6 Best Practices to Build a Solid Customer Experience Strategy for Small Business

Customer experience strategy is a new management approach companies take to reach high customer satisfaction. It’s a new world. Businesses are always looking for new ways to satisfy customers every day.

Because customer perceptions are changing fast with digital information technology. They now care so little about your products or prices. They care about how they feel about your brand and how you’re treating them.

Customers want a good experience. Sometimes not only good, they expect a great experience. But as a small business, how can you offer a great experience with a limited budget?

Customer experience (CX) strategy helps you achieve great customer experience across your business. In this blog, we’ll go through the CX strategy definition, why it’s important, the difference between customer experience and customer service, and what best practices you should follow to build a solid customer experience strategy for your business.

What is customer experience (CX) strategy?

What a customer remembers about your brand and what negative- positive emotions influence them to buy or not are called customer experience.

How you can influence customers through positive interactions to buy from you and a great lasting experience can be achieved through well-planned strategies. These are customer experience management strategies.

CX strategy constantly measures, analyzes and improves the experience you provide your customers. In this strategy, you have to thoroughly look for customers’ pain points throughout the entire customer onboarding journey and meticulously plan how easily solve these.

A successful CX strategy needs every team’s participation and must be implemented across the whole operation to provide a great customer experience. New customers want immediate purchases, but if you cannot provide more value to them, it will be hard to retain them over the weeks. It would be best to make each interaction and process impactful so old customers stay happy with you. CX strategy management ensures this and prevents any potential customer churn.

Why customer experience (CX) management is important?

Customers now care more about their feelings than how great your product is. If you are not delivering a great experience for them, they will choose someone else.

Internet and social media gave them this unbelievable power, which was non-existent in the past. Customers had few options; there was no way to research, and retailers had no good customer support. Customers had to stick with bad customer service even if they did not want to.

Now customers have many options and can do research simply with a google search. Businesses now have to impress their consumers with great customer service. The situation is flipped remarkably!

A flawless customer experience can help a business with lots of things. Here are four main benefits of the CX management strategy:

• Increase customer retention – When you proactively solve your customer’s problems, customer experience will go through the roof! New customers will be delighted and become more interested in your company. Old customers will recognize the value you are offering and keep coming back to buy or renew. Personalized customer support will increase retention rate and reduce your customer churn rate.
• High customer satisfaction – A great customer experience will leave customers highly satisfied. They will share their experience with their family & friends, write reviews or share on social media. A positive customer experience will bring your business a high customer satisfaction rate. It will benefit you with more organic word-of-mouth marketing and low customer acquisition cost.
• Boost customer lifetime value – Customer LTV tells you how much money a customer will spend with the brand and how well the customer relationship is doing. When a customer is highly satisfied with your brand, they are more likely to stay longer with your company. It increases your customer’s lifetime value. Increased customer Lifetime Value will help you decrease your new customer acquisition costs. In this way, you don’t have to spend more money on marketing to attract new customers and can invest more in providing a great customer experience to your existing customer base.
• Builds brand loyalty & reputation – It’s not easy to attract new customers with good products in the competitive world. One bad experience can harm your brand reputation; one negative review can hamper your brand loyalty among customers. Putting your customer’s experience strategy in work and across all teams can make a difference. Your CX strategy will keep your customers happy. It will give you a competitive advantage over your competitors and strengthen your brand reputation. An effective CX management strategy will increase brand loyalty among the existing user base.

Difference between customer experience vs. customer service

There is one distinct difference between customer service & customer experience:

“Customer service is one part of customer’s journey; on the other hand, customer experience is overall customers perception about your brand based on each touchpoint and interaction.”

Customer service is needed when customer experience goes down unexpectedly. It only happens when your customers face issues or are stuck in their onboarding process. Your agents then need to contact them quickly and provide the required assistance.

Good customer service is essential for your business, and your agents are the human part of the communication that elevates the whole customer experience.

Customer experience happens on all levels of your company. CX strategy applies to every area, from sales teams to marketing, support, service, and development. Customer experience evolves on customer’s every interaction with your brand from the moment they arrive on your website to sending a message to customer support. While the customer service team focuses on providing fast & quality solutions, the CX management strategy focuses on flawless experience at each point, so the customer does not need customer service.

How to build a solid customer experience strategy

Great customer experience can turn your average customers into your vocal brand ambassadors. They will buy from you regularly, promote you and give feedback without asking.

How can you do this? With a well-planned customer experience strategy. Follow these six best practices to build a solid CX management strategy for your business:

1. Build a customer-centric company culture

Culture is everything for a company. It’s an essential ingredient to becoming big in your industry. Take Zappos, for example. They build their whole company around great customer experience. They treated their customers as how they liked to be treated.

Customer support is an obsession for Zappos. There are many stories about the Zappos customer support people share regularly. This work as great organic marketing and attract new customers to the Zappos brand. As a result, Zappos is a billion-dollar company bought by Amazon.

Zappos became a customer-centric company by implementing a customer focus mindset from its leadership to entry-level executives. They made it clear from day one that everyone should work two weeks in the customer support department, no matter their title. This way, executives will learn more about customer pain points and perceptions from customers’ direct feedback. Constant improvement of products, actively listening to customers, developing empathy through feedback and radical transparency made Zappos a most-loved customer-recommended brand.

Now, think about how you can implement these in your business operation to become more customer-centric. Align your business values and goal with your CX strategy from the start.

2. Develop omnichannel experience

CX strategy is good, but it would be great if you could build an omnichannel CX strategy. You are interacting with your customers through various channels, so why not offer them a positive experience through every one of those? Omnichannel support can be used as the main element of omnichannel CX strategy. 

You can use the structure to elevate your CX management strategy if you have established omnichannel support in your business. Build a strong team to provide a great customer experience from channel to channel. 

Train your team with the right skills, share knowledge about products accessible to them, and select the right people for the job. Empathy plays a huge role in team building. Choose people with an empathic trait, provide them with exact guidelines and make them independent. An effective team is essential to building an omnichannel strategy and trust within customer relationships.

3. Focus on customer feedback 

Customer feedback is an easy way to discover more about customer’s expectations. Collect customers feedback continuously and add them to your CX strategy. It will improve the overall customer experience exceptionally.

Customer expectations change fast nowadays. Customer feedback will keep you in the loop about customer’s tastes. It will also help you discover where customers face problems and solve them. You can also create an internal feedback system where agents can share insight about the problems they are facing to deliver a great customer experience and what businesses need to do with ever-changing customer expectations.

Customer feedback will tell you what’s working for real and what’s not. What are customer’s perceptions about your brand and what they want from you? If you listen to your customers and take their continuous suggestions & opinions, it can reduce friction, improve your products and attract more new buyers. Customer feedback also helps make stronger customer relations.

4. Deliver a memorable experience

Give every customer interaction a human touch. Workflow automation and chatbots are useful, but overusing them can make it hard for a customer to interact. Use these tools only where you need them. Make human contact available at every touch point so customers easily connect with a support agent when necessary.

Speak in your customer language, understand your audience better and become one of them. Go through the data you collected from customer feedback & learn more about their pain points. Train your support staff to listen to customers first and use their own words to ensure you understand them. Then deliver the effective solution.

Offering personalization is another way to make great customer relations. People love when you recognize them. Know everything about your customers. Use the right tool to display customer data to your agents so they can use it to determine what type of personalized communication they should deliver. Personalized communication is a fruitful way to provide a memorable experience to your customers. And don’t make them wait. Ever!

5. Invest in the right tools

Automation, chatbots, and helpdesk are useful tools that can deliver a great customer experience if you use them right. Invest in the right tools to increase customer satisfaction and smooth business operations.

Tools are useful to offer proactive communications through multiple channels. It will enhance your current customer experience. You can use tools to contact customers fast, collect customer data accurately & get more analytic insight into customer behavior. Tools can help you fulfill customer expectations faster than traditional communications.

You can use AI chatbots for repetitive tasks, live chats for instant communication and omnichannel connection to contact customers everywhere. A good helpdesk can make your support agents more efficient in resolving customer’s complaints. 

Using the right tools, you can avoid future problems and provide your customer with a great experience through proactive communication. Solving a problem before it happens can create a unique personal experience for your customers.

6. Measure & analyze CX metrics

Measure your customer experience for a better understanding of customer expectations and customer’s perceptions of your brand. It is critical to analyze your CX strategy from time to time. Know what’s working and what’s not so you can take the necessary next steps. 

Every industry is different. So these KPIs and metrics are different based on a business needs. Build your metrics from your requirements. Most of the common metrics are – 

• Customer satisfaction score – tells you how much satisfaction a customer is with the experience. It helps you gain customer insight into your brand.
• Net promoter score – how likely a customer will refer your brands to their friends & family.
• Customer effort score – how they rate their experience with your products and services.

You can use these metrics to collect data. Based on the data, you can easily solve a customer problem or resolve any pain points before they become big. Continuously analyzing and measuring CX data will help you formulate a more accurate plan for your ongoing CX strategy. The more you listen to your customers through your data analysis, you can take practical action to deliver a great customer experience.

Conclusion

Delivering a great customer experience depends on a well-thought CX management strategy and how you are using the right tools with a symbiotic human connection. It is more than providing a seamless customer journey or great products; it is how customers feel about the brand and how much value they receive.

Focusing on customers-benefits and a holistic approach to CX strategy can lead to higher customer satisfaction. Every team must be on the same page to ensure a customer-centric mindset and regularly improve CX strategy to meet your business goals. A comprehensive plan with all hands in is necessary to build a powerful customer experience strategy.