There is no doubt that a customer service strategy is the key to business success in today’s marketplace.
But knowing where to start when creating a winning strategy can be tricky.
Fear not – your friendly business blogger is here!
In this post you will reveal
- what is a customer experience strategy
- why do you have to have one
- 9 simple steps that will lead you to success
Feel free to save this article and use it as a template for your next customer engagement strategy.
What is a customer experience strategy?
A customer experience strategy is a plan for how to improve customer experience across all touchpoints. This includes initial purchase awareness and more.
A well-thought-out strategy includes a specific goal and the actions needed to achieve it. He will also look at how to measure and optimize your efforts!
Customer Experience (CX) is the customer’s point of view when interacting with your business. You can learn more about what customer experience is here!
Why Create a Customer Experience Strategy
Initiatives backed by a strategy are much more powerful than just goal setting. Support your efforts to improve customer experience with the right strategy. Your efforts will have logic and planning to back them up. This allows you to make informed, proactive decisions instead of reactive choices. You’re also less likely to risk your budget with tactics that don’t work with constant monitoring.
Random success can only get you so far. A well-designed customer service strategy can provide you with planned and targeted growth.
How to create a customer experience strategy
Creating a customer engagement strategy may seem like a daunting task, but it doesn’t have to be. Follow these nine simple template steps and you’ll have a winning strategy.
1. Define your goals
Your first step should be to decide what you are working on. Set goals and objectives for yourself from the very beginning. With them, you will be able to measure your progress, successes and return on investment (ROI).
Each of your goals should be:
- Specific
- Measurable
- Attainable
- Relevant
- Time limited
The SMART goal system gives you clear, achievable goals.
An example of a SMART goal for customer experience would be: Increase our NPS by one point this quarter.
Or, more accurately, reduce the time it takes a customer to resolve a problem by an average of 20% this quarter.
In this case, the second, specific goal works towards the achievement of the first high-level goal. You may (and most likely will) have multiple goals to achieve your overall strategy. Start with one high level goal and work your way down.
2. Audit Your Existing Customer Experience
If you are not a brand new business, then your brand has already made an impression on your customers. You will want to know what you offer to customers from their point of view.
Audit all existing customer touchpoints. You can map them out, evaluate them, and note any potential pain points, room for opportunity, and what you’re doing well.
Structure it like a traditional SWOT analysis. This is a compilation of your company’s strengths and weaknesses, opportunities and threats. But focus on your customer service offerings.
3. Know your competitors
To stand out, you first need to know who you’re up against. What are others in your industry doing in terms of CX strategy? And who to look at?
You may already have an idea of who your direct competitors are, but Google will endlessly tell you who the best SERP dogs are. To uncover this, first identify your competitive keywords. One popular method is to use the Google Adwords Keyword Planner to analyze your website.
You can then use the five or ten most relevant keywords to see who ranks for them on Google. Just enter your keywords into the search bar and see who chooses first.
Once you know who your competitors are, you may want to keep an eye on them. Use Hootsuite Streams to follow them on all social networks.
4. Do your research (aka competitive analysis)
Spend some time exploring the customer experience landscape. You will want to answer where your brand and your competitors are in the market.
Check out the positive and negative customer reviews. Make sure you rate their FAQ page and whether they have used quality chatbots. If you can, involve your competitors in a dummy customer service request and see how they react.
Conducting a SWOT analysis of your customer service offerings and those of your competitors is a clear way to see gaps in the market.
This detailed guide to social media competitive analysis can inspire you on how to conduct customer experience research.
By understanding the customer interaction landscape, you can ensure that your brand is different in a way that matters to customers. You can also avoid customer service pitfalls that can force customers to move on to another business.
5. Create Audience Images and Customer Journeys
Customer personas and journeys help you understand who you are serving and what they experience when they interact with your brand.
Customer Journeys will show you every point of interaction with you. You can anticipate any pain points and try to make each step a little more enjoyable. And when you know who your customers are, you can personalize those moments of joy.
For example, your persona describes busy, time-hungry parents who don’t like spending too much time eating lunch on weekdays.
Your customer journey shows that these people often use their mobile phones to order groceries at the beginning of the week.
To make their customer experience more enjoyable, a pop-up could be created with a simple dinner recipe for kids, including a few items they bought before checkout.
Moments of joy can be even simpler, like a confirmation email from CD Baby. Allegedly, CD Baby founder Derek Sievers wrote it in twenty minutes in an attempt to make people smile. The letter has been shared thousands of times, and on this topic, Sievers said: “… please know that it is often the tiny details that really excite people so much that they tell all their friends about you.”
Source: CD Baby confirmation email
6. Plan your implementation, tactics or execution
After you have completed the above steps, you should have an idea about:
- Where do you want to go (your goals)
- Opportunities available to you and gaps you can fill
Now it’s time to think about how you’re going to achieve your goals with the resources available. This step in planning your strategy should be based on your previous answers, so everyone’s plans will be different.
Take your time and outline the steps needed to implement each of your actions. For example, you may have noticed that all your competitors’ customers complain about how long they have to wait to get access to a customer service rep.
An easy win would be to implement a chatbot on your website that can capture customer information and then an agent contacts them directly without annoying waiting. Your tactics here will be as follows:
- Find a chatbot that works for you (for example, Heyday integrates directly with your team)
- Embed it on your website
- Run some tests to make sure it works
- And run!
Source: Rise
Please note that chatbots are not only useful on your website. If you use Facebook, Instagram, or Shopify, you should consider incorporating one of these into your overall digital strategy. Customer service on social media is extremely important.
7. Send out surveys
If you don’t know (and often don’t), then ask! We don’t mean to be rude, but you can’t know what your customers really think unless you ask them. Send out surveys to gather opinions about your brand, customer experience, products or services.
You can create your surveys specifically to ask questions about your customers’ experiences with your brand. Have you noticed a problem with regular customers? Submit one after people have bought a product or service and ask for feedback.
8. Measure
You will need to measure your efforts to see if your strategy is effective. Consider common customer experience metrics such as:
- net promoter rating,
- Evaluation of the client’s efforts,
- Customer satisfaction assessment and,
- Average response time.
You can see more details on these totals and how to calculate them here.
9. Optimize
The last part of any great strategy is to make it better.
Keep asking people what they want from you, how you can improve what works and what doesn’t. Keep up to date with what your competitors are up to on social media.
The actions you can take to make their lives easier are likely to benefit your customers as well, such as a chatbot designed for your business.
Retail bots improve your customers’ shopping experience, allowing your service team to focus on higher value interactions.