A well-crafted customer experience (CX) strategy can be the differentiating factor between a thriving business and one that struggles to retain customers.
You understand the value of having a CX strategy in place, and you’ve implemented one into your business. Yet, despite the best intentions, you find your CX efforts are falling short of expectations.
Why? What do you need to do differently?
Here are five possible reasons why your CX strategy isn’t delivering the desired results:
1. The evolving needs of your customers aren't reflected
Maybe you’ve focused on marketing segments rather than creating customer personas, or perhaps your customer personas aren’t a true reflection of your audience. If either of these is true, you may have struggled to reflect the needs, attitudes and behaviours of your customers and have failed to design and develop services and experiences that meet their needs.
At Engine, we define customer personas as fictional yet data-driven characters representing diverse customer needs, attitudes, and expectations. Take a look at our step-by step guide to crafting exceptional personas.
Customers are often left feeling frustrated if an organisation has no understanding of their behaviours, needs and attitudes. That's where personas help. They help you understand customer pain points and what’s driving their choices.
By looking at customer data and spending time with customers, we can look across the end to end journey to understand where the key pain points and opportunities are.
2. You don't have a clear and compelling customer experience vision
Without a central CX vision guiding you, your strategy won’t work, as it’s likely creating a siloed customer experience.
Many companies struggle to use their vision and strategic ambition to guide the creation of the right services and experiences for their customers. They often can’t envisage how to move beyond strategic planning to experience design and operations.
A company’s vision shouldn’t be static. A successful business is one that recognises the need to reinvent itself with the changing needs of its customers, because change is inevitable – especially when it comes to customer expectations.
What’s more, your company’s CX vision needs to be shared across the entire workforce – from the top to the bottom. Otherwise you can sometimes find departments being pulled in opposite directions.
At Engine, we use an outside-in, inside-out approach to customer experience. This means we look at both the business perspective and the customer's perspective – not just one or the other.
3. You don't have the buy-in of your stakeholders
A successful CX strategy needs to be led from the top. Without buy-in from senior executives driving the strategy, it’s hard to get engagement from the rest of your organisation.
That’s not to say that the senior executives are the owners. Rather, they’re the enablers of having company alignment, uniting teams and embedding competencies.
All departments, staff and roles need to be aligned. The experience can’t and shouldn’t be dependent on one function or role. The entire organisation is responsible and needs to be working towards the same goal.
Your employees play a crucial role in delivering great customer experiences. If they’re disengaged, unmotivated, or ill-equipped to handle customer expectations, it will inevitably reflect in the quality of service you provide.
4. You don't have a defined way of measuring your customer experience
Defining your KPIs across the end-to-end journey helps measure the success of your customer experience and demonstrates the value of customer experience.
The metrics of success will vary from organisation to organisation, but it’s important to know from the outset what you’re tracking against so that you’re constantly adapting to new challenges.
Customer expectations are constantly evolving, driven by factors such as technological advancements, industry trends, and competitive pressures. If your customer experience strategy remains static and fails to adapt to these changing expectations, you risk falling behind the competition.
Stay proactive by keeping a pulse on emerging trends, monitoring feedback from customers and industry influencers, and leveraging new technologies to enhance the customer experience. Be agile and willing to adapt your strategy as needed in order to stay ahead of the curve.
5. You don't have a clear customer experience roadmap
A CX roadmap is an overarching strategic plan that outlines the step changes the organisation needs to make over a period of time in order to deliver the future target experience.
Every time a customer interacts with your brand they embark on a journey, and a roadmap helps ensure you keep them on the right path to an exceptional service and positive outcome.
A clear CX roadmap helps you create the change that's needed and could be the difference between a one-time interaction with a customer and them becoming a lifelong customer.
Without a clear roadmap, you’re navigating your CX transformation blind, and you could be missing crucial opportunities to improve on your customers’ experiences, commercial opportunities and ways to make your service operate more effectively.
How to create a successful CX strategy
In essence, a successful CX strategy requires a holistic approach that addresses the needs of both customers and employees, aligns with business objectives, and adapts to changing market dynamics.
By addressing these five common oversights in your strategy as outlined above, you can identify areas for improvement and take proactive steps to enhance the effectiveness of your customer experience, ultimately driving greater customer satisfaction, loyalty, and advocacy for your brand.
Discover the fundamentals of a world-leading CX strategy, and enjoy some tips to help you design and execute a successful CX strategy.
Download our eBook ‘How to Adapt to the Challenge of Shifting Customer Demands’ to discover the common barriers to meeting shifting consumer demands, with tips on how to overcome them.
