Customer experience strategy: A complete guide

Over the years, there has been a drastic shift in customer expectations. Research shows how 64% of customers wished companies could meet and respond to their changing demands quicker. Have enterprises found it easy to catch up? Not so much, and understandably so. There is a massive push for companies to resolve tickets faster, provide excellent customer service, and create more personalized consumer experiences.

Customer experience (CX) is now integral to running a successful operation, reducing churn rates, and ensuring customers stick around for the long run. It includes (but isn’t limited to) customer service and encompasses much more. In this article, we delve into what customer experience strategy is, why it’s essential, and some strategies you can use to take your customer experience to the next level.

What is customer experience strategy?

Customer experience covers interactions between a company and its customers, such as paying bills, contacting support, seeing ads, or making purchases. A strong strategy provides a blueprint for delivering positive experiences and fostering meaningful relationships.

Customer experience strategies are actionable plans businesses can create and implement to improve consumer interactions and maintain a competitive edge. A good CX strategy outlines who your consumers are, their pain points, and how to address those pain points.

It provides a clear picture of the big picture, taking into account consumers’ online and offline interactions. The strategy captures the big-picture view of the customer experience, both online and offline. A successful strategy can improve satisfaction rates, increase revenue, and improve customer loyalty. When creating a customer experience strategy framework, some key points to remember include consumer research, marketplace data, and your brand’s mission and vision.

The importance of a customer experience strategy

1. Improved customer loyalty

Studies show that 52% of customers will likely switch to a competitor after one bad experience. Conversely, the better customers feel about your brand, the more likely they will stick around. A well-made customer experience strategy ensures that your audience receives the personalized care and connection they require to stay loyal to your company.

2. Higher revenue

It’s quite simple—the lower your customer churn rate, the higher your revenue. In fact, a McKinsey report shows that companies that focus on customer experiences can double their revenue. Upselling and cross-selling are also useful practices in enhancing brand trust and increasing revenue. Upselling refers to selling a more costly product to a customer, while cross-selling is promoting the sale of supplementary products. When used correctly, these strategies can foster customer loyalty. This requires brands to cross-sell and upsell goods that are of genuine value to their consumers.

3. A competitive edge

Among the endless products and services available, the customer’s experience with your company makes you stand out in their minds. Providing quality products and services and following them up with post-sales services, polite and efficient customer support, and personalized care helps you maintain a competitive edge. Additionally, leveraging AI and analytics can help you better understand your audience.

The best customer experience practices

The importance of customer experience has been well-established, but how can you achieve it? Regarding customer experience strategy, the best practices involve all departments. Incorporating strategies, feedback, and insights throughout the company (not just the client-facing departments) means a more cohesive and aligned business. Some of the best habits to incorporate are:

1. Aligning your objectives to consumer needs

When it comes to customer experience planning, marketing is everything. Management and client-facing departments (such as sales and customer support) must be well-trained and aware of how consumers perceive your organization’s brand image, products, and services. It is also crucial for companies to align their goals with consumers’ needs. Management often tends to underestimate consumer expectations and overestimate loyalty to their brands. This creates a disconnect between the two, leading to more complaints and decreased customer loyalty.

2. Orchestrating your position in the marketing ecosystem

Converting customers is no longer limited to beating customers. Companies must now take an active role in establishing their position in the marketing ecosystem and influencing customer journeys. This involves creating compelling customer experiences, building genuine relationships, and establishing trust. As companies grow, so do marketing ecosystems. Intelligent integration, technological advancements, and resource sharing further support this.

3. Enhance convenience

Today, convenience is everything. People have access to information, products, and resources at their fingertips. Customers want to be able to purchase products at any time and place that is convenient for them. Companies that make their products easily accessible and create seamless purchasing journeys for their customers will maintain a competitive edge. This includes aspects like multi-channel communication, speedy checkout processes, high-quality products, costs, and flexibility.

4. Leverage digital marketing strategies

Online customers often require better customer experience journeys than their offline counterparts. This is because they view their purchase value as a major attribute when rating satisfaction levels and require better levels of CX to repurchase a product. Social media, for example, is an excellent way to align your company’s needs with those of your consumers, offer enhanced customer experiences, and improve consumer satisfaction.

5. Sustainability ventures

Over the past few decades, individuals across the world have become more aware of environmental issues. Studies show that companies can implement sustainable initiatives and remain competitive in their industries despite price increases. However, price increases can not be continued perpetually. Instead, companies can offer customers multiple sustainable options and allow them to choose what suits them best. This helps create compelling, positive customer experiences and increase customer satisfaction.

6. Handling customer complaints effectively

Customer complaints and feedback can be valuable assets for companies. They provide businesses with clear pictures of gaps in their service, allowing them to create action plans to resolve them. Additionally, organizations that take customer complaints seriously are more likely to gain consumer loyalty, improve their brand image, and create more compelling customer experiences. For top-of-the-line CX, customer complaint handling must be rated 9 or above on a 10-point scale.

This can be challenging for a variety of reasons. For starters, consumers who lodge complaints often develop negative perceptions of the company, which can be hard to shake off. Many dissatisfied customers may not lodge complaints at all. The key is to understand and leverage and complaints to create better customer experiences.

7. Efficiently managing product returns

Data shows that 15-40% of consumers return products they have purchased online. This puts a lot of pressure on companies to get it right the first time and create streamlined returns handling without disrupting supply chain management. One way to offset the costly logistics of product returns is to analyse which factors lead to an increase in customer returns.

How to create a customer experience strategy

Every business will need to create its unique customer experience strategy. That being said, anyone can integrate some common strategies into their planning to improve their CX. These include:

1. Create a strong, company-wide CX framework

Creating an airtight CX strategy is not restricted to consumer-facing departments. For an airtight approach, organizations need collaboration between all departments. It is also important to engage stakeholders and highlight the profitability of CX using relevant data.

To promote and ensure company-wide collaboration, encourage leadership to champion CX initiatives, setting the tone for enthusiasm and commitment across teams. Additionally, gather feedback from CX advocates within various departments to refine strategies and drive alignment. Hosting webinars and educational sessions can further enhance CX knowledge and engagement throughout the organization.

2. Study your customer base

The main aim of CX strategies is to improve the experience your audience has when interacting with you. For this to be successful, it is first necessary to know who your customer base consists of. What are their likes, dislikes, demographics, and paint points? To create a strong CS strategy, it is important to focus on customers who will benefit the most from your products or services.

Some steps to take here include analyzing your long-term, high-value customers. Determine if there are any shared traits, such as their demographics, buying preferences, or industries. Building customer personas with details like their age, location, behaviors, and pain points can also give you a deeper, more empathetic approach to understanding them. Also, try targeting newer audiences.

3. Regularly keep tabs on customer feedback

Poor support experiences often cause . It is important to identify friction points in their journey so they can be smoothed out for better CX. Some steps to gather insights include gathering customer feedback (through surveys, reviews, focus groups, and social media), identifying trends, and comparing customer reviews with your competitors to identify weaknesses in the market. These findings can be leveraged to create a better CS strategy and gain a competitive edge.

4. Invest heavily in employee training and support

Support agents are often the face of your organization. Happy, well-trained support staff are crucial for creating positive customer experiences and being able to provide efficient support. Some ways to ensure your employees are receiving the support they need is by providing robust training programs regularly, maintaining a supportive work environment, and scheduling 1:1 check-ins.

Surveys and feedback forms can also gauge employee engagement. Additionally, CRM tools and shared workspaces that house customer data in one place enhance collaboration and efficient resolutions.

5. Address gaps and refine your CS strategy

Mapping your customer journey can help identify strengths and weaknesses. This allows you to plan for improvement across different stages—awareness, intent, brand loyalty, experience, and purchase—and ensures a cohesive customer experience.

Identifying pain points and service gaps allows you to create and implement the necessary solutions. For example, maybe you only have one channel to communicate with your customers: email. This could be challenging and frustrating for those who prefer other means of communication. Introducing omnichannel support, AI chatbots, and virtual assistants can remedy this issue.

7. Continue with the best CX practices

Customer service and experience are continuous processes. After creating your strategy, addressing any gaps in service, and addressing your consumers’ pain points, the journey doesn’t end. It is important to continue implementing the above-mentioned best customer experience practices to enhance user experiences, stay competitive, and stay up-to-date on industry trends.

How to measure customer experience strategy

How can you know if your CX strategy works after studying your customers, planning, and creating it?

Customer feedback

Perhaps the most prominent and straightforward way to know if your customers have good experiences is to ask them. Customer satisfaction scores (CSAT) can be gathered through quick surveys via email, social media, or other channels. For example, a quick survey asking your customers how their experience was (excellent, good, bad, or very bad).

Ticket response and resolution times

Response times measure how long a customer has to wait to speak with a support agent. Resolution times measure how long it takes for an agent to resolve a problem. Different customer inquiries will usually have different resolution times. However, if a specific ticket type always has unusually high-resolution times, companies may want to focus more resources on speeding these up. The lower the resolution time, the happier the customer!

Wrapping up

Customer experiences don’t only involve solving problems- they foster trust, build relationships, increase customer retention, and create a positive perception of your brand. Leveraging the right CRM software, training services, AI tools, and more can ensure your company can provide customers with top-of-the-line customer service and experiences.

DevRev, a cloud-based AI-native platform, helps companies harness AI’s capabilities to expand their self-service options, omnichannel support features, and more to boost productivity and enhance customer experiences. Our AI chatbot, PLuG, intelligently understands the intent and sentiment behind custom requests and can provide quick, personalized responses. DevRev’s AI capabilities can also identify recurring queries, enabling your business to create detailed knowledge bases, FAQs, and articles for self-service.

DevRev’s platform also brings together different teams, such as product development, customer support, and engineering, to enhance communication and streamline operations. To learn how to integrate our AI-native platform into your customer experience strategy, try DevRev today!