A customer experience (CX) strategy is defined as the process of defining, planning and documenting an organization-wide approach to improve customer experience, such that it helps meet business goals. In this article, we explain why a CX strategy is critical to accelerate the achievement of your business goals, with the top 6 customer experience strategy best practices tips to prepare you for 2020!
Table of Content
- What is a Customer Experience (CX) Strategy
- The Top 6 Customer Experience (CX) Strategy Best Practices for 2020
What Is A Customer Experience (CX) Strategy?
A customer experience (CX) strategy is the process of defining, planning and documenting an organization-wide approach to improve customer experience, such that it helps meet business goals.
Why Is It Important to Have a CX Strategy?
A customer’s ‘experience’ with your brand never stops, 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 purchase. In other words, a good experience or a negative one.
It’s the same reason you have a marketing strategy – you can either wait for your customers to find out about you and have no or limited control over it, or you can take charge and define how customers learn about you by proactively introducing your brand with your own message. The latter outcome is the result of acknowledging the need for a strategy, and then executing it, such that you are more equipped to meet your overall business objectives.
Having a good customer experience strategyOpens a new window means understanding customer behaviour and expectations, and delivering on these expectations. Or better yet – delivering more than what is expected!
Learn More: customer experience strategy
Here Are the 4 Key Reasons Have a Clear, Organization-Wide Customer Experience (CX) Strategy:
1. Stronger and more predictable customer retention /renewal
A 2017 Qualtrics and Forrestor study found that 80% of businesses that lead in delivering CX, outperformed their competition and retained more accounts.
We know that the key to customer retention is satisfaction. However, customer satisfaction strategies cannot be executed and achieved without attention to customer experience. In fact, customer satisfaction is an ‘outcome’ of delivering good experiences
2. Consumers today buy experiences, not products
One of the objectives of customer experience is to first be in a position to ‘meet’ expectations, and then to start delivering better than expected!
However, experience is subjective to competition and context. You’ve probably experienced it too – remember how happy we were looking at plain, static, now-deemed-ugly websites in early 2000’s? Or mobile app experience from 2010? Or even bricks-size mobile phones if you go further back?
So what changed so quickly? What propelled organizations to produce today’s drastically better products and the overall experience of buying them? The answer is – competition, circumstances and context. These 3 factors constantly set and reset customer expectations.
When you pay attention to customer expectations, you can create winning experiences with the right combination of competitive analysis, innovation, implementation, engagement and repeat! The ones who do understand expectations can deliver a product experience that keeps pace, or better, delivers more than customer expectations. The ones who don’t, well, they go through the ‘Blackberry tragedy’ – in other words- a great product does not guarantee great business outcomes, unless it is accompanied by a great experience.
3. Drive-up customer centricity with better products and services:
As you pay attention to customer experience and as you dig deeper to provide this improved experience, you inadvertently realize that you need to improve your products, your processes and your people in order to deliver on CX. As a result, a lot more is revealed to you than you initially expected. Your product experience, customer service response time and quality, your sales team’s understanding of the product functionalities and customer utilities etc – they all improve over time as you become more customer-centric to deliver on customer experience.
This means, not only are you able to sell more, your sales and customer-facing teams are equipped to sell with better efficiency and effectiveness while building more engaged relationships. They now have a better understanding on ‘how’ to sell, a more optimized process for a friction-free sale, and of course, – a better product to sell!
CX is not just an organization-wide ‘effort’, it’s also an organization-wide ‘reward’.
Learn More: Top 5 B2B Customer Experience (CX) Best Practices for 2020!
4. Better customer crisis management
Crisis happens – and even when you do almost everything right, it can still creep up on you. The goal is to be prepared for it. You can manage any customer crisis much better when you have 2 factors going in your favour:
- You know the customer well
- Your customer is generally satisfied with the experience you deliver
One of the key pieces of any customer experience strategy is – to know customer needs, behaviour and preferences. In a crisis situation, a team equipped with this knowledge can manage the customer much better than a team that only knows a customer by sales figures and accounting numbers.
The second one is simple – anyone has more appetite to digest a crisis when their overall experience with your organization has been generally satisfactory, or better yet, very satisfactory. A series of great experiences lead to highly engaged customers.
Learn More: Top 5 B2B Customer Experience (CX) Best Practices for 2020!
Top 6 Customer Experience Strategy: Best Practices Tips for 2020
Ready to jump in and get started with your own CX strategy? Here are the 6 most impactful best practices tips to help prepare your customer experience strategy for 2020!
1. Measure, prioritize, scale
Whether it is a post-service customer effort score (CES) survey, an NPS survey auto-deployed across customer points of interaction, a quarterly CSAT questionnaire, product experience feedback – you need to measure the impact of your customer experience strategy, not just to measure your ROI at an organizational level, but to understand which strategy is contributing most to elevate CX.
Today there are many ways to understand customer intent, churn potential and level of satisfaction. From the tried and tested NPS Survey methodology, ML powered predictive analytics and AI powered technology platforms that pick up behavioural signals and predict negative (or detractor) behavior before it happens even from unstructured data (for example, from social media conversations).
No matter which method you deploy, the bottom line is you need to know customer satisfaction levels and have a systematic way to identify potential detractors or customers displaying churn intent.
A successful business knows how to prioritize, because every business has limited resources to invest. The good news is, today, there are more than enough tools – from surveys to AI-powered insights and analytics – to measure every aspect of your CX – which means, the data collection tools are there.
The goal for you in 2020 is to identify what works for you, deploy the right tools, and , make data-driven decisions to identify and scale up highest impact CX strategies as efficiently and effectively as possible.
2. Build a customer-centric culture
Customer experience is the sum-total impact of all interactions during a customer lifecycle.
In the B2B context, this means – brand discovery (marketing and UX), sales experience (sales and accounting team), onboarding and product experience (account management / customer success and entire product design and development) and post-sales servicing (customer success / account management team).
In the B2C context as well, it applies to every interaction from the ads and social media interactions, from the content experience to online or instore buying experience and everything that comes before or after.
Whether B2B or B2C, when it comes to CX, every function, every customer facing employee, every representative on every channel and platform, has a role to play in delivering a good experience. Hence, the (slightly modified) saying – ‘It takes a whole village to deliver good CX’
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 need 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 CX strategy, and its got to start at the top.
3. Refocus on the UX to deliver ‘human’ experience
In the everything-as-a-service ‘experience economy’, just about any company needs to pay attention to user experience, especially when there is self-service involved.
Even back in 2017, an American Express survey found that 60% of surveyed Americans prefer to use self-service options to address day-to-day needs. Today that number is expected to be at least 75%.
But let’s be clear: self-service is not the challenge. In fact, more and more users, especially millennials prefer self-service, as long as it is simple, instinctive and requires the least effort to ‘figure out’. This means, understanding user instincts when it comes to websites and software engagement, and delivering a UX that leverages these ‘human instincts’. In fact, with all the AI and ML tools available today, the irony is that customers expect more authentic and human experiences than ever before!
For example, ever wonder why most app menus are on the left? Because users collectively chose it. When the first wave of apps were being released for iTunes and Google Play Store, they went through enormous user-A/B testing to understand what drives most engagement. No one knew what the best position for the menu is – or even that fact that it should be a “hamburger†(3 horizontal lines) icon menu. Both practices have now become established standard best practices for app UX design.
Moreover, a UX that increases/encourages more users to opt for self-service – is great for your business’s bottom line, as you save significantly on recurring human resource costs.
Learn More: How To Improve Customer Experience (CX): Top 7 Tips for 2020
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. This means finding and tapping into rich sources of real-time intel that goes beyond predictive insights or NPS surveys.
For example, your customer facing employees can turn out to be the biggest sources of untapped and direct customer experience intelligence.
Similarly, conversations on social media too can reveal where customers are finding friction in your ‘carefully set up’ customer experience.
There is a very real strategic value in finding every possible source of customer feedback to track satisfaction and eliminate friction from your CX
5. Get 5G experience ready – mobile multimedia, AR, VR etc. is the future of experience
Yes I know, mobile multimedia has always been around since smartphones rose to prominence. However, the most critical infrastructure to enable mass consumption of multimedia on mobile devices has been lacking – fast, undisrupted and affordable mobile internet. We went from no Gs to 4G in the last 12 years, and speed went from 2 KBps to about 10000 Kbps in 5 incremental upgrades and even that couldn’t break the ceiling for mobile-internet based multimedia (when there is no wifi!). But 5G is not’ an incremental upgrade to mobile-internet, it is ground-shifting. Initial test estimates tell us that 5G will operate at over 30 GBPS. To put this in perspective, its 30,000,000 KBps, 3000 times faster than 4G.
In other words, you need to prepare your CX strategy to utilize this disruptive wave of tech-infra headed your way, without waiting for competitors to lead the way. With 5G, AR and VR will become table stakes. Are your teams ready?
Learn more: Top 7 Customer Experience (CX) Trends for 2020
6. Deliver smarter CX surveys
Yes, your customers like to provide feedback, whether they are really happy or plain 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. The neutral version is – “How was your experience?â€
- Avoid long/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.A skewed survey leads to skewed data – which leads to an ineffective/detrimental strategy.
Also, don’t expect your marketing or even customer success team to write survey questions – invest in tools that provide templates or better yet – invest in a real researcher who is an expert in designing effective and unbiased questionnaires.