Customer experience (CX) strategy is an umbrella plan to guide overall company operations and progression, starting by making sure all management decisions and actions are customer-centric. Successful CX strategies develop loyal customers who continue to purchase from and advocate for your brand among friends and family, so read on to learn more about running a successful campaign.

Define Your Goals

Establishing a CX strategy begins with understanding your customer’s goals, which can be accomplished by examining and mapping out their customer journey. This step is key as it allows companies to identify pain points that they can address to deliver improved experiences; this step allows for the creation of tangible initiatives with clear accountability including metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) to track success.

Step two is setting objectives that support these goals, such as increasing brand loyalty and customer lifetime value. CX plays an integral part in increasing these business metrics – satisfied customers are more likely to purchase additional products and services from you or recommend your business to their friends and family, such as with banks offering exceptional customer service where more customers take out mortgages, loans, credit cards or open additional accounts with them.

To meet its goals, an organization must define what it means to be customer-centric and develop a culture that emphasizes delivering outstanding experiences to clients (source: https://digital.gov/2013/09/27/what-is-a-customer-centric-culture/). To do this effectively, every employee from office custodians cleaning before client visits to corporate leaders making speeches at industry events must support these goals.

Define Your Touchpoints

Touchpoints are crucial components of CX, from the marketing materials customers see and interactions they have with customer support staff to online and offline interactions that establish memorable experiences that strengthen relationships between the brand and customers.

Journey mapping requires identifying touchpoints most relevant for customers, and then designing experiences to help them meet their goals. Not only will this enhance the customer’s journey experience but it can also reveal potential pain points you need to address to enhance overall satisfaction levels.

Once you’ve identified key touchpoints, it’s time to collect feedback and create an improvement plan. This may require setting benchmarks, selecting metrics to track, and devising action plans for each touchpoint in order to provide your team with a clear path and establish accountability.

Due to consumer review platforms like Yelp and ShareThis, providing exceptional CX has never been more integral. A recent study showed that over $62 billion annually is lost due to subpar customer service.

Define Your Measures

One of the easiest ways to gauge how well you’re CX strategy is working – according to this blog – is through gathering customer feedback. Employ surveys, interviews, and social media listening tools to keep an eye on customer perception of your brand; respond promptly to negative reviews while thanking happy ones promptly to demonstrate that you value their business.

Once your buyer personas and customer journey maps are clear, the next step should be identifying touchpoints and analyzing how each contributes to the overall CX. Start with your most used digital and physical channels before moving down. It may be that websites, mobile apps, and online support constitute most of your interactions; yet exploring additional touchpoints could provide new opportunities to enhance customers’ journeys.

As soon as you establish a clear vision for CX, you can set specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART) metrics and goals to track progress. Achieving such goals could result in more positive customer feedback, reduced churn rates, and greater revenue growth.

Define Your Strategy

Starting to build a CX strategy can be done easily! All that is necessary is setting your goals, touchpoints, and measures before creating an actionable plan to improve each interaction with your customers.

Successful strategies require alignment with customers’ expectations and needs. To develop a customer experience strategy effectively, routinely collect user feedback at key touchpoints of your CX. This way, the flow can help identify issues quickly and implement necessary modifications for keeping customers satisfied and content with their experiences.

As part of your customer feedback collection efforts, offering multiple channels through which customers can contact you is also beneficial – this gives customers more choice of how they prefer to contact you while providing you with valuable data about their experiences and needs.

Implement a system for rewarding employees who deliver exceptional experiences to customers as an essential element of CX strategy. Reward programs or integrating customer satisfaction metrics into goal-setting and performance reviews may help create an employee culture focused on creating positive customer relationships.

Implementing an effective strategy takes time, effort, and collaboration – but its return on investment can be substantial. Satisfied customers not only become repeat buyers but can act as brand evangelists who attract new ones – which makes creating one so critical to long-term success – we hope this guide has provided you with all of the resources to begin building one, in no time flat.