A step-by-step guide for how to build a customer experience strategy

Customer loyalty is the holy grail of business success, and a superior customer experience strategy holds the key to unlocking it.

According to Qualtrics XM Institute’s report, ROI of Customer Experience, 2020, nearly 90% of consumers who give a company a "very good" customer experience (CX) rating are inclined to trust that company to fulfill their needs. In stark contrast, a mere 16% of consumers who assign a company a "very poor" CX rating express the same level of trust.

If your customers lack trust in your ability to deliver exceptional products while also providing reliable, unwavering support, your chances of success are poor – if not outright bleak.

That’s why a customer experience strategy serves as a powerful and absolutely essential tool that can pave the way to that all-important, increasingly valuable thing so many companies crave: loyalty.

In this article, you’ll learn the key benefits of designing a customer experience strategy, the main steps of building a loyalty-worthy experience, and best practices to enhance and refine your established strategy.

What is a customer experience strategy?

A customer experience strategy is a roadmap to creating exceptional experiences for consumers. It goes beyond individual interactions and encompasses every touchpoint throughout a customer’s journey with a business.

With a well-defined CX strategy, companies can gain a deep understanding of their customers, identify the most prevalent and problematic pain points, and proactively address those pain points and other issues.

For instance, a SaaS company with a strong digital customer experience strategy may map out things like interactive onboarding resources and training to help users master their product or service as quickly as possible. The company may also plan for proactive customer success workflows to ensure users extract ongoing value from the product.

By mapping out each stage of the digital customer experience, a SaaS company can anticipate recurring questions or problems and design tailored digital solutions that produce elite-level customer service and support at every touchpoint.

Why is a customer experience strategy important?

As we’ve established, building a customer experience strategy is crucial for fostering enduring relationships and cultivating loyalty. When customers feel valued and appreciated, businesses reap significant rewards, including through increased advocacy on behalf of their brands.

The Qualtrics XM Institute report reveals a number of compelling insights that speak to just how vital a stellar CX continues to be:

Purchasing power: A staggering 94% of customers who rate a company's customer experience as "very good" are likely to make future purchases from that company. In contrast, a mere 20% of those giving a company a "very poor" rating express the same intention.
Word-of-mouth influence: When customers perceive a company's experience as "very good," an impressive 94% are inclined to recommend the company to others. Conversely, only 13% of those assigning a "very poor" rating to a company are willing to make a similar recommendation.
Forgiveness and understanding: Companies that excel in customer experience earn forgiveness from their clients. A remarkable 77% of customers who rate a company's experience as "very good" are likely to forgive that company for a bad experience, while merely 15% of those giving a "very poor" rating to a brand exhibit the same forgiving attitude.

The importance of a customer experience strategy becomes even more apparent when you consider the following benefits:

Boosts customer retention

A well-executed customer experience strategy can help you neutralize churn threats and increase your ability to retain clients. By proactively gathering input to drive enhancements, you can satisfy customers at every touchpoint so they stay loyal to your company.

Increases customer lifetime value (CLV)

Customer lifetime value is a crucial metric when it comes to your customer experience strategy. It measures the total value of a customer relationship over the long run, rather than just on a transaction to transaction basis.

By paying attention to the entire customer experience from start to finish, you gain valuable, actionable insights into what really makes customers loyal. These newfound observations can help you identify areas for improvement, including the quality of support and service you offer and your customers’ overall level of satisfaction.

Builds and strengthens brand equity

Brand equity is about the feelings a consumer associates with a brand. To build positive brand equity, you must deliver on promises, offer the finest products and services, and be responsive to customer needs. On the flip side, under-delivering and providing disappointing experiences can lead to negative brand equity.

When you have positive brand equity, it almost always guarantees a base of passionate customers that could even be called devoted fans. These customers are not only happy to leave positive reviews but also share their experiences with others – providing invaluable brand advocacy – and engage in loyalty programs.

By implementing an effective customer experience strategy, you can create positive brand equity that minimizes negative reviews and cultivates individuals who stick with your brand, recommend it to friends and family, and form the foundation of a lasting customer cohort.

Synchronizes internal teams

Keeping customers happy and loyal takes a highly coordinated effort – which is why having a clear game plan is key. A solid strategy maps out who oversees each part of the user experience and lays out the steps for every interaction, ensuring that all team members are on the same page.

With strong synchronization, representatives always know the right response for any situation, and can quickly address issues or transfer customers to the right experts. In other words, your customers get a reliable experience no matter who they’re working with.

How to build a customer experience strategy

Now let’s take a look at the challenge that brought you here: how to design a customer experience strategy, step by step.

1. Assess your current customer experience strategy

The starting point for building a strong customer experience strategy is taking a close look at your existing approach. Assess what you're currently doing to engage customers, determining what's effective and where the opportunities lie for enhancement.

Don't be afraid to critically evaluate both your successes and your shortcomings. Honesty and transparency about where your CX stands will help shape a more impactful strategy going forward.

💡 Here are some key tips to assess your current customer experience strategy:

Analyze metrics like retention, repurchase rates, and satisfaction scores over time to recognize trends. Low scores show weaknesses to address.
Conduct internal interviews with frontline teams to understand challenges and gather new ideas on working with customers from their highly experienced perspectives.
Clearly document your assessment outcomes to use as a baseline for measuring the impact of your new strategy.

2. Develop core customer experience values

With the assessment complete, it's time to envision your company’s future. Craft a compelling vision for the experience you want customers to have with your brand. Then, support that vision with a clear set of values that will drive everyday actions.

Define principles for interacting with customers that inspire superior service and an appetite for learning and improvement. Values such as “wowing clients at every touchpoint” and “embracing each customer as a unique individual” should reverberate across your organization.

💡 Here are some key tips to develop core customer experience values:

Ensure every employee can recite the company’s values by heart through regular training and development.
Keep it simple, with two to four concise statements that provide clear-cut guidance rather than trying to convey dense, complex philosophies.
Model and frequently reference the values to emphasize their importance (this is especially important for company leaders).

3. Get the entire company on board

While customer-facing roles drive experiences, success requires collaboration across all departments. As your customer experience strategy unfolds, an assortment of different skill sets will need to unify behind it. Because achieving this level of solidarity is so challenging, it’s imperative to communicate why prioritizing the experience benefits everyone.

Gain buy-in and commitment from departmental leaders by emphasizing how prioritizing CX will give your company a competitive advantage. When executives prioritize the customer experience – both through their words and actions – others take notice and follow their lead, pushing CX innovation and driving new initiatives and solutions.

💡 Here are some key tips to get the entire company on board:

Clearly define each department's role in supporting CX initiatives.
Make CX objectives part of annual performance reviews for everyone.
Identify and celebrate your customer champions to highlight their importance.
Gather diverse viewpoints to strengthen your strategy.

4. Define your customer personas

While the initial steps of building a customer experience strategy focus on your company’s situation, values, and departments, it's equally important to pay attention to your users.

In many instances, you’ll already have personas in place for marketing and sales purposes. However, here we’ll narrow our focus down to personas for customer service and support.

A persona is essentially a fictional character created through research, representing the common traits of a particular group of clients. Creating personas helps foster empathy by putting a human face to cold, clinical demographic data. Further, it ensures that your strategy resonates with real people and their motives rather than just broad generalizations.

By diving into your customers' minds through these personas, you align your customer experience strategy with their expectations and challenges. This targeted approach leads to greater satisfaction, loyalty, and overall business success.

💡 Here are some key tips to define your customer personas:

Conduct in-depth interviews and focus groups with a wide range of customer types.
Use analytics to segment your customer base and identify patterns in behaviors and preferences.
Include both demographic and psychographic attributes to capture full profiles.
Leverage quotes and personal details to make personas relatable and "real."
As your customer base and business evolves, periodically revisit existing personas.

5. Identify customer needs and expectations

Once you’ve established your personas, you have the profiles that can help contextualize customer inquiries and requests. But to truly excel, delve deeper into understanding the nuances of each persona. Generalizing their needs and expectations in the form of simple bullet points helps, but it doesn’t constitute a truly great customer experience strategy.

Each customer may have unique and evolving needs that can vary on a case-by-case basis. When reaching out to your customer service teams, it’s critical to remember that they expect certain things from your business to be delivered on a consistent basis.

However, you must also recognize that their needs can change depending on their emotions and circumstances (maintaining patience and flexibility, therefore, is essential to these efforts).

Sometimes, a quick response is paramount. In other instances, people prioritize a high level of quality and clarity from support team members. It all hinges on a combination of factors, including their specific circumstances when reaching out, their emotional state at that particular moment in time, and how well your team can identify and adapt to their specific desires in a timely fashion.

Understanding and catering to these ever-changing customer expectations is key to delivering exceptional experiences.

💡 Here are some key tips to identify customer needs and expectations:

Actively listen to your customers to uncover their implicit needs and expectations.
Empower frontline staff to adapt processes on a case-by-case basis.
Map the customer lifecycle to address changing requirements over time.

Leverage the power of a customer data platform to get key insights into users behavior.

6. Map the customer journey

Mapping the customer journey offers a holistic view of your customer’s entire experience with your company, allowing you to drive improvements and create memorable moments.

A customer journey map is essentially a blueprint that outlines the steps your clients take to achieve their goals with your product or service. It captures the totality of their experiences over the course of their entire relationship with your company.

Let's take the example of a software application. When designing a digital customer experience strategy, you first need to consider the user onboarding process and subsequent journey toward mastering the platform.

This mapping exercise empowers you to understand the customer's perspective, anticipate their needs, and align your resources and efforts to deliver a seamless and satisfying experience.

💡 Here are some key tips to map and improve the customer journey:

Analyze journey touchpoints against your CX objectives to prioritize improvements.
Consider each step in customer onboarding, learning curves, and evolving needs over time.
Iteratively refine journey maps to elevate experiences aligned with your brand promise.

7. Set goals for your customer experience strategy

Setting goals for your customer experience strategy is important for driving results and progress over the long run. Think about what you want your ideal customer experience to be – maybe it’s increasing your Net Promoter Score (NPS), your customer satisfaction (CSAT), or other customer-centric metrics. Anchoring your strategy to specific KPIs gives it a clear finish line to work toward.

Don't forget the smaller milestones along the way, though. Establish internal metrics you can measure each quarter so you know you're on track to reach the larger, more all-encompassing end goal. Benchmarks will motivate teams to push boundaries.

With the right goals and measures in place, your CX strategy goes from a vague, unquantified plan that only exists on paper to something capable of triggering a real transformation that customers will notice.

💡 Here are some key tips to set goals for your customer experience strategy:

Get specific about what excellent CX looks like in your industry and for your brand.
Break your longer-term goals into interim milestones measured quarterly. This keeps the strategy accountable and helps course-correct as needed.
Set both quantitative and qualitative goals. Capture the emotional elements of experience, too, by using feedback and surveys.

8. Identify key customer experience metrics

Although not all goals necessarily need to be tied to metrics, it’s essential to monitor the key numbers that reflect the customer experience, regardless of your objectives.

Metrics provide tangible data that allows you to assess the effectiveness of your customer experience strategy. Without tracking key data points, you're left blindly navigating performance instead of making decisions backed by insights.

Here are some essential metrics to follow:

Net Promoter Score: Using a 0-10 scale, NPS measures loyalty and satisfaction based on the likelihood of customers recommending your business.
Customer Satisfaction Score: This metric indicates satisfaction levels through ratings on a 1-5 scale.
Customer effort score: CES assesses ease of use by measuring the effort required from users to achieve their goals
Churn Rate: Your churn rate calculates the percentage of customers no longer doing business with you in a given period.
Customer lifetime value: CLV establishes the total revenue expected from a customer over time.
First Contact Resolution: Also known as FCR, this measures the percentage of issues resolved on first contact with support.

Average Resolution Time: The average resolution time metric calculates the time it takes to solve a customer problem.

9. Gather and act on customer feedback

Feedback is one of the keys to reaching the true potential of your customer experience. Without a deep understanding of what people really want, you cannot effectively execute your CX initiatives.

To incorporate customer feedback into your strategy, you should create dedicated channels for customers to provide their input. This can be done through various means, including surveys, one-on-one conversations, focus groups, and other established feedback mechanisms.

An ideal time to gather feedback is during customer interactions, where you can capture their thoughts and sentiments in real-time. For instance, you can include a feedback survey after a live chat conversation, or incentivize customers to share their views after an interaction with a chatbot.

💡 Here are key tips to gather and act on customer feedback:

Look beyond just complaints – find unconventional insights within positive experiences, too.
Stay agile and be willing to act on small samples, rather than waiting to analyze thousands of responses before making impactful changes.
Close the loop by communicating to customers how you're implementing new ideas and innovating on your existing CX.

10. Personalize the customer experience

Personalizing customers’ experiences is a vital step in building an effective customer experience strategy. In today's landscape, where customer expectations are higher than ever, personalization is no longer a nice-to-have – it's become a must, especially when building a digital customer experience strategy.

According to McKinsey & Company’s Next in Personalization 2021 Report, 71% of customers expect personalized interactions from companies.² And if those expectations aren't met, 76% of them become frustrated.

The power now lies in the hands of the customers, who have the freedom to choose alternatives if their experience falls short.

However, personalization is not just integral to the customer experience; it's also a key driver of business growth. The McKinsey report also found that companies that excel at personalization generate 40% more revenue from these efforts compared to average companies.²

💡 Here are key tips to gather and act on customer feedback:

Segment your customers based on common needs, behaviors, and history for more targeted interactions.
To create distinct moments that resonate, draw on all you've learned about your customers.
Tailor communications, recommendations, support, and more to reflect customer realities.
Aim to surprise and delight by understanding what drives each unique person.

Check out Intercom’s guide to CX personalization.

11. Train your customer service teams

Everything we’ve addressed throughout this article will help your representatives be truly ready to deliver the best customer experiences possible.

However, you must also identify the unique training needs of each team member as a part of a winning customer experience strategy. By providing coaching and training programs, you’ll prepare your service teams to excel at their jobs.

And don't stop at teaching technical skills alone. Take it a step further by focusing on building your customer service members’ soft skills. This will help employees develop the tools and resources necessary to establish an emotional connection with your clients. Bear in mind that loyalty is built on precisely this emotional connection: customers remember how they felt when using your product or service.

💡 Here are key tips to train your customer service teams:

Conduct skills assessments to identify specific training needs for each rep.
Coach individuals toward excellence through goals, feedback, and growth-focused learning.
Offer on-demand lessons so reps can self-learn at their own pace.

12. Continuously evolve your customer experience strategy

In today's dynamic world, standing still means falling behind. Customers' preferences and desires are constantly shifting, and the best CX strategies understand and are constructed around this relentless fluidity.

A customer experience strategy that disregards the continuous evolution of customers and their relationships with brands will struggle to resonate.

Rather than relying on a static plan, your CX must view transformation as a vital part of its DNA. Regularly evaluate key metrics and feedback to optimize what you've learned and deliver optimal experiences that stand the test of time.

💡 Here are some key tips to evolve your customer experience strategy:

Always pilot-test new initiatives before wide-scale rollout.
Dedicate resources to exploring emerging technologies like AI chatbots.
As strategic priorities evolve, recalibrate your existing goals and KPIs.

Best practices to elevate your digital customer experience strategy

Now that we've covered some of the most important steps in the digital customer experience, let's explore a few best practices to further enhance CX strategy for online businesses.

Brainstorm new ideas and approaches

Brainstorming is a structured technique that encourages innovative thinking and the exploration of fresh concepts. By bringing together a diverse group of individuals with relevant expertise, you can tap into a wealth of knowledge to solve problems and generate creative solutions.

Embrace self-service solutions

A strong digital customer experience strategy gives people independence. Rather than relying on your support representatives, they can find fast, reliable answers through self-service tools like knowledge bases and chatbots.

This type of highly accessible self-service benefits both customers and businesses. Customers receive timely solutions to their common issues, while your support team has more time to tackle the type of complex, singular problems that demand their high-level expertise.

Provide omnichannel support

Customers interact online with brands through many different channels, and you’ve got to be ready to deliver consistent experiences across all these points of contact. Whether users engage by email, live chat, or social media, they should receive a uniform, coherent level of service.

Be proactive about customer service

Rather than a reactive approach, look ahead to anticipate customer needs. A great digital customer experience strategy focuses on delivering support proactively by addressing issues before they arise.

By preemptively providing targeted, personal support through messaging channels, you empower customers with just-in-time help. Using features such as messages, banners, and product tours, you ensure the best experience by keeping support always available while still respecting customers' autonomy.

Leverage the power of automation and AI

As your business expands its customer base, maintaining the same level of service can become challenging. However, with the right tools, you can overcome this hurdle and unlock customer experience automation.

AI and automation offer incredible benefits that enhance the customer experience and provide convenience for your support team. For instance, AI chatbots can interpret customer questions and maintain engaging dialogue, even when reps are unavailable. They’re able to understand context and respond helpfully in both content and tone.

AI chatbots’ conversational skills adapt automatically without requiring extensive, time-consuming setup. You can configure them to reference your knowledge bases or other support content, and they'll smoothly guide users to self-service while simultaneously building relationships through personalized interactions.

Even when a chatbot just redirects a customer to your knowledge base, it’s still pointing them in the right direction – toward a potential solution – allowing your company’s support to be accessible 24/7.

How Intercom helps your customer experience strategy

In today's demanding market, where loyalty must always be earned and in many cases hard-won, a solid customer experience strategy is how you stand out. At Intercom, we understand the importance of satisfying customers and fostering loyalty through premier experiences.

That’s why we offer a comprehensive customer service platform that can help your business by:

Unifying valuable data to identify customer needs effectively.
Collecting and analyzing feedback for ongoing improvements.
Personalizing customer journeys to provide real value.
Offering convenient self-service solutions like knowledge bases and chatbots.
Providing proactive support that facilitates positive customer experiences.
Harnessing the power of automation and AI tools for streamlined customer experiences.

Advance and transform your digital customer experience strategy by leveraging Intercom. Start a free trial today or ask for a demo.

Sources

1. Qualtrics XM Institute, 2020 ROI of Customer Experience. To understand the connection between customer experience (CX) and loyalty, Qualtrics XM Institute examined feedback from 10,000 U.S. consumers describing their experiences with and loyalty to different companies across 20 industries.

2. McKinsey & Company, Next in Personalization 2021 Report. McKinsey surveyed 1,013 people, sampled and weighed to match the US general population 18+ years.

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