Customer Experience (CX) is one of the key pillars of successful business. Customers do not evaluate a company solely based on its product or price. They evaluate it based on the entire experience – from the first contact and purchase to delivery, product usage, communication, and problem resolution.
That is why it is not enough for organizations to simply “care about customers”.
It is necessary to clearly define what kind of customer experience a company wants to provide and how it will consistently deliver it to customers.
That is why you need a CX strategy!
What is a CX strategy?
A CX strategy is a vision and action plan that define what kind of customer experience an organization wants to provide, who it wants to provide it to, and how this will contribute to achieving business goals. It must clearly define the value it creates for the customer and the value it brings to the organization.
In other words, a CX strategy answers several important questions:
• Who are our most important customers?
• What matters to them?
• What kind of experience do they expect from us?
• What kind of experience do we want to provide them?
• What promise do we make to our customers?
• How will we deliver on that promise?
• How will a better customer experience contribute to business results?
CX encompasses the entire customer journey and all of their interactions with the organization, regardless of whether the contact takes place via the website, point of sale, app, phone, email, social media, or an employee.
What should a CX strategy include?
There is no single universal template that will work for every company. A well-designed CX strategy should connect the following key elements:
CX vision
The first step is to answer the question: What kind of experience do we want to create for our customers?
For example: “We want shopping with us to be simple, fast, and effortless for the customer.”
If simplicity is part of our CX vision, then simplicity must influence the way we design our processes, website, app, communication, delivery, and customer support.
The CX vision becomes a criterion for CX design and a criterion for decision-making.
Most important customer segments
We cannot design a good customer experience if we do not know who we are designing it for.
That is why a CX strategy should identify the most important customer segments.
These may include:
• families
• customers aged 18 to 30
• older customers
• new customers
• business customers
• long-term customers
Each of these segments has different needs and expectations that need to be adequately addressed through customer experience design.
Customer needs and expectations
One of the most important questions is: What really matters to our customers?
These should be very concrete things, such as:
• easy purchasing
• product availability
• fast delivery
• clear information
• easy payment
• a quick response to an inquiry
• effective problem resolution
• consistent communication
It is important here to distinguish between what we think is important to customers and what customers themselves consider important.
That is why a CX strategy should be based on real insights from research, data, feedback, and customer behavior.
Desired customer experience
Once we have defined who our customers are and what matters to them, we need to define what we want the experience we provide to look like.
For example:
• purchasing should be simple
• we must deliver on what we promise
• customers should not have to unnecessarily repeat or explain their problem
• customer service should resolve problems effectively rather than simply answer questions
This is the point where a CX strategy moves from nice ideas and aspirations to concrete principles of organizational behavior.
Connection to business strategy
This is an area that is very often overlooked and left undefined.
A CX strategy must not be isolated from the business. If the business goal is, for example, sustainable and profitable growth through customer acquisition and retention, we need to understand how customer experience contributes to achieving that goal.
• A simpler purchasing process increases conversion
• Better problem resolution contributes to customer retention
• More reliable delivery will reduce the number of complaints
• A consistent experience will increase trust and loyalty
A well-designed CX strategy connects what is good for the customer with what is good for the business.
It does not choose between these two perspectives but finds the intersection between them.
How do you create a CX strategy?
One of the most common questions organizations ask is:
“How do you create a CX strategy?”
The answer is not to find the perfect framework and follow it.
There are numerous CX frameworks, models, and templates for developing a customer experience strategy. They can be useful because they provide structure to the process and help ensure that we do not overlook important elements.
But a framework is only a tool.
There is no best CX framework.
A good one is one that:
• fits your organization
• fits your level of CX maturity
• people understand
• you can easily explain
• helps you make better decisions
If you have a great framework that only the CX team understands, it will be difficult to create real change.
If you have a simple model that marketing, sales, IT, logistics, finance, management, and customer service understand – you have a much greater chance of making the strategy come to life.
CX strategy must be understandable to everyone
This may be the most important criterion of a good CX strategy.
Every person in the organization should understand what the company wants to achieve for the customer and how each person, from their own position and role within the organization, contributes to achieving it.
Because customer experience is not created by one department. It is created by the entire organization.
A CX strategy must be simple enough for employees to apply in their everyday work.
Imagine a situation in which an employee is faced with a customer problem and there are simply no rules or procedures for dealing with such a problem.
What happens then?
If the organization has a clear CX strategy, the employee has their own “compass” – a question to guide them: “What is best for the customer in this situation, and is it consistent with the experience we want to provide?”
When employees know how to answer that question, the CX strategy works, comes to life, and does exactly what it was designed to do.
CX strategy is not just a document
A beautiful presentation is not a CX strategy. A 50-page document is not a CX strategy either.
These are all useful tools, but a strategy truly exists only when it influences the decisions and behaviors of people across the organization. A CX strategy reaches its full meaning when it becomes part of the everyday way of thinking and decision-making at all levels.
Because the goal is not simply for everyone in the organization to know what is written in the CX strategy.
The goal is for them to know how to act when a real customer with a real problem is standing in front of them.