How to Create a Powerful Customer Experience Strategy?
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A superior customer experience is an investment that can help you earn high customer loyalty and retention. This is why developing a powerful customer experience strategy has become the central goal for most organizations across the globe.
As per a survey, 44.5% of professionals worldwide consider customer experience as the primary competitive differentiator while 48.5% believe it plays the role of a partial differentiator.
Hence, customer experience strategy becomes quite a powerful tool to win a competitive advantage for your business. However, with increased digitalization and AI-powered assistants available for help 24X7, customer expectations are increasing every day.
Keeping your customers satisfied under this scenario can be really difficult, especially for small businesses. Considering this, we decided to analyze the factors that are responsible for creating the most powerful customer experience strategies.
After thorough research, in this blog, we have brought to you the process of creating a winning customer experience strategy. So without further ado let’s move on to know more.
What is Customer Experience?
Why Having a Customer Experience Strategy is Important?
Are Your Customers Happy with Their Experience?
Steps to Create a Powerful Customer Experience Strategy
Tips to Create a Winning Customer Experience Strategy
What is Customer Experience?
The customer experience is your buyer’s journey while they are shopping from your brand and the final impression they have of your services. The two primary components that are responsible for creating a customer experience are product and people.
This means that in the end, your customer will remember your brand only if you serve them a quality product and they receive adequate attention and support from the customer care staff.
Customers are your most valuable resource for any business. They are not just a source of money but also a medium for growing brand awareness. A loyal customer boosts your revenue in more than one way.
But today, customers have great power in hand, the power to choose out of countless options available on the internet. Also, the customers are well-informed and educated to make the right choices.
In this situation, it becomes extremely important to create a remarkable customer experience that lasts with them and they prefer you over other brands every single time.
A great customer experience can be defined as one where all the needs and expectations of the customer are well taken care of. It should be seamless, memorable, and positive.
Why Having a Customer Experience Strategy is Important?
A customer experience strategy is basically an action plan that takes into account all the aspects of a buyer’s journey. It focuses on creating a positive customer experience right from pre-purchase research to post-purchase follow-up.
As per a survey conducted by Forbes, around 74% of people buy products based alone on their previous experience with the brand. Moreover, 77% consider customer experience to be as important as product quality.
This makes having a customer experience strategy very important. It is kind of a roadmap to win the hearts of your customers and also, a reflection of the company’s health.
Having a well-crafted customer experience strategy would also help your staff, especially the customer care division to understand company expectations while dealing with a customer. This will help them bring their best foot forward while dealing with a situation.
The success of a customer experience strategy is reflected in the customer feedback as well as your company revenue as happy customers are a great source of brand awareness. Moreover, it results in improved customer retention and reduced churn.
Are Your Customers Happy with Their Experience?
This can be a very difficult question. Even if you say yes, the next question is how do you know or can you rate their level of satisfaction? After all only a happy customer can turn into a loyal customer. Although analyzing the customer experience and enhancing customer experience is the job of the customer experience management team but even if you do not have a dedicated team for this purpose, there are simple ways to do that. Using any or all of the tips given below you will be able to understand how well your customer experience strategy is doing.
- Customer satisfaction surveys: Conducting such surveys on regular basis can give you meaningful insight into the customer’s journey. You can include questions related to different points of their experience. How do they like the project? Or how friendly was the customer support staff? Or even questions like how likely are they to recommend your brand to a friend or some other known person?
For this, you can use scales like Net Promoter Score (NPS) or track customer satisfaction (CSAT) and ask your customers to rate from 1 to 5. These questions will provide you with plenty of useful data and give a clear picture of how well is your customer experience strategy performing. - Rate of customer churn: Customer churn is unavoidable but the rate of churn can be reduced considerably. Looking at the customer churn rate you will be able to avoid reasons that may be responsible for it. Make an analysis of the churn of customers.
If you are losing a large percentage of customers every month it can really be an issue of concern and there may be a need to look into your customer experience strategy. You can discuss the issue with your team and find out a solution to avoid similar situations in the future. - Customer feedback for improvement: The best way to improve is to ask your customers about their expectations. Create forums for your customers where they can place requests for an improved feature or service. Create surveys or community pages where your customers are encouraged to provide their feedback.
This does not necessarily mean that you follow every piece of advice but, it gives you an idea about the general problems that your customers may be facing. If there are recurring trends, then resolving them is worth your time, Â Â Â effort, and money. - Customer support trends: This is one of the most critical divisions to be taken care of. If the majority of your customers appear to be seeking support regarding similar issues you certainly need to work on them. Review the possible reasons for these issues and come out with practical solutions.
Also, look at the number of complaints registered every month. Your customer experience strategy can only be considered successful if the number of complaints declines and most of them is marked as resolved.
All these steps will help you analyze the present rate of satisfaction amongst your customers and bring forward the issues resolving which can help you grow the number of happy customers. Once we know the problems, we can move on to creating a perfect customer experience strategy that understands all the customer needs and ensures generating more happy and loyal customers.
Jeenal Jain
Steps to Create a Powerful Customer Experience Strategy
A great customer experience strategy covers all the touch points across all the channels that your customers move through during their journey of buying a product. It helps you shape the emotions and perceptions of a buyer towards your brand. Below we have listed 5 simple steps that can help you devise a customer experience strategy perfectly suitable and practically applicable for your company.
1. Clear brand mission: This should be very clear while devising the customer experience strategy. As a brand what do you want to achieve or how do you plan to serve your customers or how do you want your customers to see you in the future?
All these questions are very important and capable of creating an impression about a certain brand. Therefore, the brand mission should be action-oriented and capable of delivering the impact that you wish to create through your brand.
A clear brand mission would help you devise a customer experience strategy that supports it to the core. It will decide the way you want to treat your customers as it will decide how they will treat you in return.
2. Positive employee experience: As per Gallup, a 17% improvement in productivity and a 21% enhancement in profitability were noticed in the companies that gave priority to employee engagement. A happy employee is no doubt a key to a profitable business. Just like the customers, you can use surveys to gauge employee satisfaction levels.
Take feedback and work towards creating a better work environment and positive employee experience. Prepare your team for future challenges and support them wherever they need it.
3. Identifying and locating customers: Not everyone in the world can be your customer. You have to identify the target audience for your business and find where they are so you can approach them. Knowing your target audience will further let you shape your customer experience strategy as per their expectations and requirements.
You can use an omnichannel approach to create brand awareness amongst these customers but make sure not to spam them. Then check their response and decide your future strategy accordingly.
4. Features to support your promise: When you offer a product to your customers you are actually making a promise to them. This promise can be as simple as this attire would make you look stylish or as tough as a five-year guaranty card.
Irrespective of what you offer as a brand, you have the promise to fulfil. Make sure you find ways to do that. If the idea is comfort, add features that make your product more comfortable. No matter how small or big changes you make but while doing so, you are actually establishing yourself as a trustworthy brand in the eyes of your customers.
5. Build your tech support: With the advent of technology nothing can be a better idea. You can use AI support or various other tools available to help you generate a better customer experience. Also, whether or not you are running an online business today, sooner or later you will have to go online with your products and you will need a tech support team for that.
So it is better to stay future-ready. Moreover, these tools help you create a more personalized experience for your customers. They respond even when your employees don’t and also, do not forget any of their responsibilities.
Ashwini
Tips to Create a Winning Customer Experience Strategy
When your customer experience strategy is ready here are a few bonus tips to keep it updated and create a winning experience with every customer.
- Understand your customer: You can only provide valuable services to your customer when you understand their needs. You can create buyer personas for this purpose that will help you meet their expectations. This way you can develop a strategy that keeps your customer engaged.
- Real-time assistance: The world is moving fast and you cannot make your customers wait for your response. Use tools or chatbots to ensure that your customers receive real-time assistance. Also, do not forget to ask for feedback on assistance.
- Customer loyalty program: Offer special rewards to your regular customers, and make them feel special. This will help you create a personal bond with them and create a superior customer experience.
- Train your customer service team: This is not a once-after joining but a regular process. Help them work on their communication skills while dealing with customers. This will also help you know about the problems faced by your employees while dealing with the customers and you can work together to find a solution.
- Track the reviews: This is an extremely important tip. In this world of social media, words spread faster than they are said. Keep track of the reviews provided for your brand on any social media or review site. Respond to them quickly and resolve their issues as soon as possible. Remember even one review can make or break your image and it might take you years to get rid of it.
Chaitra S
Conclusion
A strong customer experience strategy can influence how customers view your company. You can increase both your company's revenue and retention with its assistance. In light of this, developing a strong customer experience plan aids in improving high customer loyalty and reach.
FAQs
What is customer experience?
The customer experience is your buyer’s journey while they are shopping from your brand and the final impression they have of your services.
How can I analyze the success of the customer experience strategy?
One can analyze the success of customer experience strategy in the following ways:
- Customer satisfaction surveys
- Rate of customer churn
- Customer feedback
- Customer support trends
How to create a powerful customer experience strategy?
The steps to create a powerful customer experience strategy are:
- Clear brand mission
- Positive employee experience
- Identifying and locating customers
- Features to support your promise
- Build your tech support
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