of them abandoning the product.
While preparing your company to become a customer-centric business may be enough to motivate organizational change, you first need to create initiatives and gain momentum to achieve a unique customer experience that will help your product perform distinctively. This could also result in increased profits, as research shows that 86% of customers will pay more for a great customer experience.
Creating a great CX strategy is the start to ensuring a memorable experience for customers. It helps introduce novelty and enrich the customer experience. Here, we will look at the elements of a successful customer experience strategy and see how to put them together to build one.
1. Create a clear vision of the customer experience
The first step in building a customer experience strategy is to outline your customer experience vision. The simplest way to define it is to create a few statements that act as guiding principles for your CX strategy.
Be specific with your nigeria phone number library vision so that everyone in the organization can easily understand it. After creating a vision statement, get everyone in the company to invest their time and energy into making it a reality. Start by introducing a customer-centric culture at the grassroots level to move in the direction of improving customer experience.
This alignment of company members will make them all oriented towards the same vision, so that each of them knows in advance the role they must play to make the vision a success. And finally, to ensure that all employees are dedicated to your customer-centric culture, you can set goals and link them to incentives for achieving certain results for customers.
2. Know your customers
Thoroughly understanding your customers and their needs is an integral part of defining your customer experience strategy. Without knowing your customers beforehand and the situations they face, you won’t be able to empathize with their problems and propose alternatives or solutions to keep them and your brand in good standing.
It is also worth mentioning that different groups of customers will have different complaints. That is why the first step to knowing your customers is to create accurate buyer personas. These buyer personas are profiles that represent a group of your customers who are likely facing the same issues and having the same problems.
You can even conduct surveys to learn about different types of customers and then use the data to create a CX strategy that addresses the pain points of all your customers. You can further enable this process by tracking the ads your customers respond to to gain better insight into your customers’ minds.
Make sure you keep a record of the different people and surveys you request information from so you have it handy when a certain department needs to refer to it. You can use tools like HubSpot's Make My Persona to help you create an attractive buyer persona, and use other tools like Dropbox to store all your feedback surveys and other relevant details.
3. Enable real-time support capability
Did you know that businesses take an average of 12 hours and 10 minutes to respond to customer queries? This doesn’t even come close to meeting the growing expectations of today’s customers. So how can you make sure you’re racking up the points when most businesses aren’t?
Facilitating real-time customer service.
Real-time customer support with the help of live chat software can help you provide instant solutions to customers and accompany them throughout the customer journey, if needed.
Live chat can raise customer service standards several notches by allowing your customer support team to interact with potential customers in real-time throughout their customer journey.
You can also live chat with a co-browsing software to help your support team easily interact with your customer’s screen to better understand their complaints and provide instant help by sharing the customer’s screen and guiding them through the product.
4 Make it personal
After enabling real-time support, move on to personalizing the customer experience. Creating a personalized experience can do wonders for your brand by increasing customer loyalty. In fact, 80% of customers are more likely to purchase a service or product from a company that offers personalized experiences.
Personalization helps brands differentiate themselves from the competition and foster a stronger relationship with customers. It is the nurturing of these relationships that results in customer loyalty down the line. And when done right, personalization signals to the customer that your brand is invested in their experience and wants to strengthen the relationship by working to provide better service, better suggestions, and instant support, among others.
A great example of personalization is Brainshark, a B2B software provider. Brainshark was facing problems converting free users into paying customers. That’s when they hired the services of a third-party vendor to help them deliver personalized messages. After running some analytics on their product usage, they identified gaps in engagement and started with messaging from within the product interface and used ads and pop-ups on their website to reach out to existing users and give them advice on how to optimize Brainshark.
This ultimately helped them increase signups by 15% and get a 150% growth in free trial signups for their product. Their sales pipeline also saw a massive growth of over $1.1 million.
5. Collect feedback regularly and act on it
How do you know if you’re delivering a great customer experience? Ask your customers using tools like Astuto . Feedback surveys have been a timeless companion of forward-thinking brands, helping them optimize their offerings by listening to what customers have to say about them.
Collecting feedback regularly helps you measure customer loyalty and attrition. This feedback helps you learn more about the customer and their level of satisfaction with your product.
Feedback in the form of testimonials and reviews can also be a huge help to your business. According to research by American Express, 34% of customers believe that positive word of mouth is far more important than a sale or promotion.
However, it doesn’t stop here. After asking for feedback, you need to act on it in a firm manner to further enrich the customer experience. One of the best examples of brands using customer feedback to their advantage is Starbucks. The coffee company often interacts with customers and asks for their opinions, thus adding value to the customer experience.
Among its many initiatives to enrich CX, its “ What’s Your Starbucks Idea? ” program stands out the most. Through crowdsourcing feedback, the brand works with suggestions, ideas, reviews, and more to gather valuable insights on all three fronts of CX ideas, product ideas, and engagement ideas to further diversify its product. Apart from that, Starbucks also allows customers to chat with its representatives so that they can gather ideas from their customers and act on the ones that really matter.
6. Know which customer experience metrics to track
Customer experience is an evolving standard, and measuring customer satisfaction requires more than simply recording revenue growth or excess inventory. Since customer experience is so multifaceted, it stands to reason that getting a complete picture of it requires benchmarking from multiple angles.
This is where customer experience metrics come into play. You need to ask yourself which set of CX metrics help you paint a broad picture of what customers feel about your brand. So, when it comes to measuring CX metrics, make sure you follow the five below to get a broad view of your CX picture.
Net Promoter Score (NPS): This score measures the likelihood that existing customers will recommend your brand to others. Customers rate their willingness to recommend you on a scale of 0 to 10. There are three types of scores:
Subtracting the percentage of detractors from promoters gives you your final NPS score.
Churn Rate: Churn rates help you measure the overall percentage of consumers who abandon your service after a given period. It is determined by taking the difference in users at the start of a period and users at the end of the period and then dividing the difference by users at the start of the period.
Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT): Customer satisfaction score is measured on a five-point scale. These scores are typically measured after customer service interactions are completed.
Customer Effort Score (CES): A variation of the CSAT, the CES score measures customer effort and rates their experience on a scale from very easy to very difficult. In other words, it asks customers how easy or difficult they found it to use your product or service.
Customer Lifetime Value (CLV): CLV is the expected gross profit derived from a customer over the life of the customer relationship.
These metrics will help you get a bird’s-eye view of your CX landscape. However, keep in mind to constantly evaluate the above-mentioned metrics from multiple angles and adapt the necessary changes in time to build an effective CX strategy.
Conclusion
A company’s customer experience strategy is its Rome: it can’t be built in a day. It’s a slow process that requires you to define each step and work to define and simplify the six key areas above, but do so under the notion that things are subject to change.
A study by Econsultancy and Adobe called the 2020 Digital Marketing Trends Report asked organizations what the most lucrative opportunity was for them this year, and once again, most of them were unanimous in their response about customer experience.
Customer experience is one of the determining factors of a brand’s fate and establishes ultimate customer loyalty. In fact, a study by Oracle revealed that 74% of business leaders say that customer experience affects customer loyalty. A single instance of poor customer experience could drive away nearly 17% of customers , while repeated instances could lead to 59% of them abandoning the product.
While preparing your company to become a customer-centric business may be enough to motivate organizational change, you first need to create initiatives and gain momentum to achieve a unique customer experience that will help your product perform distinctively. This could also result in increased profits, as research shows that 86% of customers will pay more for a great customer experience.
Creating a great CX strategy is the start to ensuring a memorable experience for customers. It helps introduce novelty and enrich the customer experience. Here, we will look at the elements of a successful customer experience strategy and see how to put them together to build one.
1. Create a clear vision of the customer experience
The first step in building a customer experience strategy is to outline your customer experience vision. The simplest way to define it is to create a few statements that act as guiding principles for your CX strategy.
Be specific with your nigeria phone number library vision so that everyone in the organization can easily understand it. After creating a vision statement, get everyone in the company to invest their time and energy into making it a reality. Start by introducing a customer-centric culture at the grassroots level to move in the direction of improving customer experience.
This alignment of company members will make them all oriented towards the same vision, so that each of them knows in advance the role they must play to make the vision a success. And finally, to ensure that all employees are dedicated to your customer-centric culture, you can set goals and link them to incentives for achieving certain results for customers.
2. Know your customers
Thoroughly understanding your customers and their needs is an integral part of defining your customer experience strategy. Without knowing your customers beforehand and the situations they face, you won’t be able to empathize with their problems and propose alternatives or solutions to keep them and your brand in good standing.
It is also worth mentioning that different groups of customers will have different complaints. That is why the first step to knowing your customers is to create accurate buyer personas. These buyer personas are profiles that represent a group of your customers who are likely facing the same issues and having the same problems.
You can even conduct surveys to learn about different types of customers and then use the data to create a CX strategy that addresses the pain points of all your customers. You can further enable this process by tracking the ads your customers respond to to gain better insight into your customers’ minds.
Make sure you keep a record of the different people and surveys you request information from so you have it handy when a certain department needs to refer to it. You can use tools like HubSpot's Make My Persona to help you create an attractive buyer persona, and use other tools like Dropbox to store all your feedback surveys and other relevant details.
3. Enable real-time support capability
Did you know that businesses take an average of 12 hours and 10 minutes to respond to customer queries? This doesn’t even come close to meeting the growing expectations of today’s customers. So how can you make sure you’re racking up the points when most businesses aren’t?
Facilitating real-time customer service.
Real-time customer support with the help of live chat software can help you provide instant solutions to customers and accompany them throughout the customer journey, if needed.
Live chat can raise customer service standards several notches by allowing your customer support team to interact with potential customers in real-time throughout their customer journey.
You can also live chat with a co-browsing software to help your support team easily interact with your customer’s screen to better understand their complaints and provide instant help by sharing the customer’s screen and guiding them through the product.
4 Make it personal
After enabling real-time support, move on to personalizing the customer experience. Creating a personalized experience can do wonders for your brand by increasing customer loyalty. In fact, 80% of customers are more likely to purchase a service or product from a company that offers personalized experiences.
Personalization helps brands differentiate themselves from the competition and foster a stronger relationship with customers. It is the nurturing of these relationships that results in customer loyalty down the line. And when done right, personalization signals to the customer that your brand is invested in their experience and wants to strengthen the relationship by working to provide better service, better suggestions, and instant support, among others.
A great example of personalization is Brainshark, a B2B software provider. Brainshark was facing problems converting free users into paying customers. That’s when they hired the services of a third-party vendor to help them deliver personalized messages. After running some analytics on their product usage, they identified gaps in engagement and started with messaging from within the product interface and used ads and pop-ups on their website to reach out to existing users and give them advice on how to optimize Brainshark.
This ultimately helped them increase signups by 15% and get a 150% growth in free trial signups for their product. Their sales pipeline also saw a massive growth of over $1.1 million.
5. Collect feedback regularly and act on it
How do you know if you’re delivering a great customer experience? Ask your customers using tools like Astuto . Feedback surveys have been a timeless companion of forward-thinking brands, helping them optimize their offerings by listening to what customers have to say about them.
Collecting feedback regularly helps you measure customer loyalty and attrition. This feedback helps you learn more about the customer and their level of satisfaction with your product.
Feedback in the form of testimonials and reviews can also be a huge help to your business. According to research by American Express, 34% of customers believe that positive word of mouth is far more important than a sale or promotion.
However, it doesn’t stop here. After asking for feedback, you need to act on it in a firm manner to further enrich the customer experience. One of the best examples of brands using customer feedback to their advantage is Starbucks. The coffee company often interacts with customers and asks for their opinions, thus adding value to the customer experience.
Among its many initiatives to enrich CX, its “ What’s Your Starbucks Idea? ” program stands out the most. Through crowdsourcing feedback, the brand works with suggestions, ideas, reviews, and more to gather valuable insights on all three fronts of CX ideas, product ideas, and engagement ideas to further diversify its product. Apart from that, Starbucks also allows customers to chat with its representatives so that they can gather ideas from their customers and act on the ones that really matter.
6. Know which customer experience metrics to track
Customer experience is an evolving standard, and measuring customer satisfaction requires more than simply recording revenue growth or excess inventory. Since customer experience is so multifaceted, it stands to reason that getting a complete picture of it requires benchmarking from multiple angles.
This is where customer experience metrics come into play. You need to ask yourself which set of CX metrics help you paint a broad picture of what customers feel about your brand. So, when it comes to measuring CX metrics, make sure you follow the five below to get a broad view of your CX picture.
Net Promoter Score (NPS): This score measures the likelihood that existing customers will recommend your brand to others. Customers rate their willingness to recommend you on a scale of 0 to 10. There are three types of scores:
Subtracting the percentage of detractors from promoters gives you your final NPS score.
Churn Rate: Churn rates help you measure the overall percentage of consumers who abandon your service after a given period. It is determined by taking the difference in users at the start of a period and users at the end of the period and then dividing the difference by users at the start of the period.
Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT): Customer satisfaction score is measured on a five-point scale. These scores are typically measured after customer service interactions are completed.
Customer Effort Score (CES): A variation of the CSAT, the CES score measures customer effort and rates their experience on a scale from very easy to very difficult. In other words, it asks customers how easy or difficult they found it to use your product or service.
Customer Lifetime Value (CLV): CLV is the expected gross profit derived from a customer over the life of the customer relationship.
These metrics will help you get a bird’s-eye view of your CX landscape. However, keep in mind to constantly evaluate the above-mentioned metrics from multiple angles and adapt the necessary changes in time to build an effective CX strategy.
Conclusion
A company’s customer experience strategy is its Rome: it can’t be built in a day. It’s a slow process that requires you to define each step and work to define and simplify the six key areas above, but do so under the notion that things are subject to change.