The 5 Essential Elements of a Customer Experience Strategy

TL;DR:

• Customer experience strategies involve techniques designed to create the best possible experience for the customer.
• Good CX strategies enable you to reap a multitude of benefits, including higher levels of engagement, loyalty, and satisfaction.
• Key elements of a customer experience strategy include optimizing touchpoints, prioritizing personalized interactions, creating interactive experiences, creating a positive feedback loop, and tracking the right metrics to measure your results.
• With Jebbit, you can create engaging interactive experiences that allow you to collect data that will be useful for your customer experience strategy.

Today’s savviest marketers are turning their attention toward building better customer relationships. But what does that mean?

It goes beyond great products, smart pricing, or on-brand messaging. Successful customer relationships are built on amazing experiences — and as a marketer, you can plot out how to create those experiences with a customer experience strategy.

Where should you begin? We’ll show you. You’ll learn about customer experience strategies, their benefits, and how to create them below.

What Is a Customer Experience Strategy?

A customer experience (CX) strategy is all about making the customer experience as amazing as possible. So how do you do that?

In simple terms, a CX strategy should look at every component of the overall customer experience. This encompasses the entire customer journey and every touchpoint along the way — from the initial point at which customers discover your brand all the way to the purchase and into the retention stages. The idea is that no matter where customers are along the journey, you can use your CX strategy to optimize it so that you can increase engagement, offer better user experiences, and boost overall customer satisfaction and loyalty.

What Makes a Customer Experience Strategy Crucial?

Today’s markets are saturated, highly competitive places. A great customer experience can be the differentiator between a purchase from your brand or from any number of other competitors. That’s why it’s crucial for modern brands to have a solid CX strategy in place. When you’re actively optimizing the customer experience via a smart strategy, you can:

• Provide an enjoyable experience that increases customer loyalty and satisfaction.
• Generate higher levels of engagement, which leads to more word-of-mouth recommendations, more interactions with your brand, and more opportunities to sell to both returning and new customers.
• Retain more customers and reduce churn, which will lower your total customer acquisition cost while increasing customer lifetime value (CLV).
• Make your brand more valuable in the eyes of consumers (also known as increasing your brand equity). 

The benefits above are just the beginning. Ultimately, it’s all about finding ways to create a customer-centric experience that keeps people happy and coming back for more — and that’s why a well-designed CX strategy is a recipe for growth.

5 Essential Elements to Add to Your Customer Experience Strategy

Ready to discover what you can add to your CX strategy to better meet and exceed customer expectations? Below, we’ll cover the must-have elements that can create end-to-end positive experiences for your customers.

1. Optimize Customer Touchpoints

If you haven’t yet tried customer journey mapping, you should — and the reason why is because once you’ve finished your map, you’ll discover that your customer journey is filled with touchpoints unique to your brand. Every possible interaction — your social media posts, website content, in-store encounters with your products, your e-commerce checkout page, and more — represents an opportunity to optimize and create an even better customer experience. 

Once you’ve mapped it all out, you can start analyzing touchpoints individually to see where the pain points are. Analysis and optimization methods will differ from one touchpoint to the next, but here are some general steps to take:

• Along with customer journey maps, it’s helpful to develop customer personas so that you can better understand needs, preferences, and pain points.
• Assess touchpoints as a whole to ensure that you’re providing a consistent omnichannel experience with unified messaging.
• Check website traffic data, social media statistics, and other key metrics to spot places where people may be bouncing away from your brand.
• Make it easy for customers to leave feedback — and be sure to listen and act on customer concerns.
• When it comes to direct interactions with customers (chat interfaces, email, social media interactions, customer support, etc.) focus on quick response times and customer-centric employee training.

2. Prioritize Personalized Interactions

Another component to a successful customer experience strategy is an emphasis on personalized interactions. Personalization gives you a big competitive advantage over brands that don’t offer these types of experiences. That’s because it helps customers to feel valued and appreciated, which in turn increases loyalty and satisfaction — and that translates to improved customer retention and higher conversion rates. 

There are a variety of ways to create opportunities for personalized customer interactions. Examples include email marketing, on-page product recommendations, or self-service chatbots that help users find products or information in real time. No matter how you create personalized experiences, you’ll need to get to know your customers — and you can do that in a few different ways:

• Collect first-party data via interactions on your website and on social media. 
• Keep track of browsing information, purchasing behavior, and other types of customer data to learn about customer preferences and buying habits.
• Use surveys or quizzes to learn even more about what your customers want and need.

3. Engage With Interactive Experiences

Engagement levels can be the make-or-break difference when it comes to customer experience management. You don’t want your brand experience to be a forgettable one, and the best way to avoid that is to work hard to keep customer engagement levels high. 

The problem with engagement is, ad fatigue is a real thing — and it extends beyond advertisements to other types of marketing materials too. With brands relying heavily on social media marketing, blogs, video content, email marketing, and other digital experiences, today’s consumers have seen it all, which makes it harder and harder to capture their attention.

That’s what makes interactive experiences so valuable. Traditional marketing techniques ask viewers to read or watch — but interactive experiences are by default more engaging because they ask customers to actively participate.

A&W Restaurants recently partnered with Jebbit to create interactive experiences — and they’re a great example of how they can build engagement. These experiences included a “Collector’s Mug Logo Vote,” an experience for National Root Beer Float Day. 

In terms of engagement, the experiences were a huge hit. More than three-quarters (77%) of users who saw them engaged with them. Nearly all website visitors who began an experience (96%) completed it. Not only did A&W create a fun and memorable experience for their customers, but they also got to collect lead information from 85% of respondents, which enables them to further engage customers with personalized email marketing.

4. Create a Customer Experience Strategy Feedback Loop

You may also sometimes see the CX strategy feedback loop referred to as a “closed-loop customer feedback strategy.” The reason why is because it’s a system that creates a closed loop that relies on feedback to make improvements to the customer experience. Here’s how it works:

• You gather feedback from customers via reviews, social media interactions, surveys, questionnaires, feedback forms, and other types of interactions.
• Next, you analyze that feedback to look for common themes — for example, pain points like bad experiences with your customer support team or customer needs such as new feature requests.
• With feedback in hand, you can now get to work on using it to make whatever changes are most sought-after among your customers.
• Once the changes are complete, make an announcement to your customer base — and request further feedback to see if the changes have improved the customer experience.
• Continue to make adjustments as needed based on the second round of feedback — and at the same time, continue to collect and analyze new feedback so that you can add more items to your list of customer experience improvements to make.

This approach to improving the customer experience comes with two huge benefits. First up, by giving customers exactly what they’re asking for, the customer feedback loop stands to offer bigger experience improvements than other, subtler methods. 

Second — and perhaps even more importantly — the customer feedback loop is a vital way to make customers feel seen and heard. When they can actually see your brand implementing their suggestions, it can give them a sense of active participation and ownership, which can send customer loyalty levels through the roof.

5. Track the Right Customer Experience Metrics

In marketing, there are dozens if not hundreds of metrics you can track — and depending on your business goals and initiatives, you’re likely already tracking many of them. But which ones are the best to inform your CX strategy? Here’s what we recommend:

• Net Promoter Score (NPS): Usually presented as a survey question with ratings from one to 10, your NPS measures the number of customers who are thrilled enough with your brand to recommend it to others.
• Customer Effort Score (CES): Ask customers how easy it is to purchase and use your product or service to create a measurement of how easy it is to do business with your brand.
• Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT): This metric measures how satisfied customers are with the experience provided by your customer service team.
• Customer Churn Rate: Churn is a measurement of the number of customers who cancel subscriptions or stop making purchases.
• Customer Lifetime Value: CLV measures the average value of a customer over their lifecycle with your brand.

Make Jebbit a Part of Your Customer Experience Strategy

With a solid customer experience strategy, you can build the kind of loyalty and satisfaction that keeps people coming back for more. Essential components of a good CX strategy include touchpoint optimization, personalized interactions, engaging interactive experiences, and more.

When it comes to creating interactive experiences that will delight your customers, Jebbit is here to help. With our Experience Builder, you can create not only surveys, quizzes, and polls but also fun games and other types of interactive content. 

To learn more about how we can help you round out your CX strategy, schedule a strategy call with one of our Experience Experts.