The customer experience is crucial to your success as a business. It defines how your brand is perceived and fosters loyalty in your audience. Even traditionally product based companies eg technology, automotive, telcomms are now competing on customer experience because this is a differentiator whilst their products and services are often very similar.
If your business struggles to deliver the desired customer experience, it might be due to several reasons.
Perhaps you don’t have a customer experience focus at the most senior level of the organization. Maybe you have defined your values and purpose but they are not translated into an actionable plan to bring them to life. Or perhaps your efforts are not supported by the organization’s infrastructure to make them sustainable.
This is where a customer experience strategy advisor could help you establish an effective customer experience strategy.
What’s a Customer Experience Strategy?
The customer experience (CX) describes how your buyers perceive each interaction with your business. This includes before, during, and after the sale, as the sum of its parts. So when we talk about a customer experience strategy, we refer to creating actionable steps to produce more meaningful and long-lasting customer experience results.
This can have wondrous effects on the bottom line: 86% of customers are willing to pay more for a better experience.
Such a strategy is usually based on consumer and competitor research and draws inspiration from an organization’s purpose and values.
Forming a Customer Experience strategy is no easy task. It is a time-consuming and complex endeavour. Most importantly, the process needs to consider all departments of a brand. It also needs to remain brand-aligned and reflect the values and personality of the organization. Finally, the strategy has to be one that all levels of the business can sustain. This includes customer-facing roles, support roles and leaders alike.
Most customer experience strategies start by creating a plan of the current customer journey. Then, they map out the most critical stages at which customers interact with the business. A customer experience strategy advisor can help you improve each of these stages to perfect the customer journey.
How Experience Strategy Advisors Contribute to Great CX
With the aid of an advisor, you can create a CX strategy that not only looks good on paper but aligns with your business objectives in your day-to-day operations and can be implemented in practice.
These are some of the vital steps in creating an excellent customer experience strategy:
Creating a Vision for Customer Experience
An advisor will help you formulate a clear customer-experience vision to communicate to everyone in your organization. This includes outsourced service partner employees as appropriate – call centres are often outsourced and yet this is one of the most important ‘touchpoints’ for customers. The vision includes core principles and values that can drive the behaviour of every employee and leader.
Understanding Who Your Customers Are
The next step is to build the persona of your typical customer and understand their needs and desires. Improve your understanding of how and when they interact with your business and what their current journey looks like. By building customer profiles, you can tailor a genuinely customer-centric experience.
Capture Customer Feedback
Before you can tweak your customer experience, you must understand the areas in your current customer journey that need to be improved. That’s why capturing real-time customer feedback is invaluable. You can use live-chat tools or follow-up emails to get your customer’s input at every crucial stage. However, the sincere intention must shine through or there is a risk that customers will view this process as impersonal and unimportant.
Establishing What Training is Needed
When establishing a new CX strategy, the change can be challenging for your team. It is impossible to expect changes to happen across all levels of your organization without providing the necessary information, training, and feedback for employees.
Experienced advisors will help you devise a plan for bringing your team on board. They’ll show you how to continually check in to ensure the framework is followed.
Improve Your Customer Experience Strategy to See Better Results
Sometimes you need to do what you do best – for example, running your business and developing new strategies for the future.
A customer experience strategy advisor can take care of one of the most critical aspects of your business. They’ll advise you on how you can create the best possible customer experience strategy to implement in your organisation.
SERVICEBRAND GLOBAL is an Customer Experience Strategy provider that can help you deliver a brand-aligned experience. Get in touch today to learn more!