7 Ways to Create a Customer Experience Strategy

Brands continue to explore ways to entice more customers to do business with them and keep them from looking in the direction of their competitors. Since price and quality do not differ much between market contenders, businesses are looking into ways to improve their customer experience (CX) delivery.

Here are some key points you should consider in formulating your customer experience strategy.

1. Reorganize your business objectives.

If you want to improve your customer experience initiatives, then you have to realign your processes and make CX the center of attention. This is not an easy thing to do, especially for established businesses who have been using a battle-tested process for years. On the other hand, this is advantageous for startups who have yet to define principles that can guide employees into achieving a customer-oriented business.

Are there gaps in your expectations and actual customer experience programs? How are your processes positioned to better serve customers? Do you have the tools necessary to improve customer experience initiatives? By answering these questions, you’ll be able to know more about your business and identify points you can redefine to make your organization more customer-centric.

Your customer experience strategy should focus on making consumers happy and satisfied. You may have to refocus your priorities based on your current situation.

2. Understand your audience.

How can you improve customer experience delivery when you don’t know anything about your audience? As an entrepreneur, you need to have an in-depth understanding of your customer’s wants, needs, concerns, and motivations.

An effective method to deal with different customer types is to create personas representing each one of them. You can do this by profiling the customers you deal with every day. Each persona should represent a consumer demographic and take into account the behavior, character, and emotional elements that make up their customer experience unique.

For example, you can create Jack, a man in his 50s with little knowledge of technical stuff. Using this persona, you’ll be able to formulate customer experience strategies and practice receiving queries from this type of customer.

The next time you encounter a customer resembling your Jack persona, you won’t have trouble dealing with them. You’ll be able to handle them well and deliver high-quality service that they’ll surely appreciate.

3. Develop an emotional connection.

According to a theory from behavioral economists, seventy percent (70%) of the decisions that customers (and employees) make are based on their emotions. This means if you can invoke a customer’s emotions with your CX initiatives, you’ll have a high chance of converting a lead.

Research also shows that people who are emotionally engaged with a business spend 23% more than the average customer. They also become more loyal because of how good they feel when doing business with you.

According to a study conducted by the Harvard Business Review, businesses tapping into what they call ‘emotional motivators’ increased customer satisfaction by as much as 50%. Customers who are fully attached to a business on an emotional level are three times more likely to become return customers.

So, if you want an effective and lasting customer experience strategy, better focus on improving your emotional connection with your audience.

4. Be attentive to feedback.

If you believe you’re delivering a satisfactory experience to your customers without even consulting them, then it’s highly plausible you’re just guessing numbers. You need feedback!

By asking them their thoughts about your business, you’ll be able to gauge your performance and devise ways to further improve your customer experience delivery. Besides, who else is better in assessing your CX initiatives other than the actual customers you’re trying to please?

5. Analyze your competitors.

Do you know how your customer experience strategy is working compared to your competitors? Conducting competition analysis will help you gauge how you’re doing in relation to your competitors in the industry.

This is very helpful in formulating your customer experience strategy. By identifying their strengths and weak points, you’ll be able to adjust your CX programs and ensure you stay ahead of the competition. You’ll also be able to identify gaps in the market that you can fill, quickly find competitive threats, and discover opportunities that other businesses are missing.

6. Develop your team.

There’s no one else to deliver the customer experience for your brand other than your employees. They are the key to your customer experience strategy since every plan you make will depend on how well they execute it.

You must train your employees to pay attention to the slightest signals that customers give. Conduct training and workshops that will help hone their skills on communication, business presentation, and thought process, along with their ability to keep a calm and cool mind when faced with critical situations.

Also, include in your customer experience strategy the establishment of principles that every employee must follow. This will guide them in every customer interaction and make sure that their actions work towards achieving your business goals.

Regularly conduct an employee feedback program to identify the strengths and weaknesses of your customer experience strategy. Aside from making them feel that their opinions are important to the management, you’ll also get firsthand accounts on what’s happening on the ground.

It’s also a good option to hire a mystery shopping company to help you assess employee performance from the perspective of a customer. SeeLevel HX can work with you on this to ensure your employees are following business protocols and are representing your brand the way you want them to.

7. Measure your CX performance.

Last but definitely not the least, is to measure your performance after executing changes in your CX initiatives. How else would you be able to determine if your customer experience strategy is working or not?

There are many metrics that measure the correlation of customer experience with business performance, the most popular being the Net Promoter Score (NPS). You can also hire market research experts like SeeLevel HX who use tools that enable them to generate comprehensive reports and derive actionable insights from customer and employee feedback.

Conclusion

The market can be an unforgiving place: the moment customers forget your brand, you’re done for. This is why it’s important to focus on satisfying consumers and securing their loyalty to your brand.

In formulating a customer experience strategy, you should focus not only on your customers but also on internal factors like employees and business processes. When you manage to develop a cohesive formula that integrates all of these aspects, you’ll have a truly customer-centric business with a rock-solid foundation.

Studying your internal procedures and audience is made easier with the help of a market research and mystery shopping agency like SeeLevel HX. We’re equipped with the right tools that enable us to formulate strategies that can help improve business performance and CX delivery.

If you’re interested in our services, feel free to contact us via email, phone, or through our website.