Developing a good CX strategy is essential for the commercial viability of a brand. To ensure you create a winning customer experience strategy, it’s a good idea to incorporate the following best practices into your customer experience design process.
9 Tips For Developing a Customer Experience (CX) Strategy
1) Create Customer Journey Maps
A customer journey map should show what the customer experiences at each touch point on their journey with a company.
A good map illustrates what customers are thinking and feeling during the journey, and also includes operational data that shows their satisfaction and frustration.
2) Perform a Competitive Analysis
What kind of customer experience (CX) are your competitors offering? It is convenient to carry out a competitive analysis in order to obtain new ideas and innovation.
3) Evaluate Staff and Correct Possible Deficiencies
A new customer experience strategy typically relies on skilled employees running support tasks. This may require companies to train new skills or create new positions and fill them externally. For example, if one of the tactics involves implementing more digital channels, the organization will need to train call center agents on how to use the new software and how to effectively connect with customers digitally.
4) Review Call Center Technology
The contact center plays a vital role in the execution of the customer experience strategy because it is a specialized center that connects current and potential customers with different departments of the business. So having the right CX engagement platform is critical. It will empower agents; reduce friction with customers, and scale to quickly meet their needs.
5) Collaborate Cross-Functionally
A customer experience strategy impacts and applies to everyone in the company. Success depends, to a large extent, on the contributions of the commercial teams. Strategy development and execution should be a cross-functional collaborative effort. Brainstorming sessions can be an effective way to develop the CX vision and identify tactics that will help the company move towards its goals.
6) Listen To Customers
The best way to identify what customers want is to listen to them by collecting as much user feedback as possible from sources like satisfaction surveys, customer service interactions, social media posts, product reviews, etc. To get the most out of call center data, consider using Artificial Intelligence (AI)-powered interaction analytics software that can analyze 100% of interactions across digital and voice channels and provide valuable insights into how they are handled, users feel and why they contact customer service.
7) Focus On Facilitating Customer Service
Whether making a purchase or seeking help, today’s consumers want easy and instant gratification. When building the customer experience, you need to focus on optimizing customer-facing technology and processes so customers can easily get what they need. Your solutions may include:
- Omnichannel experiences: So customers can have seamless interactions on the channels of their choice.
- Self-service: Give customers 24/7/365 access to your business through the channel of their choice.
- AI routing: Intelligent routing increases the chance that customer issues are resolved on first contact and reduces call transfers.
8) Leverage Artificial Intelligence (AI)
As the company identifies CX tactics, opportunities to leverage Artificial Intelligence can be sought. AI is transforming the way organizations operate and interact with customers. Only in the call center, AI can:
- Increase the accuracy of forecasts and schedules so customers don’t have to wait as long for agent assistance.
- Improve the quality of routing so customers are more likely to engage with qualified agents who will make personal connections with them.
- Train agents in real time on the soft skills that can improve customer satisfaction.
- Determine customer sentiment so contact center leaders can determine if their CX initiatives are working.
- Provide smarter self-service through IVR and digital channels.
9) Prioritize CX Tactics
Once the initiatives to support the customer experience strategy have been devised, they need to be prioritized to ensure that they get the most benefit and that they are implemented correctly. For this, it is necessary to carry out an approximate analysis of the cost / benefit for each of them.
In conclusion, developing a customer experience strategy will help ensure that a business consistently delights users.