Companies that provide emotional connection with customers outperform the sales growth of their competitors by 85 percent.
Forbes.com
Customer experience, as a unique selling point, is fast taking over as a strategy that would determine brands, businesses and companies that would dominate the market and lead the competition in their industry.
Having a unique product is no longer enough to guarantee a competitive edge in business.
With the business landscape getting more competitive, the only way to navigate the market, ground trust, enshrine brand loyalty, and build a pool of loyal customers is by investing in building a stellar customer experience strategy.
What is Customer experience [CX]?
Dave Dyson, Sr. Customer Service Evangelist at Zendesk says, “Customer experience is how a customer feels about the sum of their interactions with a business.”
Customer experience is the impressions you leave on your customers throughout their customer journey. It covers every touchpoint of the customers with your brand.
A careless approach to building one, thus, can have a profound effect on your business, impact your sales, and make your business vulnerable to competitors.
So in this article, I would be guiding you on the keys steps to implement to get started on building a strong customer experience strategy that aligns with your business goals and delivers great results on a long term basis.
Did you know?
Customers tell an average of nine people about a positive experience with a brand, but they tell 16 people about a negative experience.
Forbes.com
10 Key Steps to Building a Customer Experience Strategy
Come up with a Vision
The first step in creating an excellent customer experience is to have a mission.
Draft a set of principles and statements of core values you want your business to reflect.
Define how you want it implemented and at what stage of the journey you want your customers to experience it.
For instance, consider Intergage Marketing System (a branch of Intergage Company Ltd) and how it intends to create a good customer experience.
By assuring future clients that they care deeply about their needs, and that they are open to feedbacks from them, they create a lively and free atmosphere that improve business-customer relationships, increase engagement, and drives loyalty.
Get your key teams on the same page
You want to ensure first to bring on board the key teams in your business that engage most with your customers. For instance, your customer service team, sales team and your marketing team.
Your goal here is to communicate the prepared vision to these teams.
In this step also, you want to ensure to align the vision with the job roles of each team.
See below how Intergage Marketing System aligns its vision with the job role of its clients’ service team.
By stating explicitly the role of its clients’ service team, they define the role of the team in fulfilling the vision—while also putting them in a position that ensures accountability for fulfilment of the roles.
Take advantage of customer data
Your customers like to feel special
A key way to delivering stellar customer experience is delivering custom services. A service offering that speak to your customers’ specific needs not only surprises your customers but it demonstrates the depth of your care for them.
Here, you will want to segment your customers to different groups based on their demographics, psychometrics, and other data gathered through on-site and off-site engagement with your brand.
Then based on the information gathered, you then carve out unique value proposition that communicates to the needs and problems of each group.
Engage the use of technology
The business world is fast changing—technology is king
Your best bet to gathering enough data to delivering good customer experience is by leveraging on the use of technology that allows you to gather customer data in the most efficient and cost-effective manner.
Here, you want to engage the service of web developers, UX designers, and digital marketers to create an online presence that provides customers an opportunity to interact with your brand, while allowing you collect their contacts—in the form of emails—and data, based on their interaction with your website which would then help informs on their possible interests as they engage with your products.
This serves to informs on UVPs suitable to different customers, and what kind of customer experience would be best for different groups of customers.
See below how Intergage Company Ltd is harnessing the use of technology to create a stress-free way for their clients to achieve their business goals.
Create a relaxed and peaceful environment
Nothing wows and leaves a stronger impression on customers than an environment with a magical touch.
Remember, the whole idea of customer experience is to evoke warm, positive, and memorable emotions.
People rarely forget how they feel in a serene, beautiful, and well-arranged environment.
So here you want to develop an atmosphere with your customers that allows them to feel that you truly care about their needs and problems.
Be Helpful
Don’t just promote your services and products to them, help them maximize on their purchases: guide them on how best use your products, send them email newsletters that contain useful tips and content that speaks to their needs.
The value of this cannot be overemphasized. Customers are more loyal to brand that offer value in exchange for their patronage in the form of free consultations, free guide, and other service renders that add value to their lives.
Build valuable relationships with your customers. It pays on the long-term.
Obtain customer feedback
If you want to deliver a good, a better, then an excellent customer experience then you must continually be obtaining and incorporating feedbacks from your customers into your business strategy.
Just think about it, how will you be able tell if your current customer experience strategy is having the desired impression on your customers?
So here you want to ensure to always ask feedback from your customers periodically and consistently.
A Team of Customer-centric Employees
Ensure you have the right employees working across the various touchpoints of your business.
Ensure your employees value delivering good customer experience as much as you do.
You can consider providing your employees with relevant training session in customer experience, especially as it relates to current best practices in the industry your business belongs to.
Build and Ingrain a Good Work Culture
Develop a work culture that establishes a solid interactive environment among the various teams in your business.
Your employees can be a good source of feedback on how effective the customer experience system is working, so instituting a work culture that allows teams to evaluate their performance and provide feedback on each other on what they are doing right and what they can do to improve their performance—especially as it relates to delivering their roles as regards fostering your vision on an excellent customer experience—would be a valuable addition.
Holding regular meetings with your employees can also help drive the customer experience goal further.
Create and Develop Your Product/Service Around Real Problems
Lastly, you don’t want to forget to keep in focus the needs of your customers as you develop your product offerings—you want to to keep them in focus 100 percent of the time.
You got those customers in the first place because they want to get their problems solved—and nothing else.
So the best and most important customer experience you can deliver is to solve their problem quickly and effectively.
So you want to spend time brainstorming your product offerings—am I solving any specific problem for my customers?
Create a smooth process for your customers and seek more convenient ways for customers to patronize you.
Ultimately, you want to ensure there’s nothing your competitors are doing that’s lacking on your menu too.
Summary
Delivering stellar customer experience should be the thrust of your mission as a business. This will help you remain ahead of your competition while building brand trust and loyalty.
By setting up a customer experience vision, bringing on board key work teams, creating data-driven services and solutions, enshrining good work culture and keeping in focus the needs of your customers as your carve out your various product offerings, you set your business—brand—on the road to building valuable and longer lasting relationship with customers.
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