How to build a customer experience strategy: A deep dive

With so many products and services available to consumers at the touch of a button, businesses have to go above and beyond for their customers to differentiate themselves from the market.

Customers also expect more than a product that works as advertised – they want a great customer experience (CX) too. In fact, 86% of customers are willing to pay more for a better experience.

By building a CX strategy, you can create a solid foundation that ensures your organization is providing the absolute best service across all your customer touchpoints.

1. Research and create buyer personas
2. Understand your business objectives
3. Manage your stakeholders
4. Adopt an omnichannel approach
5. Use the right technology tools
6. Review your customer experience strategy on a regular basis

1. Research and create buyer personas

Extensive research is the first thing you should do when building your customer experience strategy. After all, how you can you create a customer experience plan if you don’t know who your customers are?

Find out who your customers are, their motivations, pain points, etc, and sort them into buyer personas. A persona is a detailed description of a fictional character who represents your target audience. By developing 1-5 personas of your customer base, you can gain a better understanding of your customers and create experiences for your most valuable segments.

2. Understand your business objectives

In today’s ever-changing digital landscape, it’s easy for your efforts to become disjointed and isolated. The main cause of this is losing sight of (or never identifying) your overarching business objectives.

Before any frameworks are put in place, you need to have a clear understanding of what you’re trying to achieve.

You should have the answers to the following questions:

• What technology, people or processes do we need to achieve our goals?
• What gaps are there between customer expectation and actual experiences?
• Where do we stand today in terms of a customer-centric experience?

The answers to these questions will help you better shape your CX strategy.

3. Manage your stakeholders

Changing any part of your organization can cause disruption and confusion among your employees if it’s not handled correctly. The customer experience is created by the entire business, which means you’ll need buy-in and support from your key stakeholders to do it successfully.

By taking time to answer the “what’s in it for me?” question, you’ll help them see the value of the change, increasing the chances of them embracing the project. But remember – just because they've bought into your vision now, doesn’t mean it will remain this way.

For example, executives may change their minds, be seconded to a different project, or leave the company. That’s why you need to regularly establish and promote your customer experience vision by using tools like rich pictures and journey maps that bring your ideas to life.

4. Adopt an omnichannel approach

Consumers today don’t see brands in siloes anymore – instead, they want to script their own journeys across multiple channels and touchpoints. By creating an omnichannel experience, you can keep all of your channels in one place while unifying their style and information.

With an omnichannel approach, you can:

• Integrate multiple channels – this helps create a seamless experience for your customers, allowing them to easily pick up where they left off on one channel and continue their experience on another
• Increase customer satisfaction – having disconnected channels means your customers will have to start over when they switch from one to another, which can hinder the quality of support they receive. With an omnichannel approach, you can vary contact channels to manage the different types of assistance your customers might need. This could be providing live chat to solve simple website queries or co-browsing capabilities for issues that might require a more visual level of support
• Improve customer retention – by ensuring your customers can easily move from your social media pages to your website for example, you can enhance their experience and boost your cross-channel marketing strategy

Although more and more businesses are adopting an omnichannel approach, a multichannel approach is still a good way to bring maximum awareness to your brand though several channels.

You can read more about the differences between multichannel and omnichannel by clicking here.

5. Use the right technology tools

In today’s era of digital customer experiences, no customer experience strategy would be possible without the right technology. Some of the tools you can use include:

Enhance your offerings with AI and automation

70% of customers now expect a company’s website to include a self-service application. And these self-service offerings can be enhanced by AI technology.

Some benefits of AI include:

• Enable auto-responses to straightforward customer queries and guide your audiences with carefully curated content
• Reduce the need to attend every customer conversation to free up your agents to focus on more complex problems
• Use your subscribers' email browsing data, web pages visited, and past interactions to auto-send personalized messages and even track their responses
• Draw on past interactions to ensure your customers get the most relevant experiences
• AI chatbots on your website can help you deliver more personalized experiences and faster, automated service. For example, a chatbot can greet customers by their first name and if the customer needs to passed on to your agents, they can dive straight into the conversation without needing to ask prequalifying questions

Organize all your sales and customer data with a CRM system

The customer should be at the centre of everything you do. With a CRM system, you can manage your engagements and give your customers the excellent experience they want and expect.

A CRM system helps you:

• Gain enhanced knowledge of your customers and better anticipate their needs
• Create more personalized messaging for your audience based on deeper customer insights
• Access automated and customizable data dashboards
• Dig deeper into your data and metrics, and make more informed decisions
• Boost your customer retention because nurturing existing customers is easier
• Better segment your audience because a CRM breaks down your data into more structured categories and criteria

Learn more about the benefits of a CRM system by clicking here.

6. Review your customer experience strategy on a regular basis

A customer experience strategy isn’t a one-and-done exercise. It’s an ongoing process. With a measurement strategy in place, you should revisit your CX strategy regularly and look for ways to manage and optimize your efforts.

CX strategies can be affected by several factors, such as new trends, competition, technology, or shifts in consumer behaviour. That’s why it’s important to monitor these areas and tweak your CX strategy accordingly.

At Columbus, we’ve partnered with a variety of businesses across a range of industries to help them enhance their customer experiences.

Let’s take a closer look at two of our customers.

Helping Carter Jonas leverage the benefits of the cloud
Carter Jonas is a national property advisor business that’s intent on helping clients realize their goals and aspirations by providing ‘simply better advice’.

While their old system had performed well, Carter Jonas acknowledged they needed to move from an on-premise CRM to a modern cloud-based solution. This was to align with their own cloud-first strategy and to better manage their business-to-business contact data.

Since we’ve helped Carter Jonas upgrade to Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement (D365 CE), they’ve been able to leverage the additional features and benefits of having a modern cloud-based solution, such as having all their customer profiling information in one centralized location.

This has helped Carter Jonas deliver excellent customer experiences at every touchpoint as their teams can view accurate customer data and tailor the right messaging to the right clients.

Read Carter Jonas’ story in full by clicking here.

Helping Orangebox automate their business to deliver better customer service
Orangebox – an office furniture manufacturer – was struggling with a lack of automation and tech support across the business for their employees. By implementing D365 CE, they could better plan/schedule their field network and link this to the installation team, as well as systemise their sales.

This enabled them to see across the board in real-time what’s happening for their customers. They could also grow their business without increasing their cost space by improving the consistency and quality of customer service.

Click here to learn more about Orangebox’s journey.

Transform your customer experience with digital transformation

Providing exceptional CX is one of the major driving forces for customer retention and acquisition. Technology can help you deliver an unparalleled customer experience – but you also need the right mindset and culture inside your organization to make your transformation a success.

Our recent report produced in association with Business Reporter looks at the internal and external impacts of digital transformation and how it connects to customer experience.

Click the button below to download your copy.