How to Create a Customer Experience Strategy: The Steps to Take

Are you aware that 20% of small businesses will fail within their first year?

As a new business, this figure might seem worrying. It’s especially worrying when you have little to no experience in online business ventures. If you aren’t careful, you might end up discouraging prospects from buying your products.

Want to know how to give the best customer experience?

This guide will give you some important customer service tips. That way, you can make a viable customer experience strategy. Read on and keep more customers soon:

1. Make a Clear Customer Experience Vision

Your first step toward a solid strategy is to have a clear vision. This must focus on improving your customers’ experience. At the same time, you must ensure that it’s easy to communicate with people within your organization.

An easy method of defining your vision is to make a set of statements. These will function like guiding principles. Once you plan this, ensure that it becomes embedded into your company culture.

These statements serve as the driving force behind your company’s behavior. Each team member must know these by heart. This is possible by applying these principles to all training and development areas.

2. Understand Your Customers’ Identity

After developing a clearer vision, you must bring your ideal customers to life. Think about the type of people your customer support teams will deal with. Your organization must teach your teams to connect and understand customers’ issues.

Achieving this will help you reach a new understanding of what your customers want and need. If you want a good place to start, do so by developing customer profiles. Use this method for each customer segment.

To personalize it further, give each segment a name and personality. The following section is an example of a good customer profile.

Mae is a 35-year-old woman with the technical expertise to follow your buying process. Meanwhile, Mike is a 42-year-old male with little internet experience. He may need help understanding your website.

If you make customer profiles, your company better equips your customer support team. They can recognize the people they might deal with. This allows them to understand their needs better.

With this, your company works better toward becoming customer-centric. This applies whether it’s the in-store experience or website experience.

3. Make an Emotional Connection

When you create an emotional bond with a customer, it results in the best customer experiences. Take note; over half of a customer’s experience comes from their emotions. This means it’s an important factor in shaping their attitudes.

Customers that form emotional attachments to your company become loyal. They will remember that feeling whenever they use your product or survey. Optimize your customer experience for emotional connections so you can start outperforming competitors.

If you have emotionally-engaged customers, they’re more likely to recommend your company. The same level applies to their likelihood of repurchasing your products. They’re also unlikely to defect to other brands unless offered over 20% discounts.

4. Record Customer Feedback as It Happens

To determine whether you’re delivering a great customer experience, you must ask. It would help to get feedback as it happens in real-time.

To get real-time feedback from your customers, use a live-chat tool. You may also send up a follow-up email to keep in touch with them.

Do this for each customer using post-interaction surveys. If you use other customer experience tools, use this method for all.

Ask your customers if you can make an outbound call to them. If they agree, this will give you more insightful feedback. Always remember to be polite and never push them.

Tie your customer feedback to specific customer support agents. Show it to your team members and let them know the difference they’re making. If you’re generous enough, give incentives.

5. Use a Quality Framework for Team Development

You now know the customers’ opinion of your service quality. This allows you to compare it to your defined set of customer experience principles. With this, you can now define the training needs for each customer support team member.

Most companies use phone and email when improving a team member’s quality level. However, making a quality framework will take this to the next level. This allows you to track your team’s development with eLearning, coaching, and group training.

6. Listen to Regular Employee Feedback

As an organization, you must have a yearly survey process. This allows you to know your team’s feedback.

With this, you can determine their engagement with their job. At the same time, you can assess their skills to deliver exceptional customer service.

What happens in between these survey periods? In most cases, nothing. To prevent this, you must invest in continuous employee feedback.

Use tools to enable your staff to share ideas. That way, you’ll have more means of improving your customers’ experience. This allows managers to determine the staff’s current feelings toward your business.

7. Measure the ROI Coming from Great Customer Experience Delivery

To finish everything off, you must ask yourself an important question. Are all your investments working and paying off? This applies to your investments in teams, processes, and technologies.

The good news is that the answer lies in the business results. Take note; most companies have trouble measuring their customer experience satisfaction. Sometimes, you only need to ask whether these people will recommend your company to a friend or loved one.

With that, you have a suitable benchmark to measure your customer experience success. The best part is that it’s easy to put in place.

Want more information about customer experience analytics? Head over to decibel.com. That way, you’ll have a better system for digital customer experience.

Make a Great Customer Experience Strategy Today!

Now you know how to give the best customer experience. With these tips, you can develop a comprehensive customer experience strategy. Use these tips to get the most out of your efforts and investments.

Thanks for reading our article! Want to drive your new business to success? Check out our other business and marketing guides for more insightful tips!