But then there’s the dreaded plateau. This can happen after you’ve been steadily gaining momentum, then all of a sudden, it seems as if your initiatives are no longer moving the needle. That’s when you know it’s time to update your customer experience program.

Why Refresh Your Customer Experience Program?

1. Design with the End in Mind
2. Understand Successes and Shortcomings
3. Look at Short-term and Long-term Actions

Like most things in the world, your customers—and your market—are not stagnant. They’re constantly changing and adapting to world events, new trends, upgraded technology, and more. And that’s a good thing! It simply means that in order to meet the needs of your customers and your business, you need to consistently evolve your program according to new circumstances and objectives.

We understand it may seem intimidating, but over our 19 years of experience helping the world’s most popular brands ace their customer experience, we’ve learned a few things about how to systematically and strategically review your CX program, and pinpoint the actions you need to take for success. In this blog, we’ve gathered a few of the top tips from our experts to help guide your refresh efforts. You’ll find them all below!

Tip #1: Design with the End in Mind

We’ve said it before, and you’re about to hear us say it again: you need to design your CX program with your current goals for both your experience and your business in mind. Your experience-level goals may look like increasing your net promoter score (NPS) by a certain number in the next year, or launching QR codes surveys. On the other hand, your business goals may be to increase customer tenure or lower cost to serve. Your CX program can help you meet all of those goals, but first, you need to have those goals set in stone!

Tip #2: Understand Successes and Shortcomings 

Every CX program has something it does well—and something that isn’t quite hitting the mark. It’s important that you understand current strengths and weaknesses when you start to update your customer experience program. The “current” part of this mandate is emphasized because you must recognize that just because an initiative was working before doesn’t mean it’s the best solution now.

For instance, one of our clients, Volvo, had a post-transaction survey that had served it well in the past. However, that survey was, in a few words, too long to maintain customers’ attention. That’s why we challenged the brand to take a critical look at each question and ask itself, “is this information already available to us?” The result was a significantly shorter microsurvey that asked intentional and open-ended questions which garnered more responses, more context, and more actionable intelligence. (You can read more about Volvo’s story here.)

Tip #3: Look at Short-term and Long-term Actions

Now that you’ve identified areas of opportunity, it’s time to come up with an action plan to implement successful initiatives more widely and remove points of friction across the customer experience. In order to prioritize (and avoid overwhelm), it’s important to break your action plan up into phases.

Check out this checklist to see how you can build a max-impact CX strategy for a small CX team!

First, identify short-term goals or initiatives you can get started on immediately and implement in the next few weeks. These short-term goals can be something like updating a survey, pulling together a CX cross-functional team, etc. Next, you need to identify the more complex goals, such as proving the ROI of customer experience at your company, implementing employee training based on intelligence, and the like. These more long-term goals will require multiple steps, stakeholders, and approvals. But just because they’re long term doesn’t mean you should put them on the back burner. It merely means that you need to get the ball rolling and prepare for the long haul. 

Still Unsure of How to Get Started?

Our Strategic Insights Team leads Pearl-Plaza clients through a service we like to call XI Blueprint, in which our experts help brands assess their existing CX blueprint and determine an action plan for both short- and long-term objectives that meet the current needs of their business.

Want to learn more about it? In this video, our Senior Director of Strategic Insights Funda Whitaker paints a clear picture of how XI Blueprint can get CX programs “unstuck.” Watch it here!

You can also hear our client, Harvard Pilgrim, discuss its XI Blueprint success story here!