Today, the key to retaining customers and outperforming the competition is delivering consistently extraordinary customer experiences. Creating outstanding customer experiences require getting to know your customers, creating personalized interactions, and being innovative. That’s where having a robust customer experience strategy comes in. Once you have a solid customer experience strategy in place, you can set your brand apart.
Brands are realizing the value of creating a rich customer experience (CX). These companies understand that successfully implementing a carefully crafted CX strategy is key to increased customer satisfaction, decreased customer churn, and higher revenues. Yet, there is a disconnect between the experience companies deliver and the experience customers get.
CX strategy best practices can help brands improve their customer experience quickly, because it sets the ball in motion. Below are three best practices that can propel your brand into the superior customer experience stratosphere.
1. Create a customer-centric culture
You must put the customer first in order to design a successful CX strategy. It’s one thing to say that your business focuses on the customer and quite another to become customer-centric. Management must work to create a customer-centric culture throughout the organization, and help employees understand the value of creating a rich customer experience. It helps to put everyone in the customers’ shoes.
Keep in mind that simply creating a customer-centric culture isn’t enough if you want to create a successful CX strategy. You need to make your efforts sustainable and consistently evaluate your company culture to make changes as needed.
2. Map the customer journey and build to customer experience mapping
How do you go about personalizing the customer experience? Start by mapping your customer journey. These maps show gaps between customer expectations and the actual experience at key stages of the journey. At the very least, customer journey maps should contain the context, a persona, outcomes, and touchpoints.
Companies new to customer journey mapping should carefully define their objectives. With clear goals in mind, you’re much more likely to define a path to achieve them. It’s also helpful to include executives in the process of defining objectives and engaging them in the process. Then, define the scope of the project by identifying the processes and specific customers that will be targeted in the journey mapping process. It’s better to complete customer journey mapping for each key customer segment.
Once you master customer journey mapping, move on to customer experience mapping. Customer experience maps deliver key insights to help you streamline your CX strategy. These maps go one step further by examining the complete picture of the customer experience with a brand, analyzing behavior and interactions across touchpoints and channels. These maps can help you understand the process each customer segment goes through when interacting with your brand, and surfaces potential interactions throughout the whole buying journey. Customer experience maps are a must for determining why customers don’t have the best possible experience, especially when you are not sure where the disconnect is happening.
3. Create personalized, relevant and timely interactions
Of course, personalization starts with knowing your customers, and knowing them well. Using innovative technology to listen to customers, gather data from all of your interactions with them, and to learn from their behavior to get a complete picture is paramount. Then, you can target their unique interests and meet their expectations.
With a better understanding of your customers’ patterns of behavior and needs, you’ll have the knowledge to more accurately predict their next moves for more relevant campaigns. This more strategic approach to using customer data could mean the difference between losing or gaining a customer.
Having a solid customer experience strategy will enable you to stand out from the competition and increase revenue from new and loyal customers. To get your customer experience right, and close the gap between customer perceptions and experience, you need to craft a successful CX strategy.
