How to Define a Customer Experience Strategy

What is a customer experience (CX) strategy?

A customer experience strategy is an organized approach for delivering the best possible customer experience with your business across all touchpoints in their customer journey. It involves turning every customer interaction into a positive and meaningful experience so that it's easier to find new customers and convert existing customers into loyal fans. 

A successful customer experience strategy, at a high level, starts with knowing your customers, understanding marketplace data and conditions, and deciding how your company's mission and vision fit into all of that.

This process ideally includes gathering input and involving people from all departments in your organization, not just team members who are in customer-facing roles. By aligning all of your customer insights from across your company, you maximize your ability to build a better customer experience and create more long-term customer relationships. 

Why is having a CX strategy so important?

Having a CX strategy is important because it gives all of your customer-facing team members clear guidelines on how to shape customer interactions and offer the best customer experience they can possibly provide. It also helps your entire organization by prioritizing the opinions and experiences of those who matter most—your customers. This leads to more sales, more word-of-mouth referrals, and most importantly, more happy and loyal customers. 

It's not just about giving attentive customer service, either. Customer service is one type of interaction along the customer journey. It's where your team helps customers walk through standard purchase and onboarding processes, and addresses any questions that the customer initiates. Customer experience, on the other hand, entails every moment your customer looks at or interacts with your product or company. Both are critical but not the same. 

Another thing to note is that a truly powerful CX strategy isn't possible without customer experience design. CX design is the practice that design teams undergo to refine and optimize all touchpoints before, during, and after the customer sale or conversion. It's about striving to delight customers at each step of their journey, using your company's brand promise as the unifying thread. The end goal of CX design is to nurture strong customer-brand relationships throughout these meaningful moments, whether it's a direct interaction with your product, on social media, your website, or anywhere else.

The importance of CX is undeniable. Now, let's look closer at the key elements of CX strategy that will provide your base for building a successful strategy of your own. 

4 key elements of a great CX strategy 

While every customer experience strategy will vary across companies and sometimes even across different product lines within the same company, the elements of customer experience strategy are the same. They include:

1. Data-driven, strategic insights

2. Alignment to mission and vision

3. Tools and technology

4. Customer service support and self-service solutions

1. Data-driven, strategic insights

Data-driven, strategic insights include any information about your customer that is measurable and actionable. This can consist of market and consumer research, as well as competitive intelligence: both shed light on what customers are doing, where they spend their time, how often they take certain actions, and who else is in your market vying for their attention. 

Getting data-driven insights requires a plan for gathering and analyzing data effectively, which any product manager or product marketing manager should know how to do. This step is also infinitely more manageable when you're using a powerful database tool like Airtable. 

2. Alignment to mission and vision 

Like any viable business strategy, you’re more likely to have success with your customer experience strategy when you align your efforts with your company's mission and vision. This adds an element of authenticity to your customer experience. In action, this is as simple as asking yourself this question when making customer-related decisions: "does this approach with customers a good representation of our company's mission and vision?". 

Remember to also actively include leadership and staff involvement at a cross-functional level. This ensures that you're accurately interpreting your company's vision and not making decisions in a vacuum.

3. Tools and technology

There's an endless amount of business tools and technology available to help you optimize your CX operations. Use that to your advantage. The right tools give you more capability to gather data, particularly customer feedback, in real time and ways to automate processes and analyze data more efficiently. Whatever you decide, be sure to thoughtfully align your tools and technology with the contours of your company's specific customer needs. The tools and technology should mold around your needs, not the other way around. 

4. Customer service support and self-service solutions

Customer service takes on many forms, but it typically appears as either live support (chat, email, phone call) or self-service (help center documentation). Both are integral to curating an optimal customer experience because they are familiar outlets for customers seeking help about your product. Knowing how to position live support for your products, which self-service options makes sense for you to offer, and your company’s communication style on each medium, represents a huge part of a complete customer experience strategy. 

There you have the key elements of a customer experience strategy. But understanding the elements required to sustain a great CX strategy is one part of the puzzle. Next is implementing the best practices for designing your own.

Best practices for designing a great CX strategy

With so many things to consider in a customer experience strategy, it's hard to know where to start. One thing to take comfort in is the fact that every customer interaction is valuable, and any improvement you make to their experience can change the course of the whole customer journey. For that reason, giving attention to even one key CX element is a worthwhile endeavor.

Here are five CX strategy best practices to help you choose your move:

1. Know your customers and understand their POV

2. Provide consistent, quality support

3. Design a customer experience that's pleasant, practical, and proactive

4. Invest in tools and technology that enhance the customer experience and can evolve with the business

5. Track metrics and continuously refine the customer experience

1. Know your customers and understand their POV

The first step of creating any customer experience strategy is knowing your customers. After all, how can you positively impact your customer if you don't know what customers want, their current customer expectations, and what drives their decision-making? Getting to the root of this information includes creating buyer personas and user journey mapping to come up with a definitive, end-to-end vision of the ideal customer experience. It also includes doing customer interviews, which allows you to uncover your customer's true expectations when engaging with your product or service.

In the end, there's no better way to know your customers than to put yourself in your customer's shoes and experience your customer journey as if you were them. Take note of the good, the bad, and areas to improve. Regularly doing this exercise gives you an honest and valuable perspective on how your customer views your product and your company, giving you a strong foundation for building your customer experience strategy and improving it over time. An added bonus is you can use this insight to shape your product roadmap! 

2. Provide consistent, quality support

As we've mentioned before, customer service is one crucial part of the customer experience. It's also a persistent challenge in companies because it entails solving customer problems under pressure while managing emotions and expectations. A surefire way to design a strong customer experience strategy is to focus on excellent, consistent customer service that makes customers feel seen and heard.

To accomplish this, unite your customer service processes around your shared mission and vision, and:

• Ensure short response times and adhere to an SLA if one is in place 

• Use customer feedback to improve 

• Empower cross-functional stakeholders to participate

3. Design a customer experience that's pleasant, practical, and proactive

It should be easy for customers to engage with your product or service. And though some products or services don't require tons of customer support, you should still strive to create personal touchpoints with your customer, whether face to face or digitally. This makes it easier for them to trust and remember you, while also fostering a better connection between them and your brand. And that's your ultimate goal, isn't it? 

 4. Invest in tools and technology that enhance the customer experience and can evolve with the business 

We already know that tools and technology make life easier. But when it comes to your customer experience strategy, don't just level up your technologies and tools for the sake of it. Customer experience tools are especially useful for managing large amounts of data, customer analytics, and automation, so if you're upgrading your tech stack for any reason, choose one that directly helps you in one or more of those areas.

5. Track metrics and continuously refine the customer experience

If you don't track your work's progress, how do you know you're producing your desired result? This same thinking applies to creating and executing a solid customer experience strategy that leads to satisfied customers. Tracking metrics, continuously refining your processes as you learn, and sharing those insights across your organization ensures that you're focusing on the right areas to improve customer experience. All of your key stakeholders can then also see relevant data in real-time, which supports the decisions you make as a team. 

Design a customer experience strategy that truly delivers 

With these customer experience strategy definitions, key elements, and best practices under your belt, your vision of an optimal CX strategy should feel more achievable than ever. Now, instead of panicking at every piece of negative customer feedback or drop in customer retention rate, put your energy where it's more useful. Put it into executing your customer experience strategy as best as you can and rallying your team members together to do the same. 

One final note we should address is how to manage all of the information, customer data, and processes that go into a complete customer experience strategy. Even the most advanced teams have trouble doing this well, but for those that do, their teams move faster, communicate better, and make fewer mistakes, which is invaluable when working with customers. A trick to this is using prefabricated templates, such as for journey mapping, customer surveys, and customer research. Starting from a proven template—rather than from scratch—allows you to spend less time on documentation and more time creating a great customer experience. 

Download Airtable's journey mapping template today and start implementing your next great CX strategy.