How to Implement A Customer Experience Strategy In Your Business

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We asked business people what their main business priorities are for the next five years, and again the same answer prevailed.

Can you imagine what priority the companies have? If you guessed Customer Experience (CX), you guessed it.

Customer experience is the top business priority for the next five years, and the reason is simple. Companies that focus on customer experience reduce churn and increase sales, resulting in higher profits!

For many, customer service and customer experience seem interchangeable. However, one is a  point of contact with the brand and the other influences feelings and emotions and covers the entire customer journey.

The quality of your customers’ experience affects all areas of your company. Let’s get right into it!

What is a customer experience (CX) strategy?

Customer Experience (CX) refers to the holistic perception of your brand’s customer experience. A CX strategy refers to the actionable plans a business puts in place to deliver a positive, meaningful experience to customers across their interaction with the brand.

Every brand action affects the perception of customers and their decision to keep your business or not. Therefore, excellent customer experience management is your key to success.

Why customer experience matters?

Here are some impressive numbers:

  • According to an Oracle survey, 74% of C-suite executives said their customer experience influences their passion for trademark attorneys.
  • According to a study by American Express, 60% of participants were willing to pay more for better customer service.
  • Eighty per cent of the companies in the Bain & Company survey believed their customer experience was excellent. Only 8% of customers agreed.

Your customer experience can be of great benefit to you, but since so many companies don’t understand it, it’s still a pretty serious competitive advantage.

What is a great customer experience?

Is everything related to communication? Based on our extensive work with SaaS companies, Interactions – Yes. But touchpoints, depth of communication and experience (inclusion) also contribute significantly to the customer experience. Great CX is achieved through continuous improvement of each these components.

7 Steps of A Great Customer Experience Strategy

  1. Review Your Current Customer Experience Strategy

The first step in creating a customer experience strategy is to review your company’s current approach to customer support. The goal here is to identify what works well for your company and where you can improve.

If you’re unsure where to start, try to find critical metrics in your company’s customer support or data centres that show success, such as the Online Advertising Score, Customer Satisfaction Score, and Customer Tournament Index. If you score below expectations, you have a starting point to get worse.

  1. Understand Your Customers’ Needs

Some customer needs are necessary, such as being on time and maintaining a positive attitude. These are the things a customer expects from your business every time they get there.

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However, most customers have different needs that change depending on your business. In some cases, a quick response may be necessary; other times, quality and clarity are the keys to success. It all depends on how the customer feels when they contact your company and how well your team can identify and adapt to their needs.

  1. Solve your Customer Queries

A higher customer service strategy focuses on solving customer problems, whether those problems are expected or unexpected. In many companies, teams try to prevent potential problems and catch them before they affect the customer.

They plan problems along the way and with regular customers to make sure everything goes well after the purchase. This kind of proactive customer service reduces changes and strengthens your team’s relationship with your customer base.

  1. Create an Emotional Connection with your Customers

Have you heard the phrase “this is not what you say; how do you say it”?

The best customer experience is achieved when a brand creates an emotional connection with the customers. Research by the Journal of Consumer Research has found that more than 50% of experiences are based on emotions when emotions shape attitudes that lead to decisions.

Customers are loyal because they are emotionally connected and remember how they feel when using a product or service. The company that optimizes for the emotional connection outperforms the sales growth of the competition by 85%.

  1. Capture Customer Feedback In Real-Time

How do you know if you’re offering a WOW customer experience?

You have to ask – and ideally, you do that by collecting real-time reactions and feedback. Use live chat tools to have real-time chats, and when you’re ready, send post-communication surveys to the desired customers using customer experience management tool.

You can also follow up with the customers via the telephone for more detailed feedback.

  1. Invest in the Right System and Tools to Level Up Customer Experience

Developing suitable systems and tools is one of the best practices for enhancing the customer experience. By investing in proactive communication channels, you can improve customer communication and understanding.

Choosing and implementing the right tools is vital to encourage customers to interact more with your brand. However, the ultimate goal is to meet customer expectations and make them happy.

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Brands that focus on enhancing the customer experience need to add digital tools and traditional tools to attract customers. Use various plugins on your site for a better experience or having a giveaway contest like integrating role-based price for WooCommerce plugin to provide discounts to different user roles.

The use of specific tools helps to respond on time, to monitor customer behaviour and preventive actions. They also help resolve customer complaints faster and provide effective solutions.

  1. Use Artificial Intelligence (AI) For A Better Customer Experience

Customer experience landscape defined by artificial intelligence (AI). Chat bots help companies drastically change their customer experience and faster growth. Invespro says: “Chats can save customer support costs up to 30% and respectively companies with an accelerated response and answering up to 80% of Questions.”

The chat robot is the best solution to solve the simple questions of customers immediately. However, complex problems cannot be appropriately answered by bots, which re-directs the conversation to the right human agent.

Provide customers with the best experience in both worlds – the chat bot handles simple questions, and tricky-complicated chats are handled by human agents’

Takeaway

Customer expectations are higher than ever before, and word of mouth is driven quickly! And when a customer gets even more rights, it increases the importance of the customer experience.

Customer experience is an area that needs constant feeding and care, and by paying more attention to the customer experience strategy, companies will have a positive impact on customer loyalty, more excellent retention, and increased revenue.

Ashlie Lee
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