Customer Experience Strategy

What is customer experience strategy?

A customer experience strategy is a plan and system that you put in place to create and deliver positive customer experiences that inspire loyalty and advocacy. It involves creating great customer experiences across all touchpoints and interactions.

Your customer experience strategy should include and involve all departments in your organization, not just sales, and support. Your focus should be on aligning the entire organization towards improving your customer experience, not making it a siloed function.

Concentrate on creating seamless, frictionless experiences for your customers, across the channels that they prefer.

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Why is customer experience strategy important?

If you don’t have a well-defined customer experience strategy in place, your customer experience transformation will be random. And that is not something that you want to leave to chance.

Every time your customers interact with your business, you’re delivering an experience. The experience either makes them more likely to make a purchase, stay loyal, and advocate for you, or it can make them less likely to do that. You need to be in control of that experience as far as possible.

A customer experience Framework helps you take charge. It helps you understand your customers, their needs, behaviors, and expectations, helping you deliver the experiences that they are looking for.

A good customer experience strategy helps your entire organization become more customer-centric. It helps you align every department towards creating amazing experiences. 

It also helps you understand your customers’ needs and expectations and use that information to improve your products and services. That helps you acquire and retain more customers.

It even makes it easier for you to handle customer crises, because you now understand your customers on a deeper level. Your customers would also be more gracious in such a situation if you have been delivering great customer experiences consistently.

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What are the 3 main components of customer experience?

The Temkin Group identified three main components of customer experience. According to them, every interaction affects customers along these three dimensions. They are:

• Success
• Effort
• Emotion

The Temkin Group also states that emotion is the most significant driver of loyalty.

Success

In the customer’s opinion, was the interaction successful? Did the interaction enable the customer to achieve what they had set out to achieve? Your customer experiences should be driven by the objective to make your customers successful.

Effort

How much customer effort was involved in the interaction? Was it easy for the customer to interact with your business or did it take too much time, energy, and frustration? High effort experiences do not leave your customers feeling too good, but low-effort experiences can cause your customers to keep coming back to do business with you again and again.

Emotion

What feelings did the customer go through during the interaction with your brand? What emotional outcome did the interaction create? As stated earlier, the emotional component of the customer experience carries greater weight than success or effort when determining when the customer will stay loyal to the company and keep purchasing repeatedly, or they’ll churn and stop doing business with your company.

If your customer calls your company up with a customer support query, and the agent resolves their issue quickly without requiring a lot of effort from the customer, that does not necessarily mean that the customer would feel good about the interaction. Here’s why the emotion experienced could be different. If the support agent spoke in a condescending manner and their tone made it clear that they thought the customer was stupid for having to call about such a minor issue, the customer would be left in a negative emotional state. Their issue would be solved, but they would not feel good about the experience, and might decide to stop doing business with your company after that interaction.

How to develop a customer experience strategy?

Here are the steps involved in creating an effective customer experience strategy.

1. Define a vision

You need to define a vision and a set of values that guide your customer experience initiatives. These should be communicated to your entire organization, across all departments. It should even guide your training and development initiatives.

2. Understand your customers

To deliver experiences that resonate with your customers and increase retention, you need to  get into their minds. You need to understand their needs, expectations, goals, and challenges in order to empathize with them and create a personalized experience.

3. Collect feedback 

Collect feedback from your customers. Not just about their overall experience with your brand, but also with regard to individual interactions. 

Engati’s chatbots and live chat offerings help you collect feedback seamlessly as soon as the interaction ends. 

Make sure not to simply collect information for the sake of collecting it. You need to analyze it and take action, otherwise, your customers will feel like you do not care about their opinions and challenges.

4. Focus on training

As your business evolves, so do your customers’ needs. You need to continuously train your agents and your chatbots to answer new questions and deal with new issues and challenges.

5. Map the customer journey

Customer journey mapping helps you understand the customer experience as a whole, but it also helps you understand experiences across individual touchpoints and interactions. It helps you identify gaps and areas for improvement.

6. Align initiatives with your vision

Analyze your CX initiatives and check whether they align with your vision, values, and guidelines. Don’t just go ahead with ad hoc initiatives, make sure it all fits into your strategy.

7. Measure everything

Measure the impact of your customer experience initiatives. Check whether you’re actually delivering experiences that match your vision. Tie everything to clear metrics.

You’ll also want to measure the results you are getting by creating positive experiences. You can look at metrics like your customer retention rate and your purchase frequency to get an idea of how you’re faring. If they end up falling short of your targets, you need to work on improving your experiences even further.