Elevating Your Long-Term Customer Experience Strategy

Customer interactions with a business cannot be ignored, and you consistently delivering experiences to those who interact with your business. It can take lot of effort and investment to attract customers and make them happy. However, it only takes a few seconds to make a potential customer unhappy and only a couple seconds more to have them leave your website and find a competitor. This is where good Customer Experience (CX) becomes vital. It's about optimizing every point of customer interaction.  

The Way We View Customer Experience Has Changed

The biggest drawback of a CX strategy is the idea that customers have static needs. The pandemic has helped businesses address the importance of adopting an agile CX strategy. Customers are moving from offline to online shops, and companies are looking for better communication methods due to specific environmental and geographical changes. For customers, it is all about their safety and convenience; thus, buying preferences have recently changed.p

Today, the focus on CX has been broadened to predict and reduce customer pain points even before they feel the need. 

A robust customer experience strategy excels at prediction. The analysis is based on the different points of customer interaction, from the first interaction to a stage where the customer advocates for you; customer behavior has changed the focus of CX. It may have been considered only a key marketing asset, but now it has become a vital infrastructural need for success.

Having a Customer Experience Strategy is Essential

Today, CX is a big problem that many businesses need to fix instantly. Customers invest in a business only when they feel optimistic about them. Most consumers can easily switch brands if the buying process is too complex.

The bottom line is that buyers need convenience. They prefer a personalized shopping experience that is consistent across all channels. Customers demand instant gratification. So, every brand's win is an agile CX strategy that solves these three challenges. This is just one part of the process. Factors that make customer experience necessary include shaping customer perception, improving business KPIs and gaining a competitive advantage.

Here's why a good customer experience strategy is essential for businesses to thrive:

Shaping Customer Perception

When an experience is excellent, the customer forms a positive image in their minds. They engage with the company and tell their friends about it. Customers include brand perceptions based on their personal customer experience.

When a business can deliver a customer-centric experience at every point, customers stay for a longer time. An agile CX strategy that evolves with customer behavior is what brands need to shape customer perception positively. When the perception is positive, brands not only get customers but advocates. They speak about the brand as ambassadors and help create new opportunities, a positive brand image, and increased customer lifetime value.

Improving Business KPIs

Whether a business focuses on revenues, profits, or client retention rate, a CX strategy can improve business KPIs significantly. Positive customer experience helps boost sales and revenue, bring back customers, enhance engagement and reduce bounce rates. A notable example of how companies can improve KPIs with customer experience is ShortsTV, the sole theatrical distributor of Oscar-nominated short films.

ShortsTV needed a robust online presence across a variety of devices. Their primary focus was to increase their viewer base and enhance CX. We understood their needs and created a comprehensive rights and license management system. This enabled them to deliver personalized experiences. The new system also automates viewership control for individual films across more than 100 countries.

Gaining a Competitive Edge

As per Hubspot, 76% of businesses started investing more to enhance customer experience since they consider it the most fundamental element in raising conversions. So, a good CX strategy becomes an essential metric for competitive advantage. Technology is a primary differentiator -- it can help businesses of all sizes. With custom enterprise software, companies can get the solutions they need to be tailored to their business.

A robust enterprise solution is the biggest asset for brands as they can assess customer behavior and modify it accordingly. This is specifically great for creating personalized experiences across all platforms. A business can no longer stand out from the competition by serving at lower prices. It must deliver memorable experiences that its customers need to win the race.

Building Strong Public Image

Good customer experience boosts branding, which leads to a better public image. A well-built public image is often proper when some slip-up occurs. This way, a business can retain its client base even after a customer experiences a downfall with their purchase. However, a company with good customer experience will always resolve such issues by implementing customer compensation strategies. 

According to a Salesforce Research, 78% of customers will likely forgive and forget the company for a mishap they experienced after receiving good customer service and will continue to shop from them in the future. After all, providing good customer service is vital and a direct way to build a better public reputation and company image. 

With these facts and stats, you can see how essential it is for a business to develop and implement good CX strategies. 

Customer Experience Strategy Best Practices

Customer experience strategy includes planning and designing effective customer interactions. An effective CX strategy needs businesses to focus on thorough customer research, vital competitive insights, and overall brand image. A good CX strategy is not just about the people in customer-facing roles. It is an organizational change that needs to span across all departments. Best CX strategy practices help businesses improve customer satisfaction, reduce churn and increase revenues.

Here are listed best practices to follow when developing a customer experience strategy:

Create a Clear Customer Experience Vision

Whether B2B or B2C, brands that focus on customer communication have a more significant long-term impact than others, so it is essential to teach customer experience as one of the guiding principles of your organization. It can be a set of statements, rules, or simply CX goals that an organization plans to achieve.

They can be embedded within teams across all departments via training. When all teams understand CX's motivation, it can positively drive the overall brand reputation.

Understand Who Your Customers Are

Brands must know the likes and dislikes of their customers. When a business understands customer needs, it can strategize more effectively. Developing buyer personas is a great start. Customer segmentation helps brands identify the different personas that interact with them.

Understanding customers becomes even more critical with evolving trends. A business aware of its target audience can save time, money, and effort while maximizing productivity.

Create an Emotional Connection with your Customers

The impact of an emotional connection is immense. No doubt, emotions are the dominant driver of most meaningful decisions in life. Likewise, businesses that successfully connect emotionally with customers have a more substantial influence.

A successful emotional connection increases product recommendations by consumers to potential customers. So, understanding what resonates with your customers is one of the best practices of a good CX strategy.

Always Keep Your Employees Motivated

It is vital to assess your business's technological and training needs before implementing the CX strategy. With eLearning and coaching, teams can be made more efficient. These efforts can be scheduled and tracked with a quality framework for better productivity. This is a continuous process; organizations must proactively take initiatives to ensure seamless optimization and business continuity.

Continuous employee feedback and idea-sharing mechanisms can help enhance CX and assess what the company thinks. Ensure employee motivation and effective CX by welcoming constant feedback in a closed environment for all team members.

Capture Customer Feedback in Real Time

Keeping track of customer data and feedback in real-time offers key insights that can automatically  shape the CX strategy for a brand. There are many places for a brand to track customer data when communicating with customers with live chat tools, follow up mails or virtual engagement sessions. So, businesses must be vigilant and assess the customers at every step.

Live customer analysis is an excellent advantage in this competitive market. When businesses gain regular customer insights, they can create a better strategy suited to customer needs.

Measure the ROI from Delivering Great Customer Experience

In the initial stages, CX is less about ROI analytics, such as revenues. Instead, the ROI on an excellent strategy is calculated based on its Net Promoter Score (NPS). NPS is the value that estimates the readiness of customers to recommend a product, service, or business. Simply put, it is the total number of brand advocates a company creates from its customers.

NPS can be used to calculate hard-to-gauge metrics such as customer satisfaction and happiness. So, the ROI of a CX strategy is based on the assessment of loyal customers instead of just leads.

Building a Customer Experience Strategy 

Delivering positive experiences is a critical aspect of forging valuable customer relationships. An effective CX strategy helps inculcate a customer-centric approach in the organization. Employees start relating to buyer personas which make business processes more accurate. So, a smart customer experience strategy is vital for internal and external businesses.

A CX strategy is an investment for the future. Customers can go elsewhere if they find the experience satisfactory within seconds. No brand wants customers to leave. So, the mantra is simple, 'Always give what customers want.'

If your goal is to be one of the brands driving customer-focused transformation, and having a lasting impact on your customers and your business, explore Icreon's Customer Experience Services.