How to Create a Customer Experience Strategy That leads to Conversations

Intro

A business is nothing without its customers, right? No matter whether you sell high-fashion clothing or the latest gadgets, you need to focus a lot of effort on attracting customers to your brand and boosting your conversion rate.

To do this, customer experience is key. You need to wow customers and provide them with an excellent experience in order to gain their trust and tempt them to spend their hard-earned cash.

With that being said, below, we are going to take you through the steps on how to create an excellent customer experience strategy that will deliver real results.

What is customer experience?

‘Customer experience’ refers to the impression a person has of your business as they navigate through every element of the buyer journey.

It’s important to deliver a great customer experience, not only to wow that individual but to grow your business. After all, 72 percent of customers will share a positive brand experience with at least six other people.

What is a customer experience strategy?

A customer experience strategy should incorporate both offline and in-store customer experiences. Basically, it will cover every interaction that a customer has with your brand.

Your customer experience strategy comprises the plans you have established to deliver a positive experience at every consumer touchpoint along the journey, and the purposeful ways of measuring those experiences. Again, this is both offline and online!

How to create a customer experience strategy

Now you know what a customer experience strategy is, let’s take a look at how to improve customer experience with a stellar strategy:

1. Create buyer personas - Start off by creating personas so that you can truly understand your audience. After all, if you don’t understand your audience, how are you going to create an experience that truly impresses them?
2. Work backward - It’s a good idea to reverse-engineer the experience. This is something Steve Jobs was very much an advocate of. So, start by listing the stages of the customer experience that people have with your brand. Then, discover where you can make an impression, for example, with speedy delivery. Start from there, and then ask yourself what you actually need to do to ensure that customers can seamlessly go through this stage. Repeat it for each and every element within the customer journey for both online and offline avenues.
3. Train your employees - You need to get the right people in place to begin with. The employees you hire will have a monumental impact on the experience your customers have. Don’t neglect this from a training perspective either. Help your employees to be customer-centric and the best they can be!
4. Address design issues - Customer experience also involves the experience people have while they are on your website. Design issues can be frustrating and result in potential customers going elsewhere. Make sure your website loads quickly, navigation is seamless, and you don’t have any bad links on your site. You also need to get rid of any unnecessary hurdles. When someone checks out, ensure that they only have the necessary fields to complete so that they are not wasting their time providing information you don’t really need. This can cause frustration and result in abandoned shopping carts.
5. Find out what your competition is doing - Competitor research is critical, both in terms of finding out what they are doing right and where they are going wrong. You will need to identify gaps if you are to differentiate your business.
6. Place great emphasis on customer feedback - When you are putting together a customer experience strategy, it is vital to place a lot of emphasis on feedback. While bad feedback can be difficult to read, it can help you to grow and improve your customer experience going forward. You should encourage customers to take surveys. Tempt them with a special offer or a competition entry, for instance. Also, practice social media monitoring. Look for mentions of your brands so that you can get an understanding of what the general feel is about your business.
7. Leverage Artificial Intelligence (AI) - AI technology has advanced considerably in recent years. You can no longer ignore it. AI can help to make the experience as easy and smooth as possible for customers. You can reduce the need to attend to every consumer conversation, which means your agents are freed up to concentrate on more complicated problems, and wait times are reduced. If you guide your audiences with carefully curated content, it also makes their life a lot easier when they simply have a routine question.

The importance of customer experience

Finally, let’s answer the question: why is customer experience important? Well, an exceptional experience for your customers is vital in terms of sustained growth. If you offer your customers a positive experience, this will encourage brand advocacy, help you to retain customers, and promote loyalty.

It’s important to understand that consumers have the power in today’s digital age. This is because they have more options available to them than ever before. If you don’t provide them with an outstanding experience, you can be sure that someone else will.

On the flip side, if you deliver a memorable and excellent customer experience, your delighted customers will share how impressed they have been with their friends, co-workers, and loved ones, which helps your brand to grow.

Elevate your brand by focusing on customer experience

So there you have it: an insight into the importance of customer experience and how to create a customer experience strategy that results in conversions.

If you follow the tips that we have provided above and put together a careful customer experience strategy, you should begin to slowly but surely see those conversion rates improve as a consequence.