Customer experience (CX) is more than how you engage with your customers; it’s also how your customers feel about your brand.
Here are some tips for creating an effective customer experience strategy that gets customers excited about working with you.
1. Design your customer experience strategy around customer and market needs
Get to know your customers—really get to know them. Understand what motivates their purchasing decisions and makes them loyal to your brand and personalize your customer experience to put those elements front and center.
“Developing personas based on your audience will help you better understand the customer psyche and build experiences tailored to key segments,” said Barry Nolan, chief strategy officer at Swrve. “Once you fully understand your customers, you can start mapping the customer journey based on how they interact with your business.”
As part of this, it’s also important to learn about your customers’ goals. Kerry Cunningham, 6sense Research and Thought Leadership, recommends that you get an understanding of customers’ success criteria. “Ask yourself, ‘What does the customer need to be able to say about using your solution for them to become an advocate?’”
2. Let your customers’ needs guide your business goals and objectives
Delivering positive customer experiences is a worthy goal for any organization. But how do you know what that really means for your business?
Once you fully understand your customers, work to align their goals with your own. “Revisit your business mission, values, objectives, and processes,” said Nolan. “A successful CX strategy needs to closely align with the entire business ecosystem.”
Meeting your customers’ needs may also mean helping them find the information they need as they grow their relationship with you. According to Helen Baptist, COO at PathFactory, “Enabling customers to easily find the right content at the right time in the customer journey should be a key priority of any CX strategy along with content intelligence to measure customer engagement and intent to buy more from your business.”
3. Consider input from key players
Customer experience doesn’t happen in a silo—so neither should the process of building a strategy.
To create a truly connected customer experience, make sure everyone in your organization who contributes to customer touchpoints—including marketing, sales, commerce, and service—is on board and aligned to the same goals and objectives.
4. Ensure your customer experience strategy enables the right processes
A strong strategy includes processes that help you enhance the customer experience throughout the customer lifecycle.
According to Randy Frisch, chief evangelist at Uberflip, “The three pillars of customer experience strategy—identify/attract/engage—are an amazing framework, both from a process perspective as well as the technology that drops into these buckets.”
- Identify: Plan for how you’ll research personas and analyze customer data to understand how to connect with prospective customers.
- Attract: Create targeted messaging and offers that will draw customers in.
- Engage: Leverage email automation, chat, and other technologies across multiple channels to seamlessly interact with and support customers at every step.
5. Implement the best tools and resources to support your strategy
You’ve put the processes in place, now make sure you have what it takes to support them. Not sure where to start?
- Collect unknown user data in a customer data platform and map it into your customer relationship management solution to ensure that every interaction can be data-driven and personalized.
- Use a content management system to organize information and make it easier for customers to find relevant information.
- Integrate an email marketing automation tool to connect customers with relevant information and offers at key stages of their experience. Geoff Smith, senior vice president of marketing at Stensul, says “Email’s role in CX can be overlooked. It doesn’t take much to test, analyze, and refine strategy for emails that customers look forward to getting, opening, and acting on.”
Creating an effective customer experience strategy is within reach when you understand your customers, align your business objectives to their needs, and work with key stakeholders across your organization. Having the right processes in place, as well as the tools and systems to support them, will help you ensure a seamless, positive customer experience.