7 ways to improve your customer experience strategy

While the terms 'customer experience' and 'customer service' are often used interchangeably, there is a key difference between the two. Your customer service strategy comes in when looking after your customers – giving them advice, support and help. Customer experience, or CX, is the sum of all of the interactions a user has with your business, from initial marketing touchpoints to the way in which they use your product and interact with your brand.

With significant benefits to retention, advocacy and customer loyalty, a customer experience strategy is crucial to the success of any business in 2020. Below are seven ways to improve your customer experience.

1. Design your vision

To get started, it's important to define your vision for your customer experience. Acknowledge whether you're looking at CX because you know it's an area in which your business lacks, or whether you want to make improvements to boost your customer retention, reducing churn rates.

Start by looking at your current data, and calculating averages for KPIs such as retention rates, customer satisfaction and Net Promotor Scores (NPS). Once you have some base figures to hand, it'll allow you not only to prioritise the areas that need work on the face of it, but to effectively measure the impact of your updated strategy. If you don't have this data available now, it's important to gather it as soon as possible.

2. Map out your customer journey

From the get-go, it's important to have a clear picture of the entire journey that your customers take with your company.

Covering all touchpoints along the way, make sure to cover:

• Pre-sales interactions (social, live chat, phone, meeting, webinar)

• The sales or purchasing process itself (face to face, on an e-commerce store, via phone call, and so on)

• The after-sales process (both customer service and the experience of using the product itself)

• The retention experience (loyalty schemes, surveys, referral codes)

There are plenty of templates and infographics online if you need support with your customer mapping.

3. Understand who your customers are

The next step when creating a successful customer experience strategy is to fully understand who your customers are. Consider creating a buyer persona – this not only helps with your marketing and communications strategy, but gives you a frame of reference that can be applied consistently across the entire journey.

Some of the things to consider when thinking about who your customers are include:

• Demographics (age, gender, income)

• Location (countries, towns, rural vs city)

• Hobbies and interests (cooking, sports, reading etc)

• Job (role, seniority, industry, company size)

• Pain points (which issues are they facing that your product solves)

By creating a clear outline of who your users are, this can help you refine your customer journey by catering it towards them. For example, if the majority of your customers are millennials, you might consider putting more resources into live chat customer contact options rather than a call centre. You may also optimise your website and buying experience for mobiles rather than desktops, or focus your marketing on Instagram over LinkedIn.

4. Gather customer insights and feedback

One of the most accurate methods of improving your customer experience strategy is to gather feedback from your current customers.

Some easy ways to do this include asking for reviews, sending out surveys post-purchase and gathering feedback when delivering customer service. You can start by simply asking how likely they are to recommend your products to a friend or family member, or you can create a more comprehensive survey (or a series of shorter, real-time surveys) to ask about their experience and provide comment on areas for improvement.

Another really important source of feedback is to engage with your customer base regularly. If you're looking at creating a new product or style, ask your customers what they think! If you're a SaaS provider, ask your customers which future integrations and product features would make a difference to how they use your product.

One super-easy way to do this is to take the Tide approach – they use a Trello board to showcase their product roadmap, and regularly encourage users to vote on the future features they'd find the most useful. This dictates the short-, medium- and long-term priorities for their product development, and allows their users to have their say in the evolution and priorities of the product.

5. Act on your customer feedback

Once you've collated regular customer data and identified trends, you can prioritise the changes needed across the entire customer journey. The next priority is to create a robust internal framework to keep things heading in the right direction, based on your areas for improvement.

For example, if you've found that your customer service is too slow, or inconsistent between customer service agents or platforms (live chat vs social, for example), it's important to put the framework into place so that all customers receive the same level of service consistently. This may include team training, eLearning, call and message monitoring or the implementation of KPIs.

If you've noticed that customers tend to buy once and not again, perhaps review your customer loyalty and advocacy strategy, or look at other ways to cross-sell or up-sell your products once they've made their initial purchase. This can involve phone follow-ups, automated emails or even direct mail to encourage your customers to purchase again. This can also be indicative of a poor-quality or product that's not fit-for-purpose, so customer feedback and reviews will help you understand this, and create a plan of action to prevent this moving forwards.

6. Implement and iterate

At this point, you should have data, customer insights and a comprehensive new or improved customer experience strategy. Now, it's time to implement this. It can be easy to focus on it for a few weeks or a few months and then let it slip, so be sure to keep your department heads accountable for the results of their team, and their part in the customer experience journey.

Frequent iteration doesn't mean changing your mind or going back and forth, it means being mindful that times change, trends evolve and as your product offering changes, your customer experience and customer expectations may, too.

7. Measure ROI

Now your customer experience strategy has been implemented, it's important to measure the ROI of your new methods. Using the KPIs and goals set at the beginning of this task, review at one-, three- and six-month intervals to calculate the impact of your new strategy.

Be sure to break this down by stage such as pre-sale, sale, post-sale and retention, as well as looking at the data for the business as a whole – this will ensure that you have a clear view of which measures have and haven't worked, as well as showing further room for improvement.

To conclude, only by truly understanding your customers and their experience with your product or service can you make improvements to your customer experience. Set goals, get to grips with your buyer personas and create an ongoing feedback loop to make sure that your strategy evolves as your business does.