Why You Need a CX Strategy Before You Build Your Website

An excellent customer experience is a powerful differentiator that gives you a leg up on your competition.

Businesses with great experiences enjoy a price premium of up to 16%. But more importantly, most customers are willing to share more information with companies that meet their experience needs. With Apple updating their privacy settings and Google soon to follow, having this information is vital.

Here’s how to create your CX strategy so you can impress your customers, compete in your industry and build loyalty to your brand.

What to Focus on When Building a CX Strategy

Your CX strategy needs to consider all aspects of your business that relate to your customers—for example, your company mission, pre-and post-sale interactions and customer research.

Here’s a way you can approach your CX strategy:

1. Assess your current strategies and refresh your strategic vision

To assess where you are now, you want to consider:

• Desktop research, e.g. channel and industry analysis.

• Customer value proposition workshops.

• In-depth interviews with customers.

• Competitor and industry leader profiling.

• Website analytics insights.

Next, you’ll need to develop your strategic vision and goals. Create a statement that encapsulates your CX north star, and write down the Objectives & Key Results that can get you there.

Some metrics that you should consider for your objectives include:

• Net Promoter Score (NPS): NPS is the percentage of customers happy to recommend or promote your brand. You can determine this score by asking customers how likely they are to recommend your company or products.

• Customer Satisfaction (CSAT): Excellent CX often results in high customer satisfaction. A simple question like, “How would you rate your satisfaction with our product?” can help you rank this metric.

• Customer Effort Score (CES): CES measures speed and convenience, which PWC found are vital for CX. Ask your customers, “Was it easy or difficult to navigate our website?” Or, “How much effort did you use to solve your problem today?”

• Customer Retention Rate (CRR): Measures how long customers stay with your company. To find your CRR, calculate the differences between your existing customers at the beginning of a period versus the end.

• Digital Monthly Active Users (MAU): MAU considers your engagement levels across different platforms, e.g., social, email, website, etc. Increasing active users may come from better CX as customers stay loyal and recommend your company to their friends.

2. Customer journey mapping

Customer journey mapping highlights a customer’s major touch points with your brand.

By analysing these points, you can determine customer pain points that may prevent others from buying your products and create a plan to solve them.

Here’s how:

1. Assess where you are now.

Review your current customer personas, journey maps, CX metrics and anything else that affects the mapping process.

You’ll also need to choose a persona to focus on for the rest of the steps.

2. Customer research.

You can split this step into two phases. Phase one focuses on qualitative research like focus groups and one-on-one interviews. In phase two, you turn this initial research into a survey that you can easily share with your chosen customer persona.

3. Write down and assess customer touchpoints.

Note the significant touchpoints customers use and points you believe are essential to the journey.

Then you want to consider things like:

• Journey length.

• Major roadblocks at each touchpoint.

• Customer emotions during the journey.

4. Determine the changes to make and how you’ll make them.

Now that you have a bird’s eye view of your custom journey, you can plan the changes you want to make.

It’s a good idea to focus on high-leverage points so that you can drive improvements faster.

For example, many customers are reaching your product pages but no further. To fix this, you may need to improve your copywriting, imagery or design. And the answer will come from your previous research.

You’ll also want to show the return on investment of your plan to gain solution buy-in from management. If you can’t create estimates from your metrics, share statistics from other brands or research studies focusing on similar customer problems.

5. Make your changes and assess the outcome.

When you make changes, it’s vital to assess their effects. You can’t be sure which changes will result in a positive ROI, so it’s good to run split test experiments to validate your ideas.

Customer journey mapping is ongoing, so you’ll need to repeat these five steps regularly, e.g., monthly or quarterly. Over time, you’ll refine your customer journeys and improve customer experiences.

3. Identify digital priorities that can improve CX

Most, if not all, customer interactions happen digitally. That’s why improving the digital aspects of your business can make a big difference in CX.

Here are three to focus on:

1. Data segmentation & CRM.

Using customer interaction data is vital to discovering insights you don’t learn during your initial research. But data can also be messy.

The solution is to capture as much data as you can and combine it into one easy-to-understand database and dashboard where you can do your analysis.

Then you need to figure out where you are on the customer segmentation ladder.

Most companies start with basic segmentation. However, your data becomes exponentially more powerful when using predictive segmentation based on historical data.

If you want to move up the segmentation ladder, progressive profiling is your friend. It’s a strategy for building customer profiles over time by capturing behaviour that allows you to provide personalisation to your customers.

2. Digital loyalty program

Roughly 90% of consumers are happy for companies to access their data if they get personalised rewards in return. So if you don’t have a digital loyalty program, now’s the time to create one.

When creating your program, you should consider:

● The types of rewards your customers will enjoy.
● Using a digital card and app where customers can access their details.
● Gamification aspects like points, challenges and leaderboards.

3. Implementing advanced analytics

While digital data is powerful, combining it with its offline counterpart is where the real magic happens.

To combine them, you’ll need to create a set of data KPIs that cover all channels and assets—for example, data quality and volume.

You’ll also need to work on:

• Creating customer feedback loops.

• Establishing cross-channel and cross-asset analytics standards.

• Building dashboards and reporting frameworks

• Defining how insights will be captured, actioned and shared across assets.

Then keep measuring, analysing and improving your analytics processes over time.

Excellent CX Depends on a Variety of Factors

Creating fantastic customer experiences comes from diving deep into customer pain points and frustrations and figuring out how to solve them.

And to translate this knowledge into a great website build, you need to have a CX strategy to guide you. We shared the steps for creating a strategy in this post, and it’s up to you to work through them.

But if you need a hand, you can reach out, and we’ll see how we can help build your CX strategy.