How to Create a Customer Experience Strategy for Your Business

If this is the first time that you’re developing a customer experience strategy, you might not have the budget or the time to make customer experience the centre of your business. Customer experience is an excellent asset for any business, however it takes time and patience to implement correctly, and if the business has never had a customer experience strategy before, the steps can see insurmountable. 

Here’s how to make it easier. 

Short term.

Every business has to start somewhere, and that is especially true for customer experience. To create a strong basis for unmatched customer experience, first you need to start shifting your business priorities towards customer service. 

Look at the biggest customer-facing problems that your business is currently facing right now. Are customers complaining about something in particular, such as order fulfilment or poorly-managed aftersales service? Is it hard for your customers to contact you remotely or get in touch with the aftersales department?

Make fixing those problems the priority. For six months, focus on easing the biggest problems that your customers are dealing with; not only will you see how quickly profit increases, but the goodwill generated through your earliest changes will make it easier to weather the much more detailed changes that will come with a long-term strategy. 

Medium term

Once you’ve made some changes to your customer-facing side, it’s necessary to look at what this means in the long-term. Short-term plans are excellent for generating a certain quantity of goodwill however that will fade if you go back to your old ways of doing things, and therefore it’s important to set longer term goals. 

After six months, you can start looking into setting up dedicated customer-related resources. If your business is small, it might be too costly to host a full-time customer experience team, however you would still need a department that is mostly focused on customer experience. 

At this stage, you can also start looking at your customer journeys. How are your customers finding you? Is it difficult to purchase your products or to use follow up services? How easy is it to contact customer service in the case of a problem? All of these are questions that a longer term strategy needs to address. 

This phase can take up to two years of your time. For diligent organisations, this can take less, but make sure it is a phase that fully answers all your customer service questions. 

Long term

After two years, you should have a decent idea of what your customers are like. You should also have an idea of the customer journey and any outstanding issues that you need to resolve. 

It’s now time to focus on setting up KPIs and budgets for your customer-facing side. Ideally, your customer-facing side and your business side are no longer two separate facets of your organisation, but if they still are, work on merging them together. Furthermore, ensure the availability of resources is high enough that all your customers can be taken care of should the need to do so arise. Additionally, assign a good budget to your customer service department to enable them to further your customer experience goals. 

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