Top 9 Customer Experience Strategies: Best Practices from CX Leaders

New research from the Medallia Institute reveals how to improve your customer experience using these customer experience strategy best practices.

Wondering what sets companies with a successful customer experience apart from the rest? That’s exactly what our researchers at the Medallia Institute set out to investigate. For answers, they conducted an analysis of the customer experience programs of over 580 brands. As part of this study, they surveyed marketing and customer experience professionals representing organizations with more than 100 employees based in the U.S., Canada, Mexico, Argentina, Colombia, Great Britain, Germany, France, Spain, New Zealand, and Australia. 

What they discovered reveals the top customer experience strategy best practices that deliver the greatest customer and business outcomes, where organizations have the biggest opportunity to maximize their customer experience strategies, and the tactics that separate top performers (the “leaders”) from those at the bottom (the “laggards”). 

Let’s dive into these critical findings now, so you can start putting these customer experience strategy best practices into motion right away.

Top 9 Customer Experience Strategy Best Practices

Upgrade your website. Elevate your contact center. Delight customers visiting your storefront. Whatever your customer experience priorities, leveraging the following tactics will help you gain a better understanding of your customer experience so you can maximize each and every customer interaction across channels and across the customer journey.

1 & 2: Collect customer feedback and track customer sentiment: CX leaders are 2.5 times more likely than laggards to indicate that they have enough data to understand their brand’s customer experience.

3: Gather customer insights across as many channels as possible. Leaders are 3.3 times more likely than laggards to prioritize increasing the amount of customer feedback they collect. On average, leaders use more than three (3.3) channels to capture voice of the customer insights, compared to the 2.4 channels laggards use. 

4: Capture as many types of customer experience data as possible, including direct and indirect customer signals, structured and unstructured customer data, and feedback that’s both internal to the organization and external.

Nearly 50% of customer experience leaders say they capture unstructured data from their contact center chat and call sessions, and more than 33% of leaders say they capture customer feedback from third-party online review websites. 

5: Analyze your organization’s customer experience intelligence on a regular basis. Customer experience leaders get ahead by measuring and making sense of their customer data more often than laggards, and by using these more relevant insights to guide their customer experience priorities. According to our research, nearly half of leaders (47%) analyze their data on a monthly basis, compared with just 27% of laggards.

6: Democratize your company’s customer experience data across the entire organization. Leaders are nearly 2 times as likely to grant their employees direct access to customer feedback that’s relevant to their specific role. 

7: Use your customer experience insights to fuel data-driven decision making. Compared with lagging organizations, leading brands are 3.5 times as likely to use this data to drive actions across the organization.

8: Prioritize investing in employee experience to improve the customer experience. The majority of customer experience leaders (61%) say that improving employee experience and loyalty is an area of strategic focus for the next 12 months, compared with just 20% of laggards that say the same.

9: Use technology to deliver seamless personalized customer experiences. More than half of customer experience leaders (54%) use customer data to automate action and follow up on feedback in a timely fashion using technology, compared with only 24% of laggards. 

The ROI of Using Customer Experience Strategy Best Practices

Based on our Medallia Institute survey, we found that leading organizations that put these customer experience strategy best practices in place are:

• 26 times more likely than laggards to experience year-over-year revenue growth of 20% or more
• 2.8 times more likely than laggards to meet financial targets and be viewed as a great place to work
• 3 times more likely than laggards to achieve high levels of employee satisfaction and retention

The return on investing in customer experience is clear, and, fortunately, it’s easier than ever to put effective tactics in place to make a difference for your customers, your employees, and your business as a whole. 

Read the full report, Uncovering the Secrets Behind a Successful Customer Experience Program, to learn how to improve customer experiences for your brand.