Create a Customer Experience Strategy [FREE TEMPLATE]

There is no doubt that customer experience strategy is the key to business success in today’s market.

But knowing where to start when creating a winning strategy can be daunting.

Never fear – your friendly neighbor business blogger is here!

In this post you will discover:

• What is a customer experience strategy?
• why should you buy one
• 9 easy steps that will lead you to success

Feel free to save this article and use it as a template for your next customer experience 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 awareness of purchasing and beyond.

A well thought out strategy includes a defined goal and actionable steps to get there. It will also cover how to measure and optimize your efforts!

Customer experience (CX) is the customer’s perspective when interacting with your business. Find out more about what customer experience is here!

Why should you create a customer experience strategy?

Startups with a strategy behind them are much more powerful than just setting goals. Support your customer experience efforts with an appropriate strategy. Your efforts will have logic and planning to support them. This allows you to make informed, proactive decisions rather than reactive choices. With consistent tracking, you’re also less likely to risk your budget for tactics that don’t work.

Random success can only get you so far. A well-crafted customer experience strategy can provide you with planned, targeted growth.

How to create a customer experience strategy?

Creating a customer experience strategy may seem daunting, but it doesn’t have to be. Follow these nine easy, templated steps and you’ll have a winning strategy.

1. Define your goals

Your first step should be: decide what you are working for. Set your goals and objectives from the beginning. When these are implemented, you will be able to measure your progress, achievements and return on investment (ROI).

Each of your goals should be:

• Special
• Measurable
• accessible
• Relating to
• temporal

The SMART goal framework gives you clear, achievable goals.

An example of a SMART goal for customer experience would be: To increase our NPS score by full points this quarter.

Or more specifically: Reduce the time it takes for a customer to resolve an issue by an average of 20% this quarter.

In this case, the second, specific target works towards the first higher level target. You can (and probably will) have more than one goal to work towards in an overall strategy. Start with one high-level goal and work your way down.

2. Audit your current customer experience

Unless you’re a completely new business, your brand has already made an impression on your customers. You will want to explore what you offer customers from their point of view.

Audit all your existing customer experience touchpoints. You can map them, rank them, and note down potential trouble spots, opportunity opportunities, and what you’re doing well.

Configure it like a traditional SWOT analysis. This is a compilation of your company’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. However, focus on your customer experience 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 should you look for?

You may already have an idea of ​​who your direct competitors are, but Google will indefinitely tell you who the best SERP dogs are. To reveal this, first identify your competitive keywords. One popular method is to use the Google Adwords Keyword Planner to analyze your website.

Then you can use your top five or ten keywords to see who rank for them on Google. Type the keywords into the search bar and see who hits it first.

Once you know who your competitors are, you may want to keep an eye on them. Use Moyens I/O Streams to watch them on every social network.

Try Moyens I/O free for 30 days

4. Do your research (AKA a competitive analysis)

Take some time to research the customer experience landscape. You will want to answer where your brand and competitors stand in the market.

get see positive and negative comments by customers. Be sure to rate their FAQ pages and whether they use quality chatbots. If you can, involve your competitors in a fake customer service request and see how they react.

realization SWOT analysis of your and your competitors’ customer service bidding is a clear way to see gaps in the market.

This in-depth guide to social media competitive analysis may give you some inspiration on how to tackle your customer experience research.

By understanding the customer experience landscape, you can differentiate your brand in a way that matters to customers. You can also avoid customer service pitfalls that could cause customers to take their business elsewhere.

5. Build audience personalities and customer journeys

People and customer journeys help you understand who you serve and what they experience when they interact with your brand.

Customer journeys will show you every touchpoint your customer has 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, personalize those moments of happiness.

For example, your personality describes busy, time-hungry parents who don’t like to spend a lot of time on weekday dinners.

Your customer journey shows that these people frequently use their cell phones to order food earlier in the week.

The solution to making the customer experience more enjoyable may be to have a popup with a hassle-free, kid-friendly dinner recipe that includes a few items they purchase before paying.

Moments of joy like CD Baby’s confirmation email can be even simpler. Allegedly, CD Baby founder Derek Sivers wrote down twenty minutes to make people smile. The email has been shared thousands of times, and Sivers’ said, “…please know that it’s often the little details that get people excited enough to tell all their friends about you.”

Source: CD DollConfirmation Email

6. Plan your practice, tactics or practice

After completing the above steps, you should have an idea of:

1. Where you want to go (your destinations)
2. Opportunities available to you and gaps you can occupy

Now is the time to think about how you will achieve your goals with the opportunities available. This step of planning your strategy should build on your previous answers, so everyone’s plan will be different.

take your time and Map out the steps required to implement each of your action steps. For example, you may have noticed that your competitors’ customers are complaining about how long it takes to reach a customer service representative.

An easy win would be to implement a chatbot on your site that can grab a customer’s information and then have an agent contact them directly without the annoying wait. Your tactics here would be:

1. Find a chatbot that works for you (e.g. Heyday integrates directly with your human team)
2. Apply to your site
3. Do some tests to make sure it works
4. And throw it!

Source: heyday

Note, chatbots Only useful on your website. If you’re on Facebook, Instagram or Shopify, you should consider incorporating it into your overall digital strategy. Social media customer service is extremely important.

7. Send surveys

If you don’t know (and often don’t), then ask! We don’t want to be rude, but you won’t know what your customers are really thinking if you don’t ask them. Submit surveys to crowdsource awareness about your brand, customer experience, and products or services.

You can create your surveys specifically to ask questions about your customers’ experience with your brand. Have you noticed an issue with repeat customers? After people buy a product or service, submit one 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 Score
• Customer Effort Score
• Customer Satisfaction Score and
• Average Response Time

More details on what these common metrics are and how to calculate them can be found here.

9. Optimize

The last part of any great strategy is to make it better.

Keep asking people what they want to see from you, how you can improve, and what works and what doesn’t. Keep up to date with what your competitors are up to on social media – shout out to Moyens I/O Streams again to automate this task! And talk to your customer service team.

Actions you can take to make their lives easier will also benefit your customers, like a chatbot designed for your business.

Retail bots allow your service team to focus on higher-value interactions while enhancing your customer’s shopping experience. Increase your online and in-store sales with Heyday by Moyens I/O’s conversational AI retail chatbot.