A powerful customer experience strategy — that’s in place well before clients even start interacting with your brand — is critical for business success. Here are four essential tips for building a winning strategy.
Customer satisfaction is about more than offering support at the point of sale or on the other end of a phone line. Providing a premium customer experience (CX) starts when customers learn about your business and continues even after purchasing your product or service.
To elevate your CX game, you must understand and cater to your customers' unique needs and expectations at every stage in their journey. The following four strategies aim to create a customer experience that not only meets but exceeds expectations, ensuring that each interaction leaves a lasting, positive impression.
1. engage the whole organization
Some businesses still pin responsibility for customer satisfaction on their sales and marketing teams. But that’s an outmoded way of thinking. These days, customers interact with brands in diverse and sometimes unpredictable ways. For example, person A might hear about your product on social media and then buy it through your website. Meanwhile, person B flips the process, purchasing the product online and then raving about it on Instagram.
To provide customers with a seamless experience across all these different methods of interaction (known as an omnichannel approach), your organization needs to think more holistically. One way to achieve this is to cross-train employees, teaching them about different roles throughout the company. By removing traditional barriers between functions, employees can begin to think about how the business as a whole delivers a customer experience.
2. train employees to have a CX mindset
Delivering outstanding service requires a customer-focused mindset, where you empathize with the client and approach every task from their perspective. This is a teachable skill, so make sure employees have the training they need to deliver the highest level of service, either through in-house reskilling and upskilling initiatives or external online training platforms.
Internal customer service is also critical to business success. For people in IT or payroll, the colleagues they interact with are their customers. If those co-workers receive poor service, this could impact morale and have a knock-on effect on the end customer. That’s why instilling a customer experience mindset in all employees is vital.
3. balance tech with a human touch
While digital solutions offer efficiency, it’s essential not to forget the human element. According to one study, more than half of customers find automated systems frustrating because of difficulty connecting to a human agent.
How do you strike that balance? Use the tech — chatbots or detailed knowledge bases like FAQs and online tutorials — for routine customer queries, freeing human representatives to offer richer and more tailored guidance. These agents can also be trained to specialize in individual subject areas to provide even more personalized assistance for product or service selection.
4. create customer personas to shape your strategy
To give customers the experience they expect, you need to understand who they are and what motivates them. Collect data from your customer relationship management system and other channels to segment your customers and create buyer personas, giving each persona a name and personality.
For example, Emma is 30 years old and comfortable finding and following product instructions on a video tutorial, whereas Rob (44) prefers reading instructions on a web page. These buyer personas help you visualize your target audience to better understand how your omnichannel approach will be used.
A powerful customer experience strategy is critical for the success of your business. If you’re looking to build out your organization with the top talent you need to deliver a seamless CX strategy, Randstad can help.