What is customer experience strategy?
Customer experience strategy takes into consideration all of the interactions and experiences customers have with a brand through the entire customer journey, to develop an actionable plan that delivers positive, meaningful, seamless experiences across all of those interactions. Simply stated, it is a company’s approach to creating the best possible customer experience (CX) for their customers based on customer feedback. Good customer experience insight is the culmination of many things, including competitive insight, consumer research and market data, resulting in the integration of new technologies, systems, and processes that enhance the customer journey. Companies who engage in sound customer experience strategy realize higher customer satisfaction rates, reducing churn and increasing profits.
To become truly customer centric, it is good to identify and define the types of customers who will be interacting with customer support teams. Understanding these personas helps identify customer motivations so companies can build the best experiences for them. Once personas have been established, the customer journey can be mapped out to visually illustrate the customer’s end-to-end experience with a brand. This map highlights the way customers interact with an organization from start to finish, including their actions, needs and decisions. Customer journey mapping helps identify pain points and opportunities, information that can be used as the basis for customer experience cx improvements.
Based on the touch points and interactions identified during journey mapping requiring improvement, companies ready to take the next step in transforming customer experience often look to customer experience software and platforms. These technologies are designed to engage in data extraction based on customer feedback all along the customer journey—to report, analyze and respond to customer interactions based on new customer experience strategy and help deliver compelling, cross-channel experiences that increase customer satisfaction.
Customer experience strategy benefits brands interested in understanding the interests, motivations and interactions of customers, allowing them to:
- Connect with customers.Customer experience strategy encourages emotional connections that often lead to customer satisfaction. Whether it’s tactfully handling a bad experience, or a real time connection made by social media or live chat, customers feel good about a using a product or service they can trust, resulting in brand loyalists eager to provide recommendations via word of mouth or online.
- Increase brand value. A good customer experience strategy establishes a unique business approach and value proposition for customers, encouraging positive recognition and brand loyalty. The more positive the customer interactions are to a brand strategy, the more likely customers are to develop long-term, profitable relationships with a company.
- Capture customer feedback.Measuring customer satisfaction all along the customer journey helps brands quickly identify pain points and innovate to address them. For example, digital touch points established along a customer experience journey, such as live chat tools, customer surveys, as well as customer service and social media interactions, can capture customer feedback in real time to let companies know how they are performing.
- Realize process improvements that reduce costs. . Good customer experience strategy improves efficiencies by eliminating a duplication of efforts through established systems and processes across a company, while proactively addressing problems to reduce customer inquiries and complaints as well as the amount of extra staff needed to manage them.