How to Develop a Stellar Customer Experience Management Strategy

The advent of the digital age has raised competition among brands to unprecedented levels.

Consumers are continuously exposed to products online, on multiple channels. In an era where customers wage the power of choice, customer experience management is becoming an essential tool to navigate through this competitive climate.

Dive Deeper: If You Don’t Have a ‘Customer-Obsessed’ Culture, You’re Losing

By the numbers: Why CX management is your ticket to ride

As brands place greater emphasis on experiential marketing and services, the overall customer experience has emerged as a key differentiator in the eyes of customers.

Customer experience is becoming a defining factor in customer acquisition, retention and brand awareness. Here are the stats to prove it.

• According to Salesforce, up to 67% of consumers and 74% of business buyers say they’ll pay more for a great experience.
• Temkin Group estimates that a moderate improvement to CX would earn a $1 billion company an average of $775 million over three years.
• 32% of consumers say they will leave a brand they love after one bad experience, according to PwC.

Building a compelling customer experience can gain the support of customers and keep your brand on their mind.

However, providing customers with a stand-out customer experience that meets their needs, and keeps them engaged throughout the customer journey is a consistent challenge.

How to build a robust customer experience management framework

1. Create a customer experience vision

The first thing you need to do when setting a customer experience strategy is to layout your customer experience vision. This vision is the core of your framework and should be designed to put the customer’s interests first.

Your customer experience vision needs to build a culture of customer service and focus on making the customer’s interactions with your brand as positive as possible. Having an intuitive user experience on your site and fast customer service should be staples of your customer service vision.

2. Determine which business goals are most important

To give your customer experience management framework the best chance of success you need to set clear goals. Are you looking to win new customers or to offer current customers new services? Your goals will determine the type of customer experience strategy that you design.

For example, if your goal is to win new customers, then you will have to focus more on getting your name out there and making the entry to the sales funnel as smooth as possible.

3. Create accurate customer personas and understand their needs

Delivering an exceptional customer experience is all about understanding your customers’ needs. While you might know which demographics you’re targeting, it’s important to realize that within those groups there are even smaller segmentations within them, each with their own needs and desires.

You can start to build personas by asking your customer service and success teams to provide information about the customers they assist. You can also use online analytics platforms like Google Analytics to see which demographics are interacting with your brand the most.

4. Create a comprehensive customer journey map for each persona

After you’ve gathered data on your customers, you want to create a map of the customer journey from the start to finish of the sales funnel. The customer journey map acts as a visual display of the customer’s interactions with your brands.

It’s important to identify where prospects enter the funnel, whether from social media, email marketing, the blog, or a Google ad. To further refine your funnel you’ll want to look at where prospects drop off, or at which places in the journey they experience friction.

For example, if many visitors to your site add items to their cart but then leave the page before checking out, you’d benefit from looking into why. Analytics platforms that track the user journey and provide this kind of feedback can be an extraordinary help.

Gain valuable insights into the customer journey with WalkMe. Request a demo.

5. Ensure your customer support and success teams are aligned with your vision

Executing your customer experience strategy will come down to your teams. Ensuring all internal stakeholders are aligned on the vision and goals will vastly improve customers’ experience. Creating an internal CX guide can be a great way to make it clear to staff what the CX strategy is on different channels.

Employees play a key role in unifying the brand message you have created and providing better customer interactions. Ongoing employee awareness of your plan gives you the best chance to strengthen the relationship between you and your customers.

Customer experience management: A marketing essential

Building a customer experience strategy takes time, but the benefits can be dramatic. Managing the interactions your brand has with customers will help to make sure that you provide them with an excellent experience. Successfully delivering a killer customer experience will position you as a brand to remember.

By WalkMe Team

WalkMe pioneered the Digital Adoption Platform (DAP) for organizations to utilize the full potential of their digital assets. Using artificial intelligence, machine learning and contextual guidance, WalkMe adds a dynamic user interface layer to raise the digital literacy of all users.