As a savvy business owner, you may already know that it’s wise to have a good customer experience strategy. It’s just good business to ensure that your customers walk away from their interactions with you feeling good and singing your praises.
- Want to enhance your brand’s rep?
- Turbo charge your profits?
- Keep happy customers for life?
Create a strong customer experience, and you can do all of the above. In fact, according to Zippia, you could potentially see an 80 percent revenue increase simply by focusing your attention on CX.
Our hope with this guide is to help and empower you to map out a customer experience strategy template tailored to your audience, that you can use over and over again to drive the growth and success of your e-commerce business.
What Does Customer Experience Strategy Mean Exactly?
Customer experience (CX) in a nutshell is the feelings sparked in a person when they interact with your brand. Ignite feel good vibes, and your business will do very well indeed. A CX strategy is simply a plan of action on how you will do that. The idea is to exceed your customer’s expectations while staying aligned with your company’s goals. Think concise, actionable, a plan that puts your customers at the front and center of all your decisions.
Why You Should Care About Your Customer Experience Strategy
If you’re an e-commerce brand, the reality is your customers can have pretty much whatever they might want at the push of a few buttons. Since there are no physical interactions with them, their experience with your website becomes your key differentiator.
When you create a strong CX strategy that’s well-executed, you help foster a personalized and seamless experience that keeps your audience engaged, makes your brand stand out, and increases profits and loyalty. Say goodbye to high cart abandonment rates, and hello to repeat buyers and word-of-mouth marketing. Of course, all that sounds well and good, but how to do it? Keep reading, friends!
Start By Understanding Your Audience
A strong customer experience strategy begins and ends with understanding your target audience inside and out, so that you can fully grasp what they want and meet their expectations. You’ll need to dive deep into things like customer behaviors, demographics, preferences, and psychographics.
- Use buyer personas to craft detailed profiles of your ideal customers. These profiles should include challenges they face, their interests and preferences, and their demographics.
- Map out your customer’s journey to figure out where the touch points are, and what stages a customer journeys through when they interact with your business.
- Use tools like reviews, surveys, and other feedback methods to collect and analyze data and insights directly from your customers.
Craft Clear Customer Objectives
Clear objectives are crucial when mapping out your customer experience strategy. You can’t go wrong using the SMART goal acronym. You want objectives that are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, time-bound. Your objectives also need to be strongly aligned with your brand’s overarching goals. Below are a few examples of SMART objectives to get your brain juices flowing.
- Ramp up scores for customer satisfaction by 20 percent within a year.
- Decrease customer churn rates in the next two quarters by 10 percent.
- Within six months, increase average times of resolution on customer support tickets by 25 percent.
Identify Top Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
Not all KPIs are created equal. Some won’t be as relevant to your objectives as others, so to accurately assess how successful your customer experience strategy is, you need to identify the KPIs that actually matter for your business.
Some of the most common CX KPIs are things like:
- Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) to determine what percentage of your customers give their experience a positive rating.
- Customer Effort Score (CES) to determine how easy it is for customers to interact with your business.
- Net Promoter Score (NPS) to determine how satisfied and loyal your customers are.
- First Contact Resolution (FCR) to determine what percentage of customers’ issues are resolved on their first interaction.
- Customer Churn Rate to determine what percentage of your customers stop doing business with you for a specific period of time.
Create a Culture That’s Customer-Centric
In every successful business, some might say culture is everything. If you want your customers to have an exceptional experience with your brand, they have to be the ooey-gooey center everything revolves around. Their needs must be priority number one, and you have to empower your team to deliver the kind of service necessary to keep them returning over and over again. Below are a few ideas to get you started.
- Empower and equip your team with customer service training, so they have the required skills and knowledge to handle interactions with your customers well.
- Communicate and clearly define your brand’s values around your customers. Your team needs to know that customer satisfaction is your highest goal.
- Keep an open-door policy that makes your team comfy with sharing ideas and feedback on ways to improve the customer experience.
- Foster a culture of honor and celebrate your team members who go above and beyond for the sake of your customers. Recognizing and rewarding excellence begets more excellence.
Optimize Your Customer’s Journey
There are always areas and opportunities to improve your customer’s experience. By analyzing and mapping the customer journey, you can identify ways to eliminate pain points, create positive touch points, and reduce friction throughout their journey. Some ideas for optimizing might include:
- Streamlining your processes by simplifying and automating wherever you can to minimize customer effort.
- Leveraging your customer’s data to craft relevant and personalized experiences for them.
- Ensuring a consistent and seamless experience by improving omnichannel experiences across all touch points.
- Monitoring your customer’s feedback and data to make tweaks and strategy adjustments were needed on a continuous basis.
Put Tools and Tech to Good Use
Tools and the technology they rode in on can be a beautiful thing for every business, but especially smaller e-commerce brands. Tools and tech can be ideal for enhancing your customer’s experience, gathering key insights, automating and streamlining tasks and processes, and improving overall customer interactions. Unsure where to start?
- You can manage your customer’s interactions, data, and history and create a personalized experience for them with a robot customer relationship management (CRM) system.
- You can collect customer feedback and analyze it with customer feedback tools, to help you suss out trends and ways to improve things.
- You can streamline your customer support and track customer resolution times using helpdesk tools.
- You can uncover valuable insights and monitor your chosen KPIs to inform your customer experience strategy with reporting and analytics tools.
Never Rest, Always Refine
Your customer experience strategy should be ever-evolving. It’s not a one-off deal, but a process that’s ongoing. Evaluate how effective it is on a regular basis, by collecting feedback from your customers, analyzing trends, and monitoring relevant KPIs. Tweak where needed to ensure your strategy stays aligned with your end goals and meets the needs of your customers with excellence.
- Periodic customer experience strategy optimizations can help you determine how well you’re making progress and where you’re falling short.
- Test and experiment with new tactics and approaches. Then you can measure their impact against your chosen KPIs.
- Read industry rags and blogs to stay current with the latest tools, tech, and best practices in prioritizing and improving the customer experience.
This kind of customer experience strategy template can be used to map out a comprehensive plan to improve your brand’s CX and create a more tailored approach to meeting the needs of your target audience.
Refine and tweak it on a regular basis to make sure it remains effective and continues to meet the evolving expectations of your customers. Though it seems so simple, adopting a customer-centric model with a strong CX strategy in place is just good business.
