6 Min
Imagine a business without its customers, they simply cannot exist and this is why global enterprises are focusing on how to win new customers and, perhaps most importantly, retain the existing ones. Customer experience strategy tops the priority for businesses for the next 5 years because of a simple reason; they are experiencing reduced churn and increased revenues.
Table of Contents
What is Customer experience (CX)?
CX comprises the interactions and experiences your customer has with your company throughout the entire customer journey, from the very first contact to becoming a happy, satisfied, and loyal customer.
Every interaction that a customer has with your business, whether it is talking to customer service reps, receiving the product/service they bought from you, or navigating the website is the outcome of CX. All the experience faced at these touchpoints impacts your customers’ perception and their decision to keep coming back or not—so the great customer experience strategies are must to adopt.
1. According to a study by PWC, 73% of respondents say the customer experience is an important factor and impacts all areas of business.
2. It’s no surprise that customer experience is so high as 86% of customers are willing to pay more for a better experience.
3. According to a global CX study by Oracle, 74% of senior executives believe that customer experience impacts the willingness of a customer to be a loyal advocate.
Looking at these numbers, one thing is sure that if you want your customers to stay loyal, you have to invest in their experience by having a strong strategy in place.
What Is A Customer Experience Strategy?
A customer experience strategy is a process of defining, planning, and documenting an organization-wide approach to improve customer experience. Planned CX strategy helps to meet business goals.
Importance of Customer Experience Strategy
A customer’s experience with your brand is a never-ending process, whether you define it or leave it to random circumstances. As a business, you are always delivering experiences with each interaction and at each touchpoint – what varies is whether it is an experience that moves them closer to purchase or away from the purchase.
Having a good customer experience strategy means understanding what all customers want and delivering on those expectations. Or better yet – delivering more than what is expected!
The way forward – Customer Experience Strategies for 2024 & beyond
1. Personalization of Experiences
Personalization is the key to customer experience. According to a study by VentureBeat, 77% of the digitally exposed consumers expect a super personalized digital experience. Consumers want the services and experiences customized according to their needs, preferences, and requirements.
2. Build a customer-centric culture
Whether B2B or B2C, when it comes to customer experience (CX), every function, every customer-facing employee, every representative on every channel and platform, has a role to play in delivering a good experience. The more proactive your customer-facing employees are, the better result is possible.
While you can have one team to manage and report on your CX effort, the real delivery comes from each and every moving part in the organization, that needs to work together to create and deliver great customer experiences. In other words, you need to build a customer-centric culture to deliver on your customer support strategies, and it’s got to start at the top.
3. Refocus on the UX to deliver a ‘human’ experience
Every company needs to pay attention to user experience, especially when there is self-service involved. Self-service is not a challenge. In fact, more and more users prefer self-service, as long as it is simple, instinctive, and requires the least effort to ‘figure out’. This means, understanding user instincts when they land on websites and software engagement, and delivering a UX that leverages these human instincts.
4. Find every possible source of CX intelligence
To be customer-centric – means to listen to your customers and incorporate their needs into your product and service offering. For example, your customer-facing employees can turn out to be the biggest sources of untapped and direct customer experience intelligence. Social media is another source of information to find where the customers are facing friction in your customer experience.
5. Deliver smarter CX surveys
Customers like to provide feedback, whether they are really happy or unhappy. While that is a given – the quality of their responses depends on the question and ‘how’ it is asked. This means when it comes to designing your surveys, which is the primary source of customer feedback data:
- Be completely neutral in your line of questioning
- Have a ‘zero tolerance’ policy for asking ‘leading’ questions
- For instance, “How good was your experience?” is a leading question.
- Avoid complex wording in questions. No customer has the patience to spend brain-power in giving feedback, keep them short and simple to understand and answer.
6. Measure the ROI from delivering great customer experience
And finally, how do you evaluate if all this investment in your teams, business process and technology are paying off?
The answer lies in the business insights.
Measuring customer experience is one of the biggest challenges faced by organizations, which is why many companies use the “Net Promoter Score” or NPS, which collects valuable information by asking a single straightforward question:
Conclusion
Customer expectations are higher than ever and word of mouth travels the speed we wouldn’t have imagined in this socially connected and technologically advanced world. And as the customer becomes even more empowered and wants to be involved in every decision, it increases the customer experience.
P.S: Download Knowledge management buyer’s guide to learn more about how KM plays an important role in any customer experience strategy.
