6 Steps for Creating a Customer Experience Strategy

Having a customer experience strategy in place helps boost revenue and build customer loyalty.

Nearly half (45 percent) of 1,920 business professionals surveyed placed “customer experience” as the top business priority for the next five years, according to customer relationship management software company SuperOffice.

Yet less than half of all the organizations surveyed plan to invest in a customer experience strategy next in 2023, even though “Companies who successfully implement a customer experience strategy achieve higher customer satisfaction rates, reduced customer churn and increased revenues,” says SuperOffice.

Today’s hospitality and business customers have higher expectations than in the past, which makes having a customer experience strategy in place all the more important.

“Businesses that seek to deliver an outstanding customer experience face challenges today due to elevated customer demands and expectations,” according to marketing, customer experience consulting and technology provider Fusion Alliance.

“To be successful, you must rethink and reorganize your experience strategy to accommodate these demands and shorten the gap between business goals and customer needs.”

The value of implementing a customer experience strategy

When you have a customer experience strategy in place at your business or organization, you position yourself ahead of competitors and help build customer loyalty.

“Customer experiences hold the power to differentiate a brand, and over the last year,the tangible effects of CX investments have proven critical to every industry,” according to “State of Customer Service: Winning the ROI Battle on CX Investments, a report from customer service consulting company Rightpoint.

“According to eMarketer, companies who are advanced CX organizations in retail, for example, have seen a 30 percent increase in lifetime customer value and a 23 percent increase in basket size since early 2020,” says the report.

Read on for six tips on how to create and implement a customer experience strategy for a better guest experience, higher revenue and better return on investment (ROI).

1. Focus on a clear customer experience vision

The first step in creating your customer experience strategy is to have a clear customer-focused vision and create specific statements that act as guiding principles,” according to SuperOffice.

“For example, Zappos uses their core family values and these values are embedded into their culture, which includes delivering ‘wow’ through service, being humble and embracing change,” says SuperOffice.

“Once these principles are in place, they will drive the behavior of your organization. Every member of your team should know these principles by heart and they should be embedded into all areas of training and development.”

2. Know your customers

“If your organization is going to really understand customer needs and wants, then they need to be able to connect and empathize with the situations that your customers face,” says SuperOffice, which recommends segmenting your customers and creating customer profiles (personas) for different groups.

For example, one persona could be “ages 30 to 45, loves new technologies and brief straightforward explanations.”

3. Make an emotional connection

“Customers become loyal because they are emotionally attached and they remember how they feel when they use a product or service,”says SuperOffice. “A business that optimizes for an emotional connection outperforms competitors by 85 percent in sales growth.”

4. Set nearer-term goals

Rather than base outcomes for two to three years in the future, as many businesses do, Rightpoint recommends targeting nearer-term goals that “set the path to ROI” and including l”eading indicators” of whether you’re on the right track.

5. Include a measurement strategy

Establish the data and results you’ll measure, methods of measurement and when you plan to report the findings, recommends Rightpoint:

“As part of this exercise, understand what data you need that you don’t have today and establish the requirements to put the appropriate measurement strategy in place. Implementation of the measurement strategy should be considered a core part of the overall initiative.”

6. Learn and improve from real-time customer feedback

“You need to ask – and ideally you do this by capturing feedback in real time,” says SuperOffice. “Use live chat tools to have real time conversations and when done, send a follow up email to every customer using post-interaction surveys and similar customer experience tools.”