Learn how to build a great CX strategy with these key elements

What is Customer Experience (CX) strategy?

A customer experience (CX) strategy is the collective effort of an organization’s employees to define, design, and improve customer experience.

A customer never stops interacting with your brand. The customer may have made a purchase or may not have. Your brand interacts with them at various touchpoints, moving them closer to a purchase or moving away from one. A good CX strategy will always bring them closer to a purchase and make them a loyal customer. It will also turn them into your biggest advocates, and word of mouth is instrumental in getting new customers. Amazon is a great example of this, right from the customer acquisition phase to post-purchase communications. A CX management software or platform such as QuestionPro CX can help manage your CX initiatives better and with ease.

Key elements of a successful CX strategy

What makes for a good CX strategy? What are the most important practices or tips for a CX strategy to make it a success? We have highlighted some key elements for you to include in your customer experience strategy.

• Customer-centric culture: Customer experience is determined by the quality of all interactions your customers have in a customer lifecycle. This includes all of their experiences from customer interactions with employees working in functions such as marketing, sales, customer support, and customer success. All the functions need to work together as one and have a common goal to create and deliver a great customer experience. This is where your customer-centric culture and values play a key role. If customer-centricity is part of your core value system, your CX management and strategy will be a huge success.
  
  A brand that is well-know globally for being customer-centric is McDonald’s. They always solicit customer feedback to improve their products and service with the use of technology, social media, etc. Below is a prime example of good customer experience; these ‘easy order’ kiosks help customers order fast and avoid long wait lines.
  
• User and visitor intent: Every brand, product, or service will have promoters and detractors. And they make it easy to calculate the NPS for a brand. What many organizations fail to take into account is why a customer became a detractor or promoter. What was it exactly that made them love or hate your brand? At which stage of the customer journey, they were impressed or put-off? Understand your customers, their intent, and it will help you better your CX.
  
  Ask questions, conduct surveys, and gain insights into what is working best for you and what needs fixing. It does not have to be a long detailed survey; it can be as short and simple as wanting to know why they are visiting your website or store today.
  
• CX surveys: Online customer surveys provide tremendous insights into what your customers need, want, think about your product or service, like about your offering, etc. There are several types of surveys, depending on the type of study you want to conduct. You have customer satisfaction surveys, Net Promoter Score (NPS) surveys, Customer Effort Score (CES) survey, etc. A CX management tool or platform such as QuestionPro CX helps you map your customers’ journey to build a touchpoint inventory, share insightful details with your staff to design an excellent CX, and devise strategies to deliver on customer expectations continually.
• User experience: User experience is definitely something that brands need to invest resources into. This holds especially true for online and self-service products and services. You need to leverage all of the latest tools and technology available and deliver a user experience that is smooth, user-friendly, and intuitive. A great UX will encourage more users to go for self-service, which will save you a great deal on recurring employee acquisition and training costs.
• Customer reviews: Today’s buyers rely heavily on customer reviews. They research online several times before they make a purchase or decide on their top considerations. This makes monitoring and responding to your customer reviews more important than ever. Brand reputation has become crucial for most customers, and they genuinely consider customer ratings. This social proof is important to assuage any doubts your potential customers may have. Also, with these reviews, you can know what your product or service is lacking and in which stage of the customer lifecycle. This will help you in bridging any gaps and gaining a competitive advantage. You can always solicit new product ideas and feedback from your customers online.

Are the above elements part of your CX strategy? If not, you may want to include these to make your strategy wholesome.

You may also want to view: Best ways to analyze and implement CX changes based on customer feedback.