Wondering how to create a customer experience strategy?
Customer demands and expectations are changing all the time, and businesses need to stay ahead of the game if they want to deliver an outstanding customer experience.
A solid customer experience strategy should help you bridge the gap between your customers’ needs and your company’s aims.
Here’s how to create a customer experience strategy in six easy steps.
Do your research
Before you start working on your customer experience strategy, research your customers and the way they currently experience the brand.
This should comprise both qualitative and quantitative research, including surveys, user studies, web analytics data and in-depth interviews with customers and stakeholders.
Collecting this data will give you an insight into where you currently stand. Your aim should be to identify where your company’s values align with those of your customers, and with corresponding opportunities.
Identify your company mission
A clearly defined view of your company’s mission will help you successfully align your operations and processes with your customer experience vision.
What are your strategic priorities? Are you trying to win new customers, or improve loyalty from current customers? Are you trying to enter a new market, or bring something new to the one you’re currently in?
Answering these questions will help you focus your customer experience strategy and identify areas that need attention.
Analyse your customer journey
Gathering and analysing customer data will give you a crucial insight into what your customers want, need and find challenging.
Use this customer data to define a few key ‘personas’ that represent your existing and target customers. You can then map the customer journey of each of these personas in terms of their interaction with and experience of your brand.
A visual representation of these journeys can help you identify previously hidden relationships and customer experience failures.
Look at the competition
Once you’ve got an overview of your customer base and your company mission, it’s time to investigate the competition.
Research your competitors as thoroughly as you can, and try to gain a comprehensive view of the current market you operate in.
Your research might include analyses of financial performance, customer base, consumer attitudes or technology trends – anything that will give you a better idea of the competitive landscape you’re working in.
Define your goals
Now it’s time to gather and analyse all the research you’ve done and the insights you’ve gained, and translate them into a series of strategic goals.
These goals will form the basis of your customer experience strategy, and should address the key challenges, threats and opportunities you’ve identified.
Your goals might cover themes like developing more meaningful customer relationships, identifying actionable customer analytics, improving operational effectiveness or developing a deeper understanding of your customer base.
Develop and implement your strategy
Now it’s time to pull everything together and create your customer experience strategy!
Your strategy should lay out the key steps and tactics you’ll use to reach your goals and deliver the results you want.
It should include a clear timeline that sets out a deadline for each goal, and should specify how you’ll evaluate your success.
When you’ve put your strategy into practice, continually monitor and tweak it as and when necessary.
How to create a customer experience strategy: a summary
We hope our guide has given you a better idea of how to create a customer experience strategy.
A successful strategy should help you achieve your business goals and gain an edge over your competitors. Good luck!