Customer Experience Strategy
Creating a strong customer experience strategy is an important step in making sure your customers are satisfied with every aspect of their experience with your business. Here is an overview of what a customer experience strategy is, why it is important, and how to tell if your customer experience strategy is accomplishing what you want it to!
What Is a Customer Experience Strategy?
Your business’s customer experience strategies involve carefully considering what your customers expect from your business and doing your best to meet or exceed these expectations. A customer experience, or CX, includes every aspect of the interactions your customers have with your company and their thoughts about your products, the customer service they receive, and your brand as a whole. A strong CX is an important step in keeping your customers coming back, while a negative CX may turn them into former customers even if they like products they have received from your brand in the past.
Customer Experience Strategy FAQs
Here are some of the most common questions we get about what a customer experience strategy is and how to create a strategy that benefits your business!
What Are the Four Main Components of Customer Experience?
Customer experience is divided into four main components that identify key aspects of the process your customers go through during the process of learning about your brand, considering its products, and deciding whether to ultimately make a purchase. These components include:
- A customer-centric culture that prioritizes the experience your customers have interacting with your business and lets them know their opinions are important to you
- Well-designed touchpoints that identify each time a customer will typically interact with your brand before, during, and after making a purchase and have clear guidelines for the type of experience you want your customers to have at that specific point
- Providing consistent quality that keeps your customers coming back each time they are in need of a similar product or service
- Ensuring customer satisfaction throughout every stage of the purchase process
Why Is a Customer Experience Important?
Customers that have a positive experience interacting with your brand are typically more likely to become repeat customers than those that have negative experiences. For this reason, it is important for businesses to do their best to make sure that the overall experience your customers have interacting with your business focuses primarily on how your products or services can benefit them, rather than how their purchase benefits your business.
How Can I Improve My Business’s CX Strategy?
Improving your CX strategy starts with determining what your customers think about their current experience interacting with your business and what specific areas they would like to see improvement in. You can do this by sending your recent customers surveys that ask them about their experience and assessing your metrics to search for specific ways that your current CX may be impacting sales. You can then use this information to consider specific changes that might help your customers have a better experience interacting with your company, such as:
- Creating a clear vision for the experience you want your customers to have
- Carefully considering who your customers are and what they want from your business to make sure the products, services, and overall customer service you provide align with them
- Considering both customer and employee feedback
- Using this information to create an emotional connection with your customers that makes your business stand out
How Can I Measure the Success of a CX Strategy?
Several types of data can give you an idea of how well your CX strategies are performing, such as your overall customer retention and churn rates and the information your customers provide through surveys.
What Are Some Common Mistakes to Avoid When Developing a CX Strategy?
Some of the most common mistakes that can make your CX strategy less effective include:
- Making your approach to CX too generic
- Not considering and acting upon customer feedback
- Not addressing customer concerns
- Making your policies too rigid
- Basing decisions on inaccurate or irrelevant data
Other Terms Related to Customer Experience Strategy
Effective customer experience strategies work best when they are combined with several other concepts that measure how happy your customers are with your company. Some of these relevant terms include: