The importance of customer experience can be realized with the fact that brands are willing to spend nearly $641 billion on customer experience-enabling technology in 2022.

Companies are now selling a brilliant customer experience to beat out the competition and develop their revenue growth instead of relying on unique selling points or brand strength as their competitive advantage.

And there is a good reason for it. Bad customer experience is causing loss of 9.5% revenue to companies.

On the other hand, consumers are 3.5 times more likely to purchase more from companies offering high-quality customer experience (CX).

Indeed, a good CX is the foundation of a successful business but how to achieve it for your business? 

In this article, you will learn about the top seven strategies to create a great customer experience.

Let’s start!

1- Define Goals and Objectives

Before designing your customer experience strategy, first, define your core business objectives that show the actual purpose of your CX strategy.

Ask yourself, do want to:

● Attract new customers?

● Retain existing customers?

● Embark into a new market or industry?

● Enhance your brand visibility in the market?

Besides, also set other targets, such as the timeline required to implement the strategy, your budget, and other required resources.

Answering the above set of questions will help you figure out the right strategy that works best for your business.

2- Map Out Your Target Customer Personas

Developing detailed customer personas will help you know the types of journeys that B2B and B2C customers wish to take while shopping. 

Personas will guide companies to build a CX strategy that works for every customer. As a result, they will be able to match up customers to their preferred journeys. 

To create a precise customer journey map, start with gathering insights into your target audience and existing customers. 

For example:

●  Collect their demographic details, like age, gender, location, etc. 

●  Find out their professional background 

●  Find out the income group they belong to

●  Explore the audience’s interests, etc.

Besides, closely observe your existing customer base. Analyze the entire details of your existing customers including their purchase records that you have to understand their requirements.

3- Organize and Consolidate Support Requests

Opening up more channels for support, such as emails, live chats, social channels, and phones are vital for a good CX service. However, managing different channels is a big challenge. Failing to respond to the customers’ issues drives their dissatisfaction, causing damage to the brand’s image. 

Hence, the use of a help desk ticketing system is highly suggested. It is a software designed to organize, prioritize, and consolidate support requests from different sources. 

Using the help desk ticketing system, organizations can quickly assign inquiries to the most relevant agent, provide context to customer interactions, and track customer inquiries. 

It also has a shared inbox, through which all support staff members can coordinate among themselves and resolve the customer issues quickly and smoothly.

4- Listen To Your Customers

A successful organization always has a process in place to listen to their customer, also known as the ‘voice of customer’ (VOC).

Resolving customer issues only when they directly approach you is not sufficient to improve CX. You need to understand their actual experience when they are doing business with your company. In other words, you should conceive your consumer’s problems as information to create a CX strategy.

A great way to understand customers’ experience with the brand is to use a VOC platform. The platform gathers data from the customer service department, customers’ social media profiles, dedicated groups, customer surveys, and other outward-facing sources.

The data collected from different sources will give clarity about what drives customer satisfaction or dissatisfaction. It will also suggest to companies the ways to solve the customer problems, instead of simply responding to the query or the issue.

5- Build Emotional connection

Customers are 3 times more likely to purchase and recommend your product or service if they have an emotional connection with your brand. 

Forging emotion in the relation to customers fosters retention and loyalty. Therefore, brands thrive the most that develop emotional connections with their customers.

The best way to do this is to personalize your communication while connecting with your customers. Here communication entails every possible means, such as email, chat, or phone.

Here are some of the most effective ways to personalize communication:

● Introduce yourself to your customer by your name.                 

● Address customers by their name.

● Talk with a personal and human touch.

● Respond in the form of a new question, advice, or confirmation.

● Send personalized birthday emails.

● Show a friendly attitude.

6- Train Your Customer Care team

By now you know your customers’ perceptions about the quality of your service. Plus, you have already defined the customer experience principles you need to execute. 

The next step is to use a quality framework to improve the customer care service. A quality framework includes identifying the training requirements of each individual member of your customer support team.

It also involves the assessment of the quality of phone and email communication based on basic and predefined customer experience principles.

The advanced level of quality framework incorporates scheduling and tracking your team’s improvement through eLearning, coaching, and group training.

7- Calculate the ROI of CX

Quantifying the value of your CX is essential to know if the efforts and the investment put in your team, process, and technology are giving results and paying off.

However, measuring CX is one of the biggest challenges organizations face mostly because of conflicting information and difficulty in providing a clear CX forecast, articulated in numbers.

Yet companies look for the most feasible solution to measure the ROI from delivering a great customer experience. The most accepted solution is the formula for calculating the ROI of CX that goes like this:

Customer experience ROI = Return / Investment

In some cases, the formula is broken down into smaller elements for more clarity, such as:

Customer experience ROI % = (Benefits – Investments) / Investments x 100

Summary

Improving customer experience involves everything from the level of service to how well products fit into consumers’ lives.

Happy customers are more likely to recommend to others and help grow your business.

Hence, if you aim to achieve success as a brand, it is time to focus more on learning from your failures, create strategy-based CX principles, and leverage technology-driven solutions to build deeper connections and relationships with your customers.