After “What is CX?”, the most common question business owners ask us is “How can I improve my CX?” In this article, we provide 5 simple steps to improve your CX strategy. By taking these tips into consideration, you will have a better understanding of how your business operates, how your different teams engage with your customers and identify areas for improvement.  

Get Buy In

Improving customer experience requires more than just a few optimizations and tightening a few screws. To begin with, it is vital that key stakeholders, senior management and leaders at your company understand the importance of putting customers first.  

Make a case for improving your CX, refer to what your competitors are doing, review different businesses in the marketplace and use case studies and research on CX to demonstrate the ROI in improving your CX.

Correlations between improved CX and customer retention, higher percentage of repeat business, higher number of reviews and more referred business are just a few ways that improving CX can make a difference to your bottom line.  

Create a Customer-centric Business Culture

Making a case for improving CX should not be challenging, particularly if you are following the activities of your competitors. With key stakeholders on board, your attention should be focused on addressing your business culture and ensuring that your customer is put first.  

Starting with teams that deal with customers directly, followed by teams that deal with delivery or fulfilment, there is likely no shortage of departments where you can improve the impression your customers are left with after dealing with your business.

Surveying your employees and looking at customer reviews are important tools in your arsenal to identify weaknesses and opportunities for improvement. Good communication and listening to your employees are key, as is ensuring they understand the importance and benefit of the customer having a positive experience.  

Listen To Your Customers

Now that you are actively working on your company culture and putting your customers first, it is time to gather all the information possible from outside of your organisation on how the customer journey can be improved. Listening to your customer, or customer listening as it is referred to in the industry, is integral to CX activity – without hearing a customer’s feedback, it is difficult to know what we need to improve. There are many tools in market to survey your customers, but it can be as simple as an email or phone call to those with whom you have already have business interactions. Keep your questions simple, focused and concise; rather than asking them to describe their experience, ask them to rate their experience from 1-10 pertaining to different teams or parts of their customer journey eg. from 1-10 how was your checkout experience? There is room for both qualitative and quantitative customer feedback but, for the clearest picture, you need to be able to review customer data at greater scale than just reading review after review.  

Map Out Your Customer Journey

Your customer’s journey should be broken down into the specific parts of their experience, for example, by department or sections of the journey. Without breaking down your customer’s journey into the different phases of their interaction, you can only gauge their overall sentiment, leaving little room for improvement.  Survey tools will greatly assist this activity.  

Look At The Data

Finally, after having implemented changes based on feedback from customers and internal stakeholders, you need to review your data to see if the changes have made a positive impact on the bottom line.  

Look for causation rather than correlation; improved customer service might translate to fewer refunds, or a better user experience (UX) on your website might lead to greater time spent on site. Ensure that you share your findings with relevant stakeholders and use these insights to create a culture of experimentation and improvement from a CX perspective.  

Have any questions? The Platform One team are experts in CX and would be happy to help. Click here to get in touch today!  

And if you are keen to learn more about digital customer experience strategy, check out these tips from experts in the field.

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