How To Create A Customer Experience Strategy

What is Customer Experience Strategy?

Customer Experience Strategy is an organisation's overarching plan to enhance the experience of their customers both when interacting with the organisation generally and when using its products and services. Key elements of a Customer Experience Strategy include in-depth qualitative customer research, customer journey maps, culture change and much more (see greater detail below).

Why You Need A Customer Experience Strategy

Customer experience (CX) is everything related to a business that affects a customer's perception and feelings about it. It is the overall "experience" that the customer goes away with after every interaction and transaction. Humans remember experiences – the positive as well as the negative. What is essential for any organisation looking for growth is to define not only a good experience, but a great experience, for each and every customer, every time, and with repeatability no matter which part of the organisation is touched by the customer.

Whether it's a call to a contact centre, exposure to an advertisement or even something as mundane as the payment of a bill, every exchange between customers and businesses builds (or damages) the relationship.

Most importantly, it's how customers view those experiences in aggregate that matters.

"Customer experience is how a customer feels about the sum of their interactions with a business," said Dave Dyson, Sr. Customer Service Evangelist, Zendesk. "It involves every way a customer interacts with a company, at all stages of the customer journey including the marketing materials they see before they become a customer, the sales experience, the quality of the product or service itself, and the customer service they receive post-purchase."

Thus, a customer experience strategy is critical to the ongoing survival and growth of any business – and the lack of one can leave an organisation at a severe competitive disadvantage. By ensuring an organisation-wide focus on the customer experience, a CX strategy can be pivotal to an organisation's ongoing success.

1. Understand What is Important to Your Customers.

There is no point trying to guess what is important to customers without getting out of the building and spending quality time with them in open-ended qualitative interviews. A good customer experience strategy must start by gaining a deep and nuanced understanding of the customers of an organsiation.

This exercise is usually best delivered by an external company. First, customers will be far less inhibited in opening up to an independent organisation. Second, there should be no bias when questioning, something that often creeps in if it is done by organisation itself.

A person helping another person up a hill, signifying how critical it is to understand the challenges of the customer for customer experience.

A picture of a person writing on a post it note, signifying how critical it is to generate insights from the customer to build a customer experience strategy.

2. Generate Insights From Interviews.

Understanding your customers' needs and wants has become essential to ensuring your organisation is future-proof. Listening empowers you to learn from and talk to your customers to create ever-improving experiences.

Businesses with quality data are more likely to collect actionable customer insights, which can help them grow their bottoms line in the long run.

When consumer insight research is conducted properly, it will improve the effectiveness of how a company communicates to its customers, which is likely to change consumer behaviour, and therefore increase sales.

3. Develop A Journey Map.

Understanding how your customers interact with you holistically and across their whole journey is crucial to delivering an enhanced customer experience.

A journey map is this visual representation of that customer journey. It helps tell the story of your customers' experiences with your brand across all touchpoints. The trick here is to generate the journey map from the customers' lens, not from the inside out.

The other important element in this process is to ensure the journey map includes the "emotional" journey i.e. how did the customer "feel" along the journey, where were they happy, where were they frustrated.

Journey maps also gives managers an overview of the customer's experience. They will see how customers move through the sales funnel, helping them identify opportunities to enhance the experience. The map will show how enhanced customer service can differentiate the organisation's digital experience.

A picture of a paper aeroplane with 'customer' on it flying through the air, past a customer experience strategy plan.

A picture of a child's hight being measured next to an arrow, signifying how important it is to identify the high's and low's in a customer's journey.

4. Elevate the Highs and Mitigate the Lows.

Within the customer journey identify high and low points and create strategies to accentuate the high points and remedy the low points accordingly. By focusing on the peaks (high points) – which draw in and delight customers, you can create a much more robust and meaningful journey which retains and grows the customer base. Further, by focusing on the troughs (low points), which can act as exist points for customers, you can meaningfully increase customer retention and assist ongoing growth.

5.Re-Imagine the Journey and Experience.

Routine is the enemy of innovative thinking, but so is precedent. Sometimes, we struggle to shift away from how we've always done things. Imagining a clean slate can help you change perspective and think outside the box as to what the customer journey could look like in an ideal world. An example of this could be how your organisation could engage with your customers using new digital technology.

A picture of a group of people holding hands and looking out across a vista, embodying the idea of finding fresh perspectives and innovative solutions to customer problems.

A picture of a person moving pieces on a post-modern chess board, representing the importance of strategic and long term thinking around customer experience.

6. Embed the Strategy into the Organisation.

Given the complexity of customer-centric transformation, it is easy for leaders to get distracted by changing priorities and short-term thinking. However, to realise the full business case benefits, it is crucial to embed new ways of working. Leading organisations must ensure they approach transformation as an ongoing process for continuous improvement – rather than a one-off, linear change.

The customer holds the keys to unlocking growth for any organisation. Through championing the voice of the customer and delivering a truly great customer experience, your organisation can identify and unlock areas of unforeseen growth and future-proof your business model to beat off competition.