Developing an effective and efficient CX strategy: How to go about it?

Forward-thinking businesses habitually prioritize leveraging their customer experience to thrive in the competitive digitized environment. One needs an experimental yet strategic planning while formulating an effective and efficient CX strategy. 

Your customers expect digital experiences to be enjoyable, smooth, and intuitive. With a powerful CX strategy, you can significantly slash your churn rates, boost brand advocacy, and strengthen your loyalty.

However, not all businesses are equally adroit at strategizing their CX tactics. 

Customer experience is a domain that brands often misunderstand. This eventually results in disappointing ROIs. For instance, as much as 70% of customer experience leaders find it challenging to create products that leverage customer loyalty.

Well, if you are still struggling to come up with a foolproof CX strategy, this guide should bail you out.

What makes CX so valuable for your brand?

• The American Express Global Customer Service Barometer reveals that poor customer service prompts 53% of customers not to purchase a product or service.
• If your checkout process is complicated, 74% of your potential buyers would move to a different brand.
• Just 49% of customers consider that their preferred brands offer satisfactory customer service.

Strategizing a foolproof customer experience tactic for your business

1.  Budget for tools

In the first place, brands need to consider customer experience as a journey. Creating a favorable experience calls for a specific budget. So, make sure to allocate adequate funds to procure powerful tools that would help you leverage your CX. One of the prime reasons for which organizations fail to live up to the expected standards of CX is the lack of funds to use sophisticated tools. However, just like you put aside a fund for marketing, allocate a dedicated budget for purchasing advanced tools.

Unless you deploy the right set of tools to take care of your customer experience, your competitors would be gaining an edge.

2. Identifying the best CX channels

Secondly, brands need to identify the right CX channels capable of bolstering their organizations. This way, you can define the equilibrium between effectiveness and efficiency. While exploring different channels, it might appear that the ones preferred by consumers will also make the agents gain more efficiency.

According to research, CX professionals hold the view that SMS (56%), social media (72%) and live chat (79%) will gain more popularity in the next few years. The popularity of voice communication and other legacy channels will continue to be the same. Therefore, try to focus on these three channels of delivering better customer experience to fulfill the evolving needs of your consumers.

3. Bank on technology to strengthen efficiency

Now that you have decided the CX channels to focus on, bolster the efficiency of your team by incorporating sophisticated technology. It doesn’t make sense hiring human agents operating 24/7 throughout the year. How about embracing intelligent automation that can couple up as your customer support executives? With chatbots and automated response systems, you can entertain incoming queries even at odd hours. At the same time, balance your customer support team with a limited number of human agents who can tackle customer inquiries at crucial hours.

Now, business leaders often wonder how they can leverage automated tools to enhance customer support. Think of affordable systems like automated chatbots. These tools, backed by AI, can answer repeat questions. For instance, integrating a bot ensures that it would be able to collect the names and personal details of your customers, inform them about your business hours, and decide whether any human intervention would be necessary.

4. Hyper personalization works

So far, we have recommended measures that would entrust most of the responsibilities on technology. With sophisticated tools coming into the play, most of your agents would be at ease, right? This is the time when you can personalize the experience for your customers.

Make the profile of your customer support agents more relationship-oriented. This implies that your customers would benefit from your proactive approach. In the process, you can foster a loyal customer base. With your agents channeling more time for your customers, you can make your approach hyper-personalized. This would take your customer experience to a new dimension altogether.

5. Use metrics to gauge effectiveness and efficiency

Lastly, it’s imperative to measure how effective your newly strategized CX tactics turn out to be. This is where you need smart analytics and metrics. Make sure to look beyond the average handle time (AHT) when you deliver experience to your customers. There’s no point in leaving your customers unsatisfied after each interaction. Rather, take time to interact with them and seek feedback after these interactions.

Once you have metrics in place, you can examine your existing strategy and tweak them as per your needs.

 Conclusion

We have comprehensively discussed the most practical means to leverage your CX amidst stiff competition raging. A meticulous planning and budgeting, along with tactical handling of your customers with calculated human intervention can work wonders. A personalized handling of your customers can transform the experience they savor!