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Here’s an interesting statistic for you – 80% of customers now deem customer experience (CX) to be as critical as your products.
While it’s a harsh reality to face, the fact is CX is no longer a nice-to-have sitting on the back burner. It’s a mission-critical aspect that now determines your brand’s survival.
To help you improve the CX, here’s a look at seven customer service tips your customer experience strategy needs.
1. Understand Your Audience
It’s pretty simple – Until you understand your customers, you have no way to shape your customer experience. As such, you should start by developing a buyer persona to help you uncover your customers’ needs.
A buyer persona is a profile that takes you into the minds and hearts of your customers. Using the profile, you can learn shared traits of existing or potential customers you want to attract.
The four stages in developing a buyer persona are:
- Ideation
- Research
- Creating
- Analyzing
When developing a buyer persona, you need to pay attention to the area that signals empathy. That’s because these are the touchpoints that elicit emotional responses from customers, which influences how they value your business.
2. Map the Customer Journey
An excellent accompaniment to developing a buyer persona is mapping the customer journey. The customer journey is the process through which customers move from prospects to paid clients.
A customer journey map is a visualization of the total interactions customers have with your brand. As you develop it, you begin to have a keen sense of your customer’s expectations when they come to you.
Five principles help move your journey mapping forward:
- Attract: How customers are drawn into your brand
- Accept: How customers initiate interactions with your brand
- Adopt: How customers follow through on interactions with your brand
- Amplify: The takeaway feelings customers have after dealing with your brand
- Advance: How your brand follows up with customers
A journey map is also mission-critical as it helps you gain deeper insight into the buyer Persians you develop. Consequently, your custom segmentation becomes more fruitful.
3. Casting a Clear Vision
At this point, you have a deep understanding of who your customers are and what segments they fall into. You understand their stated and unstated felt needs, desires, fears, and motivations.
Additionally, you also see the entire process from when a customer discovers your brand to when you convert them. You now need to craft a tenacious custom experience vision your brand aspires to
As you crystalize your vision, pale a heavy emphasis on personalization. At this point in your strategizing, you’re in a position to begin design specifics concerning customer interactions along their journey.
For example, if you desire your clients to feel valued whenever they are on hold, it’s at this juncture where you design the custom on hold messages for your various demographics.
The more personalized your vision, the higher the quality of your strategy when it comes to implementation.
4. Put Together a Strong Team
As most managers know, you’d rather have an A team to pursue a B idea than work on an A idea with a B team. The same applies when it comes to your CX strategy.
You need a high-quality team driven towards developing and implementing a compelling strategy to surprise and delight your clients from the get-go.
You must pick exceptional customer service team members. As long as you have the right people, you can train and empower them to surprise you with their implementation.
It goes without saying that crafting a dedicated team specifically for your customer service strategy is a must. If customer experience is left at the hands of several disparate people who aren’t coordinating their efforts, you’ll inevitably leave a bad taste in your customers’ mouths.
As such, your team needs to understand the technical side of things and also grasp effective communication. That way, customers will feel understood and come away emotionally connected to your brand.
5. Systems, Systems, Systems
The right team needs the appropriate tools and systems to design and execute the CX strategy effectively.
When you invest in the proper systems, you make it easier for your customers to interact with your brand. As a result, it then becomes easier to execute your CX strategy and monitor it.
Remember – Tools don’t stand in place or a proper strategy. They only bring it to life. An exceptional strategy can’t make its way to your customers without suitable systems.
6. Measure the Metrics
Once you execute your CX strategy, you can’t rest on your laurels. You need to observe the metrics that matter to your business to discern whether you’re on track or need to make changes.
Some off-the-shelf metrics you can adopt to measure your strategy’s success include:
Customer satisfaction score (CSAT): Gauging how satisfied your customers feel to discern if your value proposition delivers an exceptional experience
Net Promoter Score (NPS): Gauging how ready customers are to recommend you to others (which is a function of how well you met their need)
Customer effort score (CES): Gauging whether customers felt it was easy or difficult to use your products or services
Don’t be afraid to create custom experience metrics that line up with your brand’s context. The more relevant the metric, the more accurate the feedback.
7. Enhance Customer Experience by Utilizing Customer Feedback
One of the most potent hacks to level up on your CX strategy is to use your clients’ feedback. When customers tell you what worked well and what didn’t, it’s constructive.
Go back to the drawing board and tweak your approach to enhance what resonates with customers, then rinse and repeat. For every iteration, you add more longtail value to your strategy.
Don’t Settle for Less in Your Customer Experience Strategy
How customers feel after interacting with your brand is a make-or-break factor. With that in mind, investing significantly in a potent customer experience strategy isn’t a choice.
Learn who your customers are, what your firm offers, and how to improve customer experience to not only win but retain clients.
Running a business is like jumping off a cliff while building a parachute. You need every edge to win, and our website features articles that sharpen your business acumen. Check out more of our content to learn how to place your brand in pole position.
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