Develop A CX Strategy With These 6 Steps
Customer experience is the most significant competitive advantage you can have as an organization. Without a customer experience (CX) strategy or roadmap, it will be impossible to create an exceptional, competitor-beating experience for your customers.
This blog will share why you need a CX strategy and provide valuable tips and tricks to help you create one.
Why You Need A Customer Experience Strategy
From marketing to sales to service to account and beyond, all touchpoints are a part of your customer experience. Therefore, your organization must build an all-encompassing CX strategy that addresses each of these touchpoints.
Your customer experience strategy is vital because it impacts how people view your company, and it affects how you serve your customers.
CX Shapes The Market’s Perception Of Your Company
Your brand image is dependent on a variety of factors, such as your advertising activities, social media pages, and more. But ultimately, your brand image is shaped by how your key audiences perceive you. When you provide an outstanding customer experience, your customers are more likely to leave positive reviews, be a reference for your organization, and paint a positive picture of your organization in the market.
This blog from Tweak Your Biz provides some great tips on boosting your brand image through CX.
Your CX Strategy Impacts How Your Reps Serve Customers
Your organization is more likely to provide consistently positive customer experiences when there is a CX strategy in place. When there is no strategy, you will lack the resources and processes necessary to provide a consistent and positive experience.
How to Build Your Customer Experience Strategy
Step 1: Review Your Current CX Strategy
Before you start building a new CX strategy, you must analyze your current strategy. The best way to do this? Have your marketing, sales, service, and IT leaders and your executives do a self-assessment. There are plenty of free templates online and if you need more in-depth help you can speak with our certified experts.
Doing a self-assessment or working with our experts will help you understand what areas you need to focus on to improve your CX and provide personalized tips to help you start addressing your CX pain points.
Step 2: Understand Your Customers
To create your strategy, you need to understand your customers. The best way to do this is to collect customer feedback on the following two areas:
Understand the buyer’s journey: What steps do customers take to complete purchases, and what steps do they take after making a purchase? You must understand this for each product or service you sell.
Understand customer profiles: This includes information like company type and size, industry, company revenue, etc. But it also goes deeper to include information like customer pain points, expectations of purchase, and more. Again, you must understand this for each product or service you sell.
Once you understand these two key aspects, you will be well-positioned to build a CX strategy that enhances customer experiences.
Step 3: Work With Your Executive Team to Define Your CX Vision
You must share your findings from steps 1 and 2 with your executive team and work with them to develop a CX-related vision and CX goals. Enhancing your strategy will be nearly impossible without executive support and buy-in.
The easiest way to set your CX vision and goals is to understand the gaps that exist between your customers’ CX expectations and what your current strategy provides. Then, work with your executives to understand the resources you need to achieve your new vision.
Step 4: Connect Your CX Vision to Departmental Goals & Processes
Once you have set your new vision, each department should set goals to improve your CX strategy.
After departmental goals have been set, it is critical to create processes that will assist in goal attainment. This blog provides a great example of how you can develop processes based on departmental goals.
Finally, you must communicate all goals and processes across each department. This way, you can ensure that all employees work toward the same vision, regardless of their role.
Step 5: Provide Your Teams With CX Technology
Now that you have set goals and developed processes, it is time to get to work. Achieving your CX goals will be difficult without CX technology. Every team should have access to tools that provide 360-degree views of your customers.
Here are some of the technologies we recommend you use:
- CRM
- Marketing automation
- Customer service software
- Artificial intelligence
- Communication software
- Cloud computing
Conclusion: A Good CX Strategy Includes The Entire Organization
Customer experience is one of the most impactful competitive advantages you can have, and it’s a great way to stand out in your industry. Still, it requires work from every department in your organization.
Many companies don’t know where to start when developing and defining a CX strategy. No need to worry, Faye is here to help! Reach out to our certified CX experts to help your business thrive.