You want your customers to have the best possible customer experience with your brand. That’s great!
But as you probably guessed, it takes good, strong customer experience strategies to improve your delivery and how your audience perceives it.
What is a Customer Experience Strategy?
A customer experience strategy is essentially a method of improving your company’s customer experiences. It’s an outline that highlights the overall strategies you’ll use in capturing – and retaining – customers to achieve the goals you’ve set for your brand.
While it sounds easy, there are specific strategies and tactics you must employ to carry those strategies to fruition. For instance, if you aim to connect with your audience on a deeper level, your strategies might include upping your social media game or playing with new and better ways to communicate via your customer relationship management (CRM) program.
Why Are Customer Experience Strategies So Important?
Data is a pesky thing. You have to obtain it, analyze it, and use the results to make informed decisions.
But your customer experience processes can produce a lot of data. Things can get messy – quickly. And if you’re attempting to focus on several data factories at once – you’re setting yourself up for failure. Customer experience tools can help you navigate the hordes of data you’re about to produce.
Customer experience strategies are important because they provide a semblance of direction in your activities, help you stay on track, and provide baseline data from which you can measure your successes.
You don’t have to settle on a set number of strategies or be rigid in the strategies you choose. Chances are, you already have customer experience processes in place – the key is to learn how to broaden their reach.
3 Best Practices for Customer Experience Strategy
Capturing customers isn’t always easy. Audiences are inundated with up to 5,000 ads per day – that’s a lot for even the most “gnarly” of internet surfers. With all that noise, it’s only human nature to tune some of it out – or all, when it comes to those who install ad-blocking software or apps on their devices.
So, how do you get your message through all the chatter and capture your audience’s attention? And how do you keep it?
Make being your customer the easiest thing in the world
There are a lot of customer experience trends that can help you identify areas of your business that could use a facelift. Call an impromptu marketing meeting. Discuss the obstacles your customers face when interacting with your brand. If you have no data for this, consider a customer satisfaction survey that invites your customers to provide feedback on everything from experience to pricing. Social media sentiment analyses are also popular tools.
Next, come up with solutions that are in line with your company’s business goals. Will the solutions you come up with affect business processes? Will they affect team efficiency?
In your research, you might discover your customers struggle with your live chat or chatbot interface, for example. Offering phone support with a live agent instead could help resolve issues in a timelier manner. But would expanding your support offerings to include inbound calls create a financial burden?
Streamline your brand’s sales processes
If your company has an inside sales department, you likely face hundreds of questions before a prospect leaps to being a customer. So, considering your sales department’s processes as well as those of customer success is a must when designing your customer experience strategies.
Just like in the best practice outlined above, go directly to the source – ask your sales department heads and senior associates for advice. What does your team see as barring them from making a sale more quickly?
Be as responsive as possible – all the time
When a customer has a question about your products or services, many times they’ll just go through your FAQ page, knowledge base, or hop online with your chatbot – but if they have a problem, they want to feel as though their concerns are seen as valid. In addition, they expect a certain type of response – a fast and honest one. Other times, your customers will turn to social media to rant about – or sing the praises of – your brand. If your customers believe your brand actually cares about its customers, they’re more likely to remain your customers.
If your company is bigger than the average small business, you also need to be ready with answers to broad, public relations questions, too. Using an app that alerts you whenever your company or brand gets mentioned online is a good idea. This way, you can respond as quickly as possible to any question, compliment, or complaint.
So, What Now?
Designing the ultimate customer experience can be messy business. But if you at least have an idea of the kind of experience you want to build for your customers and how you want to build it, all the processes just kind of fall into place.
To keep it as simple as possible, just focus on a few areas at first. Update your website or implement a new line of customer service. After you cover the basics, take a look at formulating more complex customer experience strategies.
But most importantly, remember – there’s no such thing as the perfect customer experience! Building the right customer experience is a continuous process that evolves with the demands of your customers and your business.
