How to Create a CX Strategy for Sustained Success
The good news for CX practitioners is there are simple measures you can take to ensure your CX strategy is not only effective, but fosters relationships with buyers to increase customer satisfaction—and most importantly, retention.
For brands looking to gain a competitive edge in a customer-centric, digital-first era, quality customer experience (CX) separates the companies that excel from those that fall behind.
Despite valiant efforts from brands to make customer experience strategies a core part of their business, 70% of CX initiatives risk losing funding—and failing altogether—by not providing enough business value. And while roughly 80% of brands want to compete based on customer experience, only 7% of CX strategies result in competitive differentiation.
However, these numbers aren’t cause for panic. The good news is there are simple measures you can take to ensure your CX strategy is not only effective, but fosters relationships with buyers to increase customer satisfaction—and most importantly, retention.
3 Steps You Can Take to Improve the Lifespan of Your CX Strategy
Good CX strategies involve more than occasional customer surveys and scoring systems. They need to be actionable, iterative plans that evolve with customer habits and expectations.
Simon Fraser, VP of XI Strategy, discussed CX challenges facing brands in the webinar “Delights, Customers, Action”, where they uncover what you can do to overcome CX strategy-related challenges, and develop a plan for success:
Step 1: Take time to ask questions before you roll out a strategy.
It’s difficult to thoughtfully execute CX initiatives when you don’t take the time to ask yourself, “What do we want to accomplish?” Before implementing a full CX strategy, work with your team to compile answers to a few key questions. What is your desired outcome? What obstacles can you anticipate? Who needs to be involved? Once these questions have been asked you can get to work on answering each one, and ensure your strategy addresses any preemptive concerns.
Step 2: Don’t be afraid to test and reimagine your strategies.
Brands often get caught up in early CX success and become complacent, instead of focusing on how they can continue to improve. It’s important to remember that successful CX strategies should involve ongoing testing, validation and iteration. Factors like buyer expectations constantly shift—and you’ll want your strategy to adjust accordingly.
Step 3: Make customer sentiment a part of your CX strategy.
Great customer experiences involve fully listening to customer stories. And when you go beyond quantitative customer experience metrics, you unlock customer intelligence that allows you to understand and identify the actions to take based on what creates those meaningful, memorable experiences. Take this information and integrate it into your CX approach. That way, you can not only continuously improve, but you can also iterate your strategies based an actionable, first-hand data.
Customer experience shouldn’t trip up organizations. It should be an opportunity to understand your core buyers, drive ROI and gain an edge on competitors. And by taking a careful, comprehensive approach to developing your CX strategy, the chance of sustained success only improves.
