How you treat your customers and how you are perceived in the marketplace is essential to your company’s success. The key to winning is Customer Experience. Excellent Customer Experience equals happy customers, happy customers equal loyal customers and customers who are happy with and loyal to you will spread the word that your company is the company to do business with. In this article, we are going to learn how to improve customer experience.
So, What Is This All-Important Customer Experience?
Customer Experience is the sum of all interactions a person has with your brand over their lifetime. It is how your customers actually experience your products, your services – your company. It is the ups and downs of their time dealing with your business. It is about meeting the needs of your customers.
A good customer experience can give you a loyal customer, a great review, and free advertisement. And we all know that it is way cheaper to keep a customer than to get a new one.
How Can a Company Improve Customer Experience?
Creating a strategy for the unique Customer Experience you want to deliver is not easy, but here are the five steps we use to build your strategy.
Step 1: Understand Corporate Strategy
Customer Experience is a critical factor for corporate success, but it is not the only factor.
To build a good customer experience strategy, the first thing you should look at is the company’s overall strategy to find out how to fix Customer Experience into it. If Customer Experience is not one of the three pillars (or five boulders/ladder rungs/ whatever you use) to your corporate strategy fit best in the long term.
Step 2: Who are you as a company?
A company is built on DNA. DNA is the set of elements that characterize who you are. This base often has strengths that you can build upon and a great customer experience strategy (CX Strategy) should amplify those strengths.
Even when renewing their entire structure, great companies do not ignore their DNA, so neither should you. Build your CX strategy around your base, and success will be in hand.
Step 3: What do your customers want?
Customer experience programs help companies understand what their customers want. But many companies are not great at listening to their customers.
Helping companies learn to listen and really hear what customers want is key to building your strategy.
Step 4: Redefine your mission statement
Mission statements permeate a company. They are used in decision making, in goal setting, in annual performance programs. Your mission statement must support the Customer Experience Strategy.
Rewrite it with a team, make it no longer than fifteen words, and look at all your decisions through the lens of this single statement.
Step 5: Get your CEO to buy-in
Your CEO is your last step. So often we are asked how to get CEOs on board. What we have learned is that you need to start with them. Take your CEO along with you on the journey to build the strategy. Help them to see the correlation between Customer Experience and company growth.
You must have them on board to have success with the change you are trying to drive.
Final Words
Follow the steps that I have mentioned above, and you can design a strategy that is uniquely yours that will improve the customer experience for your company. And if you need help, reach out to the Chief Customer. We would love to assist!