How to Build a Customer Experience Management Strategy 

Building a customer experience management strategy is one of the most impactful things you can do for your business. Excellent customer experience (CX) can be the gateway to strong customer lifetime value, loyalty, and trust. Regardless of what you’re selling, this is your business’s do-or-break strategy. 

But what’s the trick to managing customer experience? 

This article is your guide on how to build a customer experience strategy. Read on and get answers to the following questions: 

• What is a CX strategy? 

• Why is customer experience management important? 

• What makes a strong CX management strategy? 

• How do I build and implement a CX management strategy? 

• What are the dos and don’ts of CX management? 

Let’s dive in. 

What Is a Customer Experience Strategy? 

We’ll start by getting the basics out of the way: what is a customer experience strategy? 

Definition and Components of CX Strategy 

Customer experience is the overall perception customers have of your brand. It’s what customers feel and think about your business. Those thoughts and feelings come from how your business engages and interacts with customers, from marketing to sales and everything in between. 

Good customer experience simply means the customer gets exactly (or more than) what they wanted and expected from the business. The customer leaves feeling satisfied, happy, and valued. 

A CX management strategy is your company’s effort to deliver the best possible customer experience. It’s a multifaceted strategy with six key components: 

• A CX vision/goals 

• Understanding your customers 

• Consistency across all touchpoints 

• Cross-functional collaboration 

• Tracking CX 

• CX tech 

CX Strategy vs Customer Service vs CX Framework 

The term CX strategy gets thrown around a lot. It’s easy to confuse it with other closely related terms. So, let’s clear the air on how CX strategy differs from customer service and CX framework. 

A CX strategy is essentially a plan that outlines how an organization aims to deliver positive experiences across the entire customer journey. It’s a holistic and proactive approach to meeting and exceeding customer expectations. 

Customer service refers to any assistance a company provides to its customers before, during, or after purchase. This includes answering questions, offering suggestions, consultation, resolving issues, and following up. It’s actually part of the customer experience. 

Customer experience framework is a structured model with guidelines for implementing a CX strategy. It provides a systematic approach to improving and measuring CX. A framework tells you what it will take to see a CX strategy through. 

RELATED ARTICLE: Change How Your Customers Experience Customer Service 

Why CX Strategy Matters 

Customers care a great deal about experience. In some cases, customers value experience even over pricing or the actual product/service. In today’s fast-paced business world, experience is everything. 

Here’s why CX matters to your business. 

Differentiation in Competitive Markets 

CX is a key competitive differentiator. It’s no secret that bad experiences turn customers away. One study found that 54% of shoppers would stop using a brand they loved after just one bad experience. And 70% of consumers will walk away after two bad experiences. 

It’s easy to see how bad experiences can push customers to your competitors. And it doesn’t matter whether you have the superior product or service. Customers will always go where they’re treated right. 

Take this scenario, for example. There’s a coffee shop right next to your home. Their $5 coffee is great, but the staff is rude, and it takes forever to get served. Would you go there? Or wouldn’t you rather walk a few blocks further to this other coffee shop for the same cup of coffee served quickly and with a warm smile? 

How Good CX Strategy Drives Retention, Loyalty, and Business Value 

Brand loyalty is tightly intertwined with customer experience. Customers will stick with brands that make them feel valued, appreciated, and cared for. In addition to loyalty, A good CX strategy drives brand advocacy. 

In a recent survey, 86% of consumers said they would purchase from a brand again after an “amazing” customer experience. Meanwhile, 81% said they would recommend that brand to friends and family. 

What’s more, you get better business value with an excellent CX strategy. For instance, brand loyalty improves a customer’s lifetime value.  

And, customers are willing to pay a premium for exceptional CX. According to research, 86% of consumers will pay more for great customer experience. No wonder companies with outstanding customer experience drive up to 5.7 times more revenue. 

RELATED ARTICLE: Beyond NPS: How Listen360 Helps You Improve Customer Experience & Reputation 

Key Elements and Frameworks of a Strong CX Strategy 

Let’s take a more in-depth look at the elements of a strong CX strategy. 

Core CX Values and Vision Alignment 

A CX management strategy starts with a clear CX vision and predefined goals. How would you like customers to perceive your brand? 

Every CX vision and goal should be achievable and measurable. They can also be dynamic, depending on your business model and customer base. 

Let’s say you run a home improvement company. You may want your customers to see the brand as capable, knowledgeable, reassuring, and competent. That’s a very different CX vision than, say, a company that organizes kids’ parties. 

The important thing is to develop a customer-centric CX vision that resonates with your crowd. That should serve as a benchmark for guiding your CX management strategy. 

Customer Journey Mapping and Identifying Touchpoints 

Understand your customers’ needs, preferences, and pain points. You can do that by mapping customer journeys, identifying touchpoints, analyzing customer feedback, and creating customer personas. Studying your customers this way helps to identify potential CX opportunities and improvements. 

A customer journey map is a visual representation of a customer’s interaction with your business. It uses customer personas to trace a clear path from first contact to post-purchase. 

Mapping the customer journey puts you in the customer’s shoes. You gain a deeper understanding of their behavior, actions, emotions, and thoughts when interacting with the various aspects of your brand. It also helps you identify critical customer touchpoints. 

Touchpoints are the various elements of your business that customers interact with. These may include chatbots, customer support agents, your website, social media channels, sales reps, etc. Customer touchpoints are where CX materializes. 

Metrics and Feedback Mechanisms (NPS, CSAT, Effort Score, etc.) 

A big part of CX management is knowing exactly where your brand stands. Track critical metrics such as customer satisfaction score (CSAT) and net promoter score (NPS) to gauge your CX efforts. 

Such measurements are crucial in gaining actionable insights into your customers’ experiences. You get to know what you’re doing right and what needs improving. 

CX tech comes in handy when tracking experience performance. Digital tools such as net promoter score software are invaluable for analyzing CX in real time. 

Organizational Alignment: Culture, Leadership, and Cross-Functional Teams 

Developing and implementing a CX strategy is a company-wide effort. So, prepare your business to realize the CX vision and goals. 

That means developing a customer-first culture and empowering your employees to improve customer experiences. Start by educating your teams on the importance of customer experience strategies. Then equip the various departments with the necessary leadership, skills, and tools to measure and improve CX. 

It’s best to adopt a distributed CX ownership model. In such a model, no single person, team, or department controls the CX strategy. Instead, create cross-functional teams to spearhead the CX efforts. Doing so encourages interdepartmental collaboration in CX planning. 

And speaking of CX tools, you might want to go digital. Nowadays, CX management relies heavily on digital tools. After all, most modern businesses have numerous virtual touchpoints. Success in CX management can very well come down to adopting and using powerful tools, such as customer experience management software. 

Steps to Build and Implement Your CX Strategy 

Below is a simple 4-step guide on how to develop a customer experience strategy. 

Step 1: Assessing Your Current State and Gaps 

First things first, know the current state of your CX. How good or bad is your brand’s customer experience? 

You can find this out by analyzing customer feedback, conducting surveys, or interviewing customers. Get as much data as you can about people’s perception of your business. Then quantify that data to get a big-picture view of CX performance. 

Doing this will help you identify gaps or areas of improvement in your CX. Assessing your current CX state shows you where to begin and the rough scale of what needs to be done. 

Step 2: Defining Customer Personas and Expectations 

What exactly do customers want from your business? And more importantly, are they getting it? 

We mentioned earlier that it’s important to understand your customers’ needs. That’s the first step in becoming a customer-centric brand. 

To do so, start by creating customer personas. A persona is an embodiment of your ideal customers. You can have more than one persona, depending on what you sell and who you sell to. 

The idea is to try to see the business from the customer’s perspective. 

Step 3: Designing Initiatives and Prioritizing Improvements 

Having understood your customers’ expectations and the gaps in your CX, you can start devising an action plan. 

Create a list of CX improvement areas. Prioritize the most urgent or impactful CX improvements. For example, if you have a huge backlog of support tickets, the first priority should be addressing the customer support situation. In short, start with the big CX efforts and work your way down to the smallest CX improvements. 

From there, design actionable initiatives against each item on the list. In the case of piling support tickets, for instance, the initiative could be installing a chatbot or outsourcing support. It’s a simple divide-and-conquer strategy. 

Step 4: Rolling Out and Scaling the Strategy 

Finally, put the plan into action. 

Roll out the changes, again, starting with the most important improvements. A gradual rollout is probably the most effective approach. Implement one change at a time and see how it goes before moving on to the next strategy. Besides, making too many CX changes too fast can overwhelm your organization and its customer base. 

RELATED ARTICLE: The Importance of Real-Time Feedback in a Customer Experience Platform 

Best Practices and Common Pitfalls to Avoid 

Quite a lot goes into building a client experience strategy. With so many moving parts, it’s easy to go wrong here and there. Keep these two things in mind when planning CX. 

Use Data and Feedback Continuously, Not Once Off 

CX management is not a once-and-done deal. It’s an ongoing process. That’s because brand perception is constantly evolving and must be continuously monitored and improved. 

One of the most important parts of a CX strategy is handling feedback. Use feedback data to drive positive changes in your business. Then show customers that you indeed act on their feedback. This is called closing the loop. 

Ensure Consistency Across Touchpoints and Departments 

Customers expect a seamless experience whether they’re engaging with your business in person, online, by phone, or on social media. You must ensure CX consistency across all customer touchpoints. 

And, crucially, CX is not just the job of the customer service team. It requires all hands on deck. All parts of the organization must work together towards a common CX vision. 

FAQs 

What is a CX strategy vs CX framework? 

A CX strategy outlines how an organization plans to deliver positive experiences across the entire customer journey. Meanwhile, a customer experience framework is a structured model with guidelines for systematically implementing a CX strategy. 

How long does it take to see results from a CX strategy? 

You may start to see initial results from your CX strategy, such as reduced churn and improved satisfaction, after just a few months. Long-term results, like increased revenue and higher customer lifetime value, may take longer. 

However, this varies greatly from business to business. 

What metrics should be prioritized first? 

These are the most important CX metrics: 

• Net promoter score 

• Customer satisfaction score 

• Customer effort score (CES) 

• Customer retention rate 

• Customer lifetime value (CLV) 

Who should own the CX strategy internally? 

In a traditional centralized approach, a single department or team owns and controls the CX strategy. But the best ownership model is cross-functional CX ownership. This is where multiple teams and departments work together to manage CX. 

Conclusion and Next Steps 

Ready to get started on your customer experience management strategy? 

Just to recap, here’s a quick summary of what it takes to build a CX strategy. 

CX Strategy Quick-Start Checklist 

• Check the current state of your CX. 

• Understand your customers; their needs, preferences, expectations, and pain points. 

• Map the customer journey. 

• Identify the key customer touchpoints. 

• Prioritize urgent and high-impact CX efforts. 

• Create a CX action plan and implement it. 

How to Maintain and Evolve Your CX Strategy Over Time 

• Collect, analyze, and act on customer feedback. 

• Cultivate a customer-first culture in your company. 

• Track your CX performance continuously. 

• Identify CX areas needing improvement. 

• Leverage modern technologies to improve CX. 

• Ensure CX consistency across all touchpoints.