The 5 Must Haves for a Successful Customer Experience Strategy

Today, businesses want customers to be loyal, try new products, and become advocates who spread good news about the business. In order to accomplish this, businesses need a strong customer experience strategy that encompasses digital channels, while still remaining efficient without losing sight of metrics.

How does this get accomplished? Well, for instance, after hours spent in the boardroom, say a company’s customer experience strategy is designed and deployed. Months pass and the contact center productivity measures are solid, employee engagement has dropped a little, but the customer satisfaction metrics haven’t moved.

The CEO might say, “Why isn’t this working? Do the advisors simply not care about our customers?!” That is where most customer experience strategies fail. For a customer experience strategy to be successful, it has to be built into the DNA of the business and not just be "A Project.”

That being said, Dougie Cameron, founder of Addzest Consulting, told Customer Think the top five things that foster a positive environment for customer experience to thrive:

Co-create the strategy with advisors and customers.

They are the ones that know what needs to be fixed. If you involve them, they become part of the cultural transformation.

The cultural transformation can’t be kept in silos.

It must be embedded everywhere from product development through to marketing – no-one should be immune.

Customer experience isn’t about apps.

Bolting a fancy Web solution onto a bad process doesn’t fool a customer.

Old metrics don’t work.

Focusing on productivity measures in customer operations means that there is no for advisors to just “do the right thing” for the customer. Operational empowerment is what separates the great customer focused companies from the wannabes. 

Trust the front line.

Trust pays dividends and customers can feel it in their conversations. Train what “the right thing” looks like and leave out the rule book. 

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