7 characteristics of a customer experience strategy
A customer experience strategy (CX strategy) helps organizations optimize customer engagement to create happy customers, increase customer loyalty, and recruit new customers.
To deliver a better customer experience, consider the entire customer journey and every customer touchpoint. We discover new customers through awareness, consideration, and purchase, aim to retain customers, and drive word of mouth through the post-purchase stage.
Customer-centric organizations prioritize great customer experiences as an important part of their brand identity. Meeting customer expectations requires discipline and compassion across the entire customer journey map.
Creating happy customers should be a key business goal for every organization. This is because these types of customers are more likely to be repeat buyers and will try to recommend your products to their friends and family through word of mouth. Doing so will increase your profitability and likelihood of customer retention.
7 characteristics of a successful customer experience strategy
Customer experience requires the right strategy and dedicated action to succeed. Here are seven components every organization should include in its CX strategy.
1. Invest in the right technology
Automation and chatbots are two technologies that are transforming the customer experience, especially with the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) adding greater sophistication to these tools. As more customers seek to solve problems online or through self-service, organizations that fail to use advanced technologies to better meet customer needs will fail in the customer experience. In a recent IBV CEO Guide to Generative AI for Customer Service study, CEOs identified customer service as a top priority for incorporating generative AI investments.
2. Problem solving
Meeting customer needs is a key component of customer experience and the best way to prevent customer churn. Not all customers who are dissatisfied with a product will report a bad experience, but those who do expect the organization to address and resolve their issues quickly. When your customer support team pays attention to the issues raised by your loyal customers, you are more likely to retain those customers and turn them into strong advocates for your brand.
3. Create a persona
Every customer is different. A way organizations can better personalize their outreach is by grouping like-minded customers into personal groups so they can better target the right message and targeting. Examples of personas include people who are price conscious, people who are likely to switch brands when their organization’s prices rise, and early adopters who buy the latest technology as soon as it becomes available.
One way to create personas is to track customer interactions, including purchases, time of purchase, and type of purchase, in a customer relationship management (CRM) database. CRM helps organizations better understand their customers and find ways to provide more value. A comprehensive, modern CRM can identify whether specific customers are ready to buy and whether high-value customers are at risk of switching brands.
4. Measure everything
Setting and tracking key performance indicators (KPIs) is a critical component of customer experience management. Organizations have several powerful ways to solicit and analyze customer feedback. Collecting a variety of customer experience metrics is important to understand user experience and track progress against key organizational goals. The most important metrics to track are:
- Net Promoter Score (NPS): This customer data point identifies how likely your customers are to recommend your organization’s products to their friends and family. It’s a good indication of how satisfied your customers are, considering they make the effort to talk about your product with people in their orbit.
- Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT): This score focuses specifically on how satisfied customers are with the organization’s products. This is often expressed as a percentage from 0 to 100, which allows organizations to track improvement (or decline) over time.
- Customer Effort Score: A metric that measures the amount of work required for a customer to interact with your business. This is effectively a customer support metric that identifies how well your service helps customers solve their problems and get the most out of your product. Examples of issues that can affect your customer effort score include lack of response time to customer questions, difficulty achieving technical support, and extended out-of-stocks that require customers to regularly check back to see if they have the product they want.
5. Prioritize employee experience
Delivering a good customer experience requires input and commitment from multiple stakeholders. Prioritizing employee experience – ensuring employees are happy, well-trained and fairly compensated – is a critical component of any customer experience strategy. Team members who are well-treated and receive extensive training are more likely to provide excellent customer care and do their best to meet your needs.
6. Embrace omnichannel customer relationships
Organizations have a variety of channels to reach customers and build stronger relationships, and it’s important to embrace this omnichannel customer service approach. For example, consumers are spending more and more time on digital experiences such as social media and mobile apps. This gives the organization an opportunity to learn more about what they want and to respond directly to any questions or complaints. Some organizations even create knowledge bases where customers can search for answers and solve problems without having to interact directly with employees.
7. Invest in customer success
Leading organizations know that the post-purchase period can be just as important to the overall customer experience as the awareness and consideration stages. Customers who regret their purchase or have unresolved issues are less likely to become repeat customers. They are also less likely to recommend or promote those products and companies to their networks. That’s why organizations are increasingly investing in customer success teams that work directly with customers post-purchase to help them maximize the value they get from their purchases.
Customer experience represents the path to repeat engagement.
Providing a positive customer experience can be a competitive advantage. This is especially true when customers are more likely to switch brands after the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic.
For more than a decade, IBM has been helping companies apply trusted AI in this space, with generative AI dramatically transforming customer and field service through its ability to understand complex questions and generate more human-like conversational responses. It has additional potential to do so.
At IBM, we help you put your customer experience strategy at the center of your business and turn it into a competitive advantage. With deep expertise in customer journey mapping and design, platform implementation, and data and AI consulting, we help you leverage best-in-class technologies to drive innovation across the customer lifecycle. Our end-to-end consulting solutions span marketing, commerce, sales and service.
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