5 Ways To Build A Powerful Customer Experience Strategy

As a business, you should always look forward to building your brand to compete favorably in the market. Making the best customer experience strategy should come first when creating brand awareness. At least 42% of businesses invest in customer experience to boost sales and improve cross-selling.

Suppose you want to guarantee your business a high customer conversion rate and customer loyalty. In that case, you need to offer high-end products, competitive prices, and most importantly, optimize customer experience to boost sales. 

Customer experience is a set of interactions that customers and prospects have with your brand throughout the customer journey, including the first interaction to becoming a loyal customer. 

Let's quickly understand what a customer experience strategy is before we learn ways to build a compelling customer experience strategy.

What is a customer experience strategy? 

A customer experience strategy is a set of actionable plans to deliver a positive experience across every customer interaction with your brand and measure those experiences.

An effective and successful customer experience strategy must consider the following important factors:

• Consumer research
• Competitive insight
• Marketplace details
• Mission & vision

Building a compelling customer experience strategy begins with setting up an overall company and customer-focused goals. This is to be done to relate business outcomes with customer expectations. 

Ways to create an effective customer experience strategy

Here are some tips to help you come up with a power CX strategy for your brand. 

1. Create a buyer persona 

The first step to building a customer experience strategy is creating a buyer persona. Creating a buyer persona helps you to recognize who your customers are and understand them better. That means you should research to understand your actual customer, what they like, and what they hate most. 

When you understand what your customers like, you can develop a strategy that figures out how to improve their experience.  

You won't be able to empathize with your customers to provide them with viable solutions if you don't understand their situations. Create a buyer profile containing information about different customers that buy your brand. 

You can survey to collect more information about your customers. A buyer persona helps you build a strategy that will focus more on your customers. Include information like age, gender, geographical location, and each customer's buying behavior on the profile.

Based on the buyer persona, you can create a blog for your business and share articles that help customers during different buyer journey stages. How do articles, explanatory videos, and user-intent focused pieces are crucial to improve your business reach and branding. 

Another great way to understand your customers is by capturing the list and details of customers handled by your customer service team regularly. It helps you to understand your customer's needs. You have to make sure that your customer support team has the right customer support tools to entertain your customers according to their needs. Alternatively, you can outsource your support to customer service outsourcing companies that have the right tools.

2. Analyze business mission and vision 

If you want to create a successful CX strategy, you should review and understand your business objectives. 

What is the primary goal of your business, and who are your new and existing customers? Are you entering a new market as a business, and what should you do to penetrate the market? 

You should review your brand strategy and focus more on identifying barriers. Come up with long-term goals and focus more on building a plan to achieve them. 

When coming up with a business vision and objectives, you should ask yourself these questions:

• What technology should you adopt to fulfill your customer experience objectives?
• Are there any gaps between fulfilling customer expectations and improving CX? If more customers are putting your email in spam, you might need to reconsider your marketing strategy. For instance, you can use a tool like InboxAlly to see real-time engagements on your promotional emails. 
• How effective are the internal processes in your business at supporting your customers?
• What third-party tools are you going to use in improving customer experience?
  

3. Establish a CX team in your business 

When you are working on boosting CX, you should focus more on your staff. How your customer experience team responds and handles customer issues is central to improving their experience. Your employees are vital to creating a better customer experience. 

Effective communication plays an essential role in improving customer relationships. It is imperative to educate your employees on listening to customers and providing them with help desk support and addressing their issues on time. For instance, if a customer places an order and mentions their birthday, the manager should come over and wish them a happy birthday. 

What you learn from this is that you should pay close attention to details. When you know more about what your customers like and dislike, you can personalize their experience and act on their needs. All you have to do is hire the right people to do the work for you. You can also integrate a customer satisfaction platform to help you with customer satisfaction.

Here is what you should focus on:

• Identify skills you consider crucial to your business—the ability to interact with people and remain composed during a crisis.
• Come up with principles that your staff should follow to ensure customer interactions are smooth.
  

4. Use feedback loops when attending to customer needs 

According to a recent Bain & Company research, it is established that 80% of CEOs believe that their companies are providing the best customer service. In comparison, only 8% of customers agree with them. 

Shoppers like to feel valued and respected. As Bing Digital says, "Search for mentions of your brand on all popular social media sites and, if there are plenty of conversations occurring, be sure to join in."

Creating feedback loops in your business is essential to know what customers need and assess your brand value. Here is what you should do to make a feedback loop:

• Go online and visit all the social media platforms to listen and read what customers say about your brand. Most customers are honest when posting about your brand on social media, which means you should take their feedback on such platforms with much intensity.
• Use real-time feedback surveys and post-interactions to build credibility with customers. You can also follow up through phone systems to find out what issues they want to be addressed.
  

Setting up an effective process to hear what your customers are saying is crucial. You can utilize this feedback to analyze customer experience. It also helps you to focus on reducing the areas of friction and increasing positive customer interaction.

Here are the ways to measure and track customer experience:

• Customer Efforts Score (CES): It measures how difficult or easy it was for your customers to take or complete an action. For example, asking customers to rate on a rating scale how easy it was to get their issues resolved. 
• Net Promoter Score (NPS): It measures how loyal a customer is to your brand. It can be done by asking closed-ended questions to your customers. For example, on a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to suggest or recommend a particular company to your friends?
• Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT): It measures the satisfaction level of your customers by using your products or services. It can be a simple 'yes’/‘no' answer or a score-based answer on a point scale of 5 or 7.
• Time to Resolution (TTR): The average time the customer service team takes to resolve any customer query. It is usually measured in days or business hours. It is calculated by summing up to resolve issues and dividing it by the number of cases fixed. 
  

5. Collect all the valuable competitor insights 

You should also research your competitors to build a clear picture of how to improve customer experience. Once you know where you should improve, you can use the information as a stepping stone to meeting your CX goals.

There are many ways of collecting valuable competitor insights. You can use different competitor analysis tools to collect information about your competitors. That includes finding out what they are doing better and what you can copy to improve CX with your brand. 

Competitor research also helps you look at the paid and organic clicks your competitors are getting and their most searched keywords. By identifying the top search terms customers use to find your top competitors, you can easily understand your customers' intent. 

Go through the various channels that customers use to interact with your competitors' brands, like their social media app and website. Find out how it feels to interact with the brand and learn from some of their mistakes to improve your brand. 

Lastly, you can conduct social media listening to find out what people are saying about your competitor. What are some of the most annoying complaints people are having with your competitors? What are people praising the brand for doing?

Final Thoughts 

It takes more than just quality products and competitive prices to build a brand and improve customer experience. 

To boost customer experience and conversion rate, you should focus more on listening to your customers and responding to their issues in real-time. Build a compelling customer experience strategy with these tips to grow your business customer base.