If you’ve found this guide, you’re already on the right track. You’ve noticed that CX is becoming increasingly prominent across industries. From SaaS and Ecommerce businesses to startups and telecommunications businesses, CX is always going to be pivotal to a company’s success.
According to Zendesk’s CX Trends Report 2023, 80% of leaders plan to increase customer service budgets over the next year. According to the same report, “60% of consumers have purchased something from one brand over another based on the service they expect to receive”.
So, you’re probably thinking it’s time to prioritise nailing down your customer experience strategy to keep up with the competition, increase customer acquisition, and build a more solid customer base.
Well, in this guide, we’ll take you through the basics of CX, what CX is, what it includes, and tips to get you started perfecting your customer journey.
What does CX mean?
CX, or Customer Experience, encompasses all aspects of customer interaction with your business from start to finish. It involves how your company engages with customers at every stage of their buying journey. In simpler terms, it’s about how customers feel during their interactions with your company.
This experience spans from the initial awareness of a product or service to the ongoing relationship customers have with your company. A positive customer experience indicates that customers are happy, satisfied, and more inclined to do business with you again.
What is CX strategy?
Analysing customer needs, preferences, and behaviours to gain insights into what they value.
Identifying and optimising every point of interaction between the customer and the company.
Ensuring a consistent and positive experience across various channels and interactions.
Recognising that employees play a crucial role in delivering a great customer experience and ensuring they are trained and motivated.
Implementing ways to gather and act on customer feedback to continuously improve the customer experience.
Leveraging technology to streamline processes and enhance customer interactions.
Aligning the company’s culture and values with a customer-centric approach.
Why do customer journeys matter?
The quality of your customer’s buying experience should be one of your highest priorities, especially now.
Companies are increasingly investing in perfecting the customer journey and tracking data to analyse how successful their strategy is. Customer journeys should never be overlooked. They represent the entire spectrum of interactions and experiences a customer undergoes with a business, offering a comprehensive view from initial awareness to post-purchase support. When you put the customer at the heart of your business strategy, you can create a customer-centric approach, essential for cultivating long-lasting relationships.
Identifying pain points and areas of friction during the customer journey helps businesses to improve overall customer satisfaction by addressing these challenges, and implementing changes. Understanding the customer journey ensures a consistent and seamless experience across diverse touchpoints and channels, such as websites, social media, in-store interactions, and customer support.
How do you measure customer service success?
There are several different ways to approach metrics for the progress of your CX strategy. We’re customer support outsourcing experts, so we tend to focus on the following:
- Revenue
- Customer growth
- Increases in support tickets for us to solve
But others include:
- Customer Satisfaction (CSAT)
- Net Promoter Score (NPS)
- Customer Effort Score (CES)
- First Contact Resolution (FCR)
- Average Response Time
- Churn
- Resolution Rate
- Feedback & reviews
To check if your customer service is doing well, you need to look at a mix of numbers and real-life experiences. Numbers tell you things like how many customers are happy, but stories from actual customers give you the full picture, allowing you to understand specific things to improve. It’s like having both the stats and the real talk to see if your team is really nailing it and keeping customers happy.
5 ways to nail CX
1. Create a CX strategy
It’s rarely a good idea to do anything in business without a strategy. In essence, a CX strategy is essential for creating a customer-focused, adaptable, and successful business. It provides you with a structured approach to enhancing your customer experience and ensures that efforts are aligned with your organisation’s broader goals. Investing in a CX consultant means you can get an expert to help you create a bulletproof strategy which will increase the likelihood of success.
2. Embrace omnichannel
Omnichannel support is an absolute no-brainer. Omnichannel support is important to the success of your CX strategy because it enables you to align your support operations with customer expectations. An omnichannel strategy provides flexibility, improves efficiency, and contributes to long-term customer satisfaction and loyalty. If you want to gain a competitive edge, create a seamless experience, and give your customers a sense of control and choice, offering support via phone, email, live chats and social media is the way to go.
3. Invest in technology
Everyone knows technology is crucial. Specifically, though, the integration of tech like AI and chatbots is really important in delivering support to your customers the way they want it. According to Accenture, 57% of business leaders feel that conversational chatbots deliver a large ROI on minimal investment. In addition, you also need to be able to offer your customers tech support when they have any problems interacting with your product, especially if you’re a SaaS company. In a lot of cases, outsourcing your tech support can be much more cost-effective as well as saving you time and giving you access to tech experts.
4. Collect and analyse data
When it comes to CX, it’s crucial to measure and optimise. Analysing trends, monitoring positive AND negative feedback and introducing an effective feedback loop means that you can see what’s working, and what needs to be improved to increase customer acquisition.
5. Be adaptable and open to change
Arguably the most important key to improving your CX is to make sure you’re versatile, adaptable, and open to change. Monitoring how customers engage with your business during the customer journey also means changing and improving your processes as you go along.
You need to be able to take negative feedback onboard and use it to your advantage by optimising any processes that might be hindering your consumers’ experience.
The future of CX
So, it’s looking like CX will be a bigger investment in the coming years, as well as centring around technology and machine learning. This means more data to analyse, better feedback loops, and a better understanding of human behaviours. It also means more competition, so it’s best to get ahead.
To wrap up
So, to wrap it all up, here’s the basic must-dos:
- Understand and implement an effective CX strategy
- Bring in a CX consultant if needed
- Use your team to bring about the best results
- Stay up-to-date with the latest technology (especially for Ecommerce & SaaS companies)
- Track, measure, adapt
CX is only going to become more and more important as the years go on. It’s time to nail your customer experience and create a trusting and returning customer base.
CX consulting & outsourcing to make headway - quickly
We’re a specialist customer service outsourcing company and a group of CX specialists. We support businesses of all kinds, including yours, with a range of services, to push them to grow and scale for the long term.
