Is your customer experience strategy up to par? 5 strategies to level up

“User-generated content,” “customer experience,” “omnichannel marketing”—every year, brands come up with new and exciting marketing buzzwords that everyone rallies around. While some of these ideas come and go, we think one will stick around: customer experience (CX). 

Why? Aside from wanting to give your customers a stellar experience, businesses that invest in CX see big returns. And those that don’t? They’re losing customers:

• Over 40% of customer-obsessed companies saw 10% growth in revenue from their previous fiscal

• 52% of customers will switch to a competitor after just one bad experience

• 80% consider the experience as important as the products or services you offer

If you’re struggling to create a customer experience your customers love or need help making it better, we’ve got five strategies to help you do just that. We’re breaking down CX and five strategies to build a better customer experience.

What is the customer experience?

Simply put, the customer experience is any interaction your customers have with your business, from the second they become aware of you to becoming a loyal customer. Every interaction—or touchpoint—is part of CX, like:

• Seeing a social media ad

• Visiting your pricing page

• Reading blog posts or downloading an ebook

• Subscribing to your email newsletter

• Renewing their subscription or upgrading

• Looking at product reviews

And yes, the customer experience even includes when customers decide to leave, whether it's canceling their subscription or making a single purchase and never coming back.

Why the customer experience matters

We already know ‌customer experience is top of mind for your customers—over 50% will leave you after one bad experience. But there's more to it.

Businesses that take every opportunity to create an extraordinary CX build stronger bonds between their brand and their customers. Why does that matter? Because consumers have literally thousands of options.

Consumers can be picky about where they shop—they want to spend money on brands that provide exceptional experiences. CX isn't a nice to have. It's a must-have competitive differentiator.

HubSpot sums it up perfectly:

"A remarkable customer experience is critical to the sustained growth of any business. A positive customer experience promotes loyalty, helps retain customers, and encourages brand advocacy."

5 strategies to create a better customer experience

​​Creating an unforgettable customer experience has to be intentional. These five strategies will help you prioritize your customers and create a well-thought-out CX:

1. Build emotional connections

2. Define your customer personas

3. Put CX at the forefront of your training

4. Leverage employee feedback

5. Use key performance indicators (KPIs) to improve your CX

1. Create emotional connections

What comes to mind when you think about the iconic shoe brand Nike? Probably its signature swoosh or powerful tagline: Just do it. 

Those three little words are powerful because of the emotional charge behind them. They encourage customers to take risks, get out of their comfort zone, and to believe in themselves.

They build an emotional connection between brand and consumer. Like Nike, many top brands cultivate a loyal following by creating that emotional connection.

To do that, you need to fully understand your audience. Who are they, what do they want and need from you, and how does your product or service solve one of their pain points? Once you have a handle on your customers, you can deliver empathetic messaging that plays on their emotions.

Just look at this Google Assistant ad that plays into '90s nostalgia and all the feels (that any millennial would appreciate).

If you can get customers engaged emotionally with your brand, you're more likely to turn them into loyal repeat customers.

2. Define customer personas

​​Do you know who your customers are... really know them? Your personas help you understand your customers better. They include general demographic data and specific and insightful psychographic information that helps you:

• Pinpoint who exactly you're targeting or should be targeting

• What your customers care about

• How your product or service serves their needs

• Refine your marketing messages

• And more

But you'll need real, hard data to start building your personas. While zero-party data—straight from your customers is best—combining it with first and second-party data can help you truly understand your customers.

Customer feedback surveys are a good place to start. They'll help you bring your personas to life, so you can build accurate personas and tailor your customer journey around them.

3. Prioritize CX in training

Gone are the days of marketing being the sole team responsible for CX. Sure, marketers are primarily responsible for researching customers and building personas. They lead journey mapping exercises to understand the customer journey and design a better CX.

But great customer experiences are everyone's job—from the social team and marketing to customer success, sales, and customer service. The best way to make sure all teams are on board and know how to deliver is to train them.

Let's take a look at your customer service team:

• Do they know how to collect customer feedback?

• Do they have the tools they need to gather feedback?

• Do they know how to resolve issues quickly?

• Have you trained them on how to de-escalate?

• Do they have the freedom to offer discounts or go above and beyond without manager approval?

• If they receive negative feedback, do they know the process for submitting requests or updating processes?

Training them to have a customer-centric mindset will help them prioritize creating a seamless CX.

4. Leverage employee feedback

Customer feedback is invaluable... but so is what your employees have to say. Survey them regularly (along with customers) to uncover hidden insights—especially from your front-line workers, like those on your customer service team.

Your customer service team can provide more granular feedback, like how you're delivering your CX vs. how customers receive it. This hands-on experience with customers makes them an ideal resource for understanding how you can improve your customer experience.

It's as simple as sending an employee engagement survey every six months. Check in with your team and see what they love and don't love so much about their jobs. Ask how they think you can improve processes and what changes they'd make to benefit the customer.

Their feedback can be a game-changer in creating a CX that aligns more closely with customer expectations and delights them at every touchpoint.

5. Use KPIs to create a better CX

Every good strategy starts with goals—trackable goals. KPIs are vital to measuring those goals and seeing what's working and what's not with your existing customer experience. Typical customer experience KPIs include metrics like:

• Churn and retention rate

• Monthly recurring revenue (MRR) or annual recurring revenue (ARR)

• Net promoter score (NPS)

• Customer satisfaction score (CSAT)

• Cart abandonment rate

• Average resolution time

• And much more

Having tangible metrics quickly reveals where you need to focus your efforts. For example, if you have a long average time to resolve issues that are affecting your churn rate, you can expect that reducing the time to resolve issues could improve the CX and reduce churn.

Dive into the data and let it guide you toward the changes you need to make to create a better customer experience.

Whether you're making small changes to improve your current customer experience or are just starting to think about your CX, these strategies will help you focus your efforts. Remember, customers needs evolve—your CX strategy should, too.