The happiness of clients should be prioritised at all costs, as their feedback can make or break any business – so what is a customer experience strategy?
As most business owners already know, customer happiness helps you measure loyalty, reduce churn and increase revenue. Customer satisfaction is also closely tied to this concept, as happy customers are also usually satisfied with your service – meaning that you’re better equipped to not only retain existing clients, but you’re then able to attract new ones and conquer the competition.
Customer experience, or otherwise shortened to CX, refers to how a business engages with its customers at every point of their buying journey – from marketing to sales to customer service and everything in between. In essence, it’s the sum total of all interactions a customer has with your brand.
More often than not, businesses that concentrate on customer happiness and make it part of their strategy succeed. To prioritise this, a customer experience strategy is essential – but what exactly is it, and how do you make one?
How To Create An Effective Customer Experience Strategy
The first step in any customer experience strategy is to have a clear customer-focused vision on what a happy customer actually looks like. Although this will often vary depending on your brand, product or service, get your hands on some metrics that can measure what a happy customer means to you. For some, that might mean monitoring the reviews left on Google or social media, while for others, it’s the feedback left on a live chat service already installed on their website.
Keep in mind that good customer experiences are not the same as good customer service. While the latter feeds into the former, customer service typically only applies during a sale, or when an issue arises. In contrast, customer experience applies to every step of the buyer’s journey, even before a potential sale or after the deal is done, when the business may not necessarily have anything to gain.
As an example, let’s say that you booked a vacation on the phone, and the staff member you dealt with was warm, friendly and incredibly helpful. While this is good customer service, a good customer experience elevates this, and is secured if you happen to receive your travel vouchers earlier than intended, you received a hotel upgrade, or you were sent an email with a list of the top things to do at your destination.
Although a customer experience strategy can be a broad term applied to a wide range of policies and tactics, the reality is that the right approach will vary between every brand or business. To start with a few of the basics of creating your own, here’s a few of the fundamentals.
Collect Client Feedback – You’ll never be able to improve your services if you don’t have access to real time feedback. Unless you’ve managed to seriously irritate a customer, it’s rare to receive pointers for moderate to average exchanges. As such, don’t be afraid to embrace email marketing to collect this information as a starting point on what you could do better, and decide on whether you prefer to encourage public reviews or private feedback forms.
Customer Relationship Management – A good customer experience strategy often includes proactive personalisation. As such, customer relationship management software are tools designed to help brands offer customers a unique and seamless experience, and are often capable of sending automated emails or texts that will be triggered based on certain actions of the customer, such as an abandoned shopping cart.
An Omni Channel Approach – With omnichannel service more readily available than ever before, there’s no reason why businesses shouldn’t be offering self-service support options to their customers. Rather than requiring people to call you whenever they need help, customers should have the freedom to answer questions and solve problems on their own if they want to, such as using live chat bots, FAQs, social media tutorial videos, and even in depth blogs.
Value Driven Content – While most brand owners now know that blogging is essential for gaining traction through the power of search engine optimisation, it’s also an incredibly effective tool for empowering and educating existing clients, and potentially attracting new ones. Essentially, your blog and content marketing efforts are a way to give out information for free, such as industry insights, how-to guides and even case studies.
Optimise Your Website – There’s nothing more infuriating than browsing a website on a desktop at work, only to get home and find that it’s nowhere near as efficient when using a mobile. A good customer experience strategy has the foresight to remove any potential technical roadblocks that could potentially frustrate a client, so be sure to properly optimise your website via Core Web Vitals to ensure that it’s working at its best across the board.
In summary, a customer experience strategy is the process of designing a frictionless experience for the customer anytime they interact with a point of contact at an organisation – even if the communication exchange is only one way. It’s centred on improving processes that meet customers’ expectations, and are easy and intuitive for them to follow and solve their problems.
However, even for the most seasoned of business owners, keeping up with these types of digital technology is not the most efficient way to use their time, energy and resources. Instead, many opt to outsource this digital responsibility to a reputable content marketing agency, or a group of industry professionals that specialise in this space, and create content that is both engaging, and ‘Google friendly’.
If you lack the time, energy or experience to successfully harness content marketing as a part of your customer experience strategy, the good news is that it’s never been more affordable to offload this task to the experts – but where do you find them?
The Key To Good Marketing Is Great Content
Here at Content Hive, producing top quality digital content is exactly what we do best. We have itemised a list of digital content services, and allocated credits next to each of these. This means that each month, you can use your credits with us to produce digital content such as blog articles, social media posts, videos and even animated Instagram stories. By using this model, we believe that it enables us to produce high quality content with faster delivery times.
If you aren’t quite sure where to start on your digital marketing journey and would like to speak to a professional, why not book in a free discovery call with us at Content Hive today to discuss how we can get your brand buzzing online.
