Company owners and business leaders know that customer experience (CX) matters, but building an effective strategy that works across multiple channels isn’t easy.
For one thing, the way digital platforms are evolving means that your channel-based approaches need to be constantly monitored and optimized. We’re also seeing completely new channels enter the mix, such as the increasingly popular Clubhouse a growing number of brands are already leveraging to communicate with new and existing audiences.
However, the biggest challenge with building a customer experience strategy is how to make it work simultaneously and synergistically across multiple channels at the same time. Within seconds, a prospect or client could visit your retail store, switch from your Twitter account to your Facebook page, return to your website where they first discovered you and telephone your call centre.
How does one brand create a holistic experience across all platforms at once? We explore this issue and four top tips you and your team can employ to make sure you’re maximizing the effectiveness of your CX strategy.
Recognize That Employee Satisfaction Improves Customer Experience
Employees who are happy and engaged will help you to build a happy and loyal customer base. As well as being more motivated to act out your core brand values and principles, engaged employees are more productive and mentally present in their tasks.
If your teams are more committed at work, they are more likely to share this contentment with customers through their actions, which translates to improved customer satisfaction levels. This also applies to employees who are not customer-facing. For instance, your marketing team may well be able to launch more creative and inspiring campaigns if they themselves actually feel creative and inspired.
Understand the Diversity in Your Customer Base
Not everyone should be communicated to in the same way. You may have a core consumer persona that you want to target, but generic experiences targeting just one group will quickly alienate others who don’t feel that the content, services or experiences are tailored to them.
Leaders need to recognise that diversity often exists even among the same or similar customers. Deep dive into your customer analytics and build a range of personas to cater to all your followers, not just the main group.
You can then adapt your content and experiences as much as possible to the preferences of each group so that they’re more likely to engage.
Adapt Your Strategy to Individual Consumer Touchpoints
Different stages of the customer journey, whether that’s when new people discovering your brand through organic Google results or current customers visiting a store or past customers following your latest updates and content via Twitter, require different experience drivers that are unique from each other, yet are still completely aligned under your core branding to communicate a coherent message.
Holistic doesn’t mean uniform. Knowing how your customers interact with your business through each step of their journey is the key to building a holistic customer experience that works.
Don’t Focus too Much on Primary Channels
By all means, invest in channels that work for you and can drive the kind of traffic and sales that matter, but don’t be overdependent on one platform and leave gaps in your overall brand matrix. The customer journey involves many types of interaction and a bad experience in one area could undermine the efforts you put into another.
This also includes touchpoints like your online payment strategy, with checkouts and customer registration processes performing a key role in overall CX. If you don’t pay attention to all stages in the customer journey, there’s a chance that you might not be creating the best impression with customers or you might even be losing them.
Final Takeaways
A positive, holistic customer experience is vital to the success of every business. It affects customers on an emotional level as well as makes it practically possible for people to get to know you on any platform they should choose, within their customer journey. If you need any more convincing, here are a few final takeaways:
• CX has already surpassed price and product as the main brand differentiator
• A good CX builds brand affinity in competitive and saturated markets
• A holistic customer experience strategy lets you develop long-term and deeper relationships with consumers
• Best-in-class CX helps you weather the storm when consumer spending drops for reasons outside of your control
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