Your consumers are talking about your brand online and with their friends and family. Making sure the info they spread is all positive is where customer experience (CX) strategy comes in. It helps you keep an eye on how you’re performing, pivot as needed and stay one step ahead of any trouble spots.
We will go over the best way to implement CX strategies with a focus on:
- What is CX strategy?
- Why should CX strategy be front and center?
- Ways to develop your customer experience strategies
- How to perfect your CX strut
And here are some CX strategy stats:
- 2% of organizations agree that CX insight helps brands achieve commercial success
- 59% of customers expect businesses to tailor their experience based on their past interactions.
- 84% of customers say they’re more likely to stick with a brand that treats them like a person, not a number.
Today, it’s about the customer, not you. Knowing where you stand when it comes to price, quality, value, social impact and more is really the only way to meet the needs of consumers and improve your CX.
Showing cosmetics consumer sentiment across a range of attributes, on a scale from –100 to 100. (April 29, 2021 – May 29, 2021)
What is CX Strategy?
CX strategy is a plan your brand sets in place based on data-driven decision-making. A CX strategy delivers experiences that meet or exceed customer expectations. It is multi-faceted and can be used for many things including:
- Putting out fires. When prioritizing the customer experience, you’ll be aware of things as they happen and understand why they happened, so you can quickly bring order to any chaotic situation, even a PR crisis.
- Providing a deeper customer description – who are they, what do they like, where are they from?
- Creating a roadmap to success based on your consumers wants and needs
- Helping your company face, address and put a plan in action to close the gap between customer expectations and what your brand can provide.
- Keeping your company accountable by measuring your KPIs over time, and against not only yourself, but also against competitors
Over 87% of companies believe that CX strategy has led to commercial success, so it’s worth focusing on, especially in today’s marketing landscape consumer experience is everything.
Why make CX Strategy a Focal Point?
Personalization is super important today with 59% of customers expecting brands to tailor their experience based on their past interactions. Additionally, 84% of customers say they prefer to stick with a brand that treats them like a person, not a number.
All of this comes down to knowing your audience and being engaged online, aka personalization. By tracking this with a social listening tool you will be alert, catching any bad customer experiences so you can quickly nip it in the bud. By confronting it and trying to resolve the issue, you show that you care, increasing customer satisfaction.
CX Strategy can keep you one step ahead of your competitors as well. Being first on the scene of an unmet desire can end with you being viewed as the authority. Or perhaps a competitor isn’t keeping track of their own consumers’ wants and desires. Eighty-nine percent of consumers will take their business to a competitor after a negative customer experience. By keeping a close eye on rivals, you can be this other competitor by offering what they didn’t
And when you put this all together, you get increased brand health, brand sentiments and revenue!
Now that we know what a CX strategy is and why it can be important, let’s talk about the how
Developing Your CX Strategy
Every savvy brand is benchmarking, and this is where your CX strategy journey actually begins. You need to know where you stand first before you can put a strategy in place. Consumer intelligence can easily identify the buzz surrounding your brand by revealing how many times you’re mentioned in posts or comments. And it can also identify brand sentiment, which is a piece of the puzzle not to be ignored as the world runs on emotions.
Once you’ve created a benchmark, you can establish priorities (customer acquisition and retention, growth and profits) keeping an eye on KPIs for each. This is where you dig down to the granular level and get to know your consumer through a consumer analysis. You want to define and capture consumer insights such as:
- Who do you want to target? If it’s Gen Z, how does your current messaging align with their values? If it’s off, just a little, that will be enough to lose the attention of a whole demographic.
- What are common connections shared between different groups, such as interests, professions, ethnicities?
- How are you performing in each of the above groups
For example, with this popular skin care brand, common professions can be seen. The higher the index value over 1, the more relevant the category is for the target topic. Here, personal services, homemakers, students and consumers who are generally very hard-working and pressed for time stand out as the main audiences of this brand.
Skincare Consumer Professions. Understanding who is talking about skincare helps brands message out appropriately. (March-May 2021)
It’s this intel that should inform the design of a brand’s CX journey. You wouldn’t target social service workers the same way you do bloggers or banking executives. Social listening tools open up the differences, big or small, and highlight unique ways to appeal to each in an authentic manner.
How great is it to be able to give a consumer something they wanted before they have a chance to express it? A CX strategy enables your brand to do this. It also points out gaps you may have been missing and helps you define initiatives required to address them – and to follow through and see if they work.
Perfecting Your CX Strut
You’ve crossed all your Ts and dotted all your Is – now you just sit back and watch it all come together, right? Not quite. Even though you’ve gone to great lengths to attract consumer attention, now that you have it, you need to monitor how it goes. And be prepared to pivot if needed. It’s a fickle crowd out there, and brands need every advantage to stay in their good favor.
Example of monitoring a skincare company’s conversation volume. Brand mentions spike with a new model announcement on 5/24, and sentiment remains steady. Later in the month, on 5/28, another spike in mentions is accompanied by negative sentiment. This is traced back to a product recall for a potentially cancer-causing ingredient.
And then the after-purchase experience is a critical part of the purchase funnel as well. This is where your brand is tested by the consumers you worked so hard to win over. You can assume that negative experiences with your product are bound to show up on social media at some point. Monitoring for these bombs using consumer intelligence should be part of any brand’s CX strategy. If you don’t know about them, you can’t get ahead of them and defuse them – and then what was all of the effort for
A great CX strategy starts and ends with benchmarking. It’s a continuous wheel of monitoring and tweaking. And it’s worth doing right, if you do it at all!
Does your brand have an impactful, measurable CX strategy in place? Reach out for a demo and never lose sight of your consumers’ wants and needs again!
