10 Ways to Create a Customer Experience Strategy

The digital world has transformed the way we do business, and competition is fierce, which is why companies must put a strong emphasis on creating a superior customer experience to attract and retain their customers. Loyalty nowadays is not a given, and brands need to work harder than ever to keep customers from jumping to the competition.

Creating a customer experience strategy requires companies to be customer-focused, open to feedback, and have a clear vision of which direction to go to ensure that every touchpoint a customer encounters throughout their journey is positive and valuable. A good customer experience strategy will help you reduce churn, increase customer satisfaction, increase customer lifetime value, and spread the positive word on your brand.

Let’s look at 10 best practices to help you create a solid customer experience strategy to wow your customers at every touchpoint.

1. Visualize the Type of Customer Experience You Want to Present

Before you can execute a solid customer experience strategy, you need to understand your company’s value and mission and use that as a guide. Shape your brand’s image to influence how people will view it. How do you go about offering superior customer support? What kind of experience do your customers have at every touchpoint? What is the quality of these interactions, and what makes them unique from all others? Your company value and mission are unique to your brand; use them to help establish a long-term vision.

2. Create Personas

Identifying your audience is crucial in providing the best customer experience possible and positioning yourself as a fully customer-centric company. You need to bring to life the customers who interact with your brand to connect with them and identify their needs, problems, and desires. Creating a buyer’s persona involves digging deep into who you are trying to reach and scratching each layer until you have formed a clear picture of the different personas interacting with your brand. Your persona could include gender, age, education level, hobbies, career objectives and anything else that will allow you to relate to your audience.

3. Collect Customer Feedback

There are dozens of ways for companies to collect customer feedback, including performing traditional outbound calls and using live chat tools. Gaining an insight into how people feel while interacting with your brand is the first step in identifying roadblocks between you and your customers, and once you have identified the positive and the negative, you can adjust accordingly.

4. Implement the Feedback into Your Strategy

As silly as it may sound, not all companies take the time to incorporate customer feedback as part of their continuous improvement process. Listening to customers not only helps form a closer relationship with them (after all, who doesn’t appreciate having their opinion taken into consideration), but it also allows you to deliver and surpass customer expectations. Companies that ignore customers and assume that they know better than anyone else risk losing out in the long run.

5. Listen to Your Customer-Facing Agents

The next best thing to receiving customer feedback is to consider the input your customer-facing employees relay back to you. Clients are often very vocal in expressing their frustrations to the customer agents they encounter, which is not a negative thing, as it allows you to promptly identify the problem and swiftly find a solution going forward.

6. Use Feedback to Build a More Effective Team

Collecting feedback helps you identify how your customers feel and determine how to further develop your team to provide a better customer experience. Do you need to implement more training for your team? Is there something you can automate to release employees from redundant tasks to focus on the customer experience?

7. Create a Strong Connection with Your Customers

Connections are based on emotions, and clients form an emotional and loyal attachment to companies that they feel provide them with a general positive experience. Brand intimacy can only be achieved through brand authenticity and by forming a genuine relationship with audiences. How you make your customers feel will determine if they want to continue interacting. Does your brand accurately relate to your target audience? Are you communicating with them regularly, for example, through daily blogs or weekly newsletters? Has your brand been part of their lives for generations, and if so, are you tapping into this nostalgia to maintain the connection? Build a connection.

8. Invest in the Proper Tools and Platforms

Trying to reach customers seamlessly and effortlessly is easier said than done, which is why investing in the proper tools and platforms is so important for creating a positive and superior customer experience. To encourage brand interaction, you need to ensure that you are active on media where your audience can be found, and it is essential to use tools that allow communication to flow, such as instant message or live streaming. Make it as easy as possible for your customers to interact with you and be sure to maintain a two-way interaction.

9. Use AI For a Better Customer Experience

We all know that bots never sleep and using them as the first touchpoint between your customers and your brand can be beneficial and cost-effective. Not only can automated chatbots be on hand 24/7 to help solve issues (track a package, provide further information), but they let your customer service representatives focus on more significant problems, allowing you to reduce the number of human resources dedicated to answering simple queries. AI is the future, and customers are becoming attuned and embracing the rise of AI-powered tools.

10. Use Appropriate Metrics to Track Customer Satisfaction

Companies all have their preferred choice of metrics for analyzing and measuring customer engagement, satisfaction and perception of brand services and products. Customer satisfaction data is always helpful in helping companies fine-tune their strategy as it gives an in-depth look into what customers are experiencing at every touchpoint. It’s also helpful to gauge how likely customers are to recommend your brand to friends and family and seeing as word of mouth is one of the best forms of marketing out there, this is a great way to build a loyal customer base.

Developing a compelling customer experience strategy is vital in acquiring and retaining customers, and their voices are growing, which means businesses no longer call all the shots. Creating a solid customer experience is a long-term strategy and is anything but static. Trends evolve, and demands change constantly, and if companies expect any kind of loyalty and increase in revenue, they need to listen to their customers and demonstrate that their opinion matters. No brand can afford to skim over the customer experience and risk losing to the competition.