SMEs are upcoming enterprises that have a long journey ahead of them. With many competitors in the market and limited resources at their disposal, SMEs are facing nothing short of a tough battle in the business world.
If you need a hard and fast rule to thrive in the competition, it is to focus on your customers. Providing an excellent customer experience can help you attract customers, retain existing customers, and reach out to more potential customers. But, if you already have a CX strategy and aren’t reaping the expected rewards, it’s time to redesign it.
In this guide, we are going to help you design a foolproof CX strategy that will definitely win customers.
7 Steps for a Successful Customer Experience Strategy
1. Measure your current customer experience strategy and identify its strengths and weaknesses
Before you begin to fine-tune your customer experience strategy, it’s important to assess the quality of your present customer experience. This would help you identify where you stand in the eyes of the customers, and what you can do to delight them better.
Your customers are the best source that can help you identify the effectiveness of your customer experience strategy and the best way to do it is by asking for their feedback. In the beginning, you can design a simple survey with generic questions that customers can answer within a short time, after a purchase or inquiry about a product. (Check our top 10 customer satisfaction survey questions here!)
2. Reach out to customers who are directly affected by the shortcomings you have identified
The shortcomings in your CX strategy can cost you valuable customers, and therefore it’s vital that you resolve them as soon as possible. So, the next step is to reach out to customers who weren’t entirely satisfied with your customer experience, identify the specific issue(s) they faced in their buying journey, and devise ways to resolve them. As an acknowledgement of their invaluable feedback, you could grant them an incentive in the form of discounts or offers.
3. Take advantage of your current points of excellence
Then, you can focus on the strengths of your current customer experience strategy and look at ways to optimize it. Again, reviewing customer feedback carefully is the key here. Pay attention to factors that have delighted your customers in their buying journey and see if you can emphasize them across the organization.
4. Build a customer journey map with the data you have collected
Mapping the customer journey is an important aspect of any customer experience strategy. It is only by visualizing the customers’ story with your business that you can truly understand what they expect, like, and dislike accurately.
To map the customer journey effectively, businesses need to design surveys tailored to each phase of the customer journey and send them out to a sample population of customers. The responses will expose how your business is performing in each phase.
5. Identify the least successful stages in your customer journey
Based on the responses you have received from surveys corresponding to each phase, it’s possible to identify areas that are successful and areas that aren’t. You can also review the KPIs tied to each phase when analyzing responses derived from the surveys. Then, you can plan on improving them. As an example, if you find there are issues in the awareness phase, you can design ways to correct or improve them.
6. Make the necessary changes to your business
Now that you have a comprehensive understanding of your CX journey, it’s much easier to align your business model to be more favorable towards customers. One of the major reasons why businesses fail to succeed in their CX strategies is the lack of focus on phases prior to and after the “purchase stage.” For example, if you pay enough attention to engaging with your customers even after they have made a purchase, you are more likely to benefit from repetitive purchases and word-of-mouth referrals.
Although, if for some reason C-suite in your organization hasn’t been convinced yet that measuring CX is important, you can check how to do it here.
7. Optimize the ROI of your customer experience strategy
You would be investing a considerable amount of resources, effort, and money to improve the customer experience. So, you have to look at ways to gain the maximum level of benefits from it. One of the best ways to enhance your rewards is by utilizing valuable customer feedback data. Through real-time feedback, you can improve CX in many ways, such as personalization, prompt service, and loyalty rewards.
FREE Template: Customer Experience Checklist
