As the tide of the pandemic gradually recedes, business leaders with a focus on growth are contemplating innovative and daring new strategies to compensate for lost time, transform their business models, and connect with the "everywhere customer".
To cultivate customer loyalty and satisfaction, marketers must employ effective CX (customer experience) strategies that not only build confidence but also optimize the user experience. According to Gartner, CX plays a critical role in driving customer loyalty, surpassing the impact of brand and price combined. By ensuring a friendly user experience and providing self-affirmation for purchase decisions, marketers can create a lasting impact on customer loyalty and retention.
To develop a successful CX strategy, marketers need to understand key personas and incorporate feedback and insights to enhance design and foster innovation. It is crucial to align the organization around specific goals and continuously improve every customer interaction, taking into account various factors such as competitive insight, consumer research, marketplace data, and the company's mission and vision.
By prioritizing these elements and continuously refining the customer experience, marketers can create a CX strategy that not only meets customer expectations but also fosters loyalty and satisfaction.
Elements of Smart Customer Service Planning
Smart CX Customer Service Planning
- Reviewing Your Current Customer Service Strategy
- Training Your Customer Service Staff
- Determining Your Customers' Needs
- Solving for the Customer
- Providing Self-Service Solutions
- Routinely Collecting Feedback
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Reviewing Your Current Customer Service Strategy
Reviewing current customer strategy with the goal is to determine what is working for your business and how to improve it. You can start with customer satisfaction scores and churn rates, if you are below expectations, you have a starting point to dig deeper to address the challenge. You can also look at the customer journey to map interactions between a customer and your business, including any pain points found along the way. This will not only help you identify friction within your customer experience but also how to remove it and replace it with delight.
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Training Your Customer Service Staff
Once you know where you need to improve, the next step is sharing that information with your team and training your staff on any new protocol moving forward. It's important to share your findings with your staff — even if the news isn't good — so they understand why you're making these changes. This will reduce pushback against your new policies and it will encourage reps to improve their performance in the future. It's never fun knowing your team is falling short of expectations, especially when other teams in your department are hitting their numbers.
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Determining Your Customers' Needs
Most customer's needs are basic, typically on-time delivery, customer rep attitude, etc. And they will vary on a case-by-case basis depending on your business. In some cases, it may be imperative to provide a speedy response, at other times, quality and clarity are the keys to success. It all depends on how the customer is feeling when they reach out to your business and how well your team can identify and adapt to their needs.
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Solving for the Customer
To achieve a high level of customer approval, it's best to allocate dedicated customer success teams to anticipating potential problems and intercept them before they affect the customer. They're a critical component to a complete customer experience, reduce churn, and strengthen relationships with your customers.
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Providing Self-Service Solutions
Leverage self-service tools, like knowledge bases and chatbots to make it easier for customers to find solutions. This will not only reduce case volume for customer reps but also time to focus on the more complex issues that require more time to troubleshoot.
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Routinely Collecting Feedback
To keep up with your customer's needs, you should routinely collect feedback from your customers, using automated tools, and surveys and apply them to your business strategy.
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Tracking Your Team's Performance
To stay relevant and reduce the churn rate, you should routinely check your team's performance and ways to add value to the customer experience. Hold your staff to high standards and expect them to generate positive interactions with every customer they meet.
Smart CX Strategy Best Practices
- Reach Your Target Audience.
- Offer Convenient Customer Service.
- Provide Convenience When Purchasing Products.
- Create In-Person & Digital Personalization.
- Focus on Simplicity & Ease of Use.
- Review the Flexibility of Your Communication Channels.
- Make Use of Automation and AI.
- Be Proactive.
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Reach Your Target Audience.
To stay competitive you need to communicate with your customers and engage them at the right time, using the right channels to provide reliable & consistent service using their preferred channels -- be it social, email, live chat, or something similar.
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Offer Convenient Customer Service.
Leverage your knowledge base, chats, and other forums to empower your customers with 24x7 service availability and the ability to help themselves without having to reach out for help.
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Provide Convenience When Purchasing Products.
Encourage customers to spend more by eliminating purchasing frications and enhancing convenience, making it easy for them to give you their money. Something as simple as accurate pricing and packaging information on your website can effectively eliminate purchasing friction.
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Create In-Person & Digital Personalization.
Use Omni channels to incorporate personalization in a scalable way and leverage customer relationships to provide better service, suggestions, support, and more. A tool as simple as a shared inbox for your service department or success teams, where folks can turn up past customer conversations or requests, can be a great starting point in creating a transparent, universal space, laying the foundation for more contextual communication and outreach.
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Focus on Simplicity & Ease of Use with Mobile First.
If you are selling online then I suggest learning from the market leader, Amazon. Amazon embodies simplicity and ease of use in their checkout process by enabling Amazon Prime members to buy an item with just one click, offering a quick and easy way to uncover product info and answer common questions on the same screen.
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Omnichannel experience
Maintain a 360-degree view of customer interactions across all channels (digital and traditional) to monitor channel preference, usage, and customer journeys from the customer perspective. Streamline channel flexibility by employing a fluid, contextual overall experience.
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Leverage Automation and AI
In this rapidly evolving environment, it can be challenging to keep up with your customers without the help of chatbots and automation. Used correctly, these features add tremendous value to the customer experience and create incredible convenience for your customer support team.
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Use Customer Tickets to be Proactive
Using your customer ticket correctly can help you identify problem areas and reduce the churn rate.
Avoiding Common Pitfalls
- Not starting with Persona
- Mixing up personas with segments
- Not able to understand customers' needs.
- Not able to demonstrate value to top management.
1) Not starting with Persona
The most common mistakes that we make are not starting with a persona or right persona, trying to do all things to everybody, and not being able to define your customer's needs. So if you try to be all things to all people or you don't have really good personas, you vast late you can't map a customer journey. You can't understand, wants and needs because it's just too broad. Another issue is only focusing on that marketing funnel of the buying cycle, not thinking of the entire end-to-end journey.
2) Mixing up personas with segments
The second most common mistake is confusing personas with segments.
Segments are like what customers mean to you or in other words, Segments see customers from business PoV, whereas Persons are what your customers PoV about your business, its outside in, and so it's flipping the perspective.
Segmentation vs. Personas
Segmentation sees your customers from the business POV - An Inside-out perspective
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Personas see your business from the customer's POV
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3) Not able to understand customers' needs.
Often organizations are not focused on understanding the customer. They think they know the customer and know what the problem is. Ask any organization what the top five problems they are solving for their customers and most will come up with a list, however, those may or may not be the right five problems. It cannot be validated in the absence of the right data, operational, and survey combined.
4) Not able to demonstrate value to top management.
Most often at the time of CX program launches, senior leaders say all the right things. They recognize the need to be outside in and pay great lip service to the power of having satisfied customers. However, as budgets start to mount, or as CX programs begin to offer challenges to the status quo, that support evaporates.
And so it becomes essential right from the start to not just orient yourself to the customer satisfaction increases but to demonstrate why it matters to the company.
Conclusion
Customer Experience Strategy Is a Long-Term Play. It requires continuous effort and dedication to define and streamline key areas while avoiding the common pitfalls mentioned earlier. However, it's important to acknowledge that customer preferences and expectations can change over time. Therefore, it's crucial to remain adaptable and flexible in your approach.
As marketing leaders, it is essential to connect customer satisfaction scores with operational and transactional data. By doing so, you can effectively demonstrate to your leaders why customer satisfaction matters, using metrics such as the Net Promoter Score (NPS).
But what exactly does high customer satisfaction mean for your business? It's important to ask yourself a series of questions to truly understand the impact of customer satisfaction on your bottom line. Do promoters spend more on your products or services? Do they make more frequent purchases? Do they have a higher lifetime value as customers? Are they more likely to stay loyal to your brand and less likely to churn? Do they refer your business to others? And lastly, do they give you higher ratings and reviews?
By answering these questions and analyzing the data, you can gain valuable insights into the correlation between customer satisfaction and business success. This information will guide your decision-making process when it comes to formulating your overall customer experience strategy.
As we continue to learn and grow in our understanding of effective customer communication and data collection, we will find it easier to make informed decisions about our customer experience strategy. Remember, customer experience is not a one-time effort, but an ongoing commitment to meeting and exceeding customer expectations.
So, work towards defining and streamlining key areas of your customer experience strategy, while remaining open to change and evolution. By connecting satisfaction scores to operational data and understanding the impact on your business, you can create a customer experience strategy that drives success and fosters long-term customer loyalty.
