The Importance of Customer Experience and How to Build a CX Strategy
Everyone is familiar with UX by now due to the high demand for UX designers and researchers in the past years; however, CX which is a big part of UX is still a mystery.
General Customer Experience Statistics:
89% of businesses compete primarily on the basis of customer experience (CX).
73% of consumers say that CX is a deciding factor when purchasing.
42% of customers would not mind paying more when offered a warm and friendly customer experience.
Why is CX that Important?
Customer Experience Design is the process of optimising and improving all the touchpoints and interactions a business has with customers. CX creates remarkable experiences for customers that goes beyond transactions. It touches them on an emotional level which nurtures strong customer-brand relationships.
How to Build a Customer Experience Strategy?
You can’t build a customer experience strategy without customer research. It is crucial to understand who your customers are, the challenges they face, and their needs.
Customer Research:
Customer Personas:
CX Personas are fictionalized archetypes representing your customer. They help everyone in your organization identify who this person really is, instead of relying on collective data that dehumanizes the customer. Each persona should include an image of the imaginary customer, attributes and motivations, needs, pain points, and actual customer quotes. To create the personas you should conduct
customer interviews and analyse and theme your data to draw meaningful insights that relate to various customer types.
Mapping the Customer Experience:
A customer journey map is a visual storyline of every engagement a customer has with a service, brand, or product. The creation of a journey map puts the organization directly in the mind of the consumer, so they can see and understand their customer's processes, needs, and perceptions.
Mapping the customer journey has a host of benefits such as:
Allowing you to optimise the customer onboarding process.
Benchmarking the customer experience desired by your customers against what they actually receive.
Understanding the differences in buyer personas as they move from prospect to conversion through the buying funnel.
Creating a logical order for your buyer journey.
Brainstorming New Tactics:
Exploring and generating new ideas by the CX team is essential in this phase. All the previous data about customers and the journey map should be considered from all angles to ideate and design the best solutions.
Best Practices for a CX Design Strategy:
Align your business objectives with customer goals for a good customer experience design.
Have a human-centered approach to the overall strategy.
Establish a customer-centric mindset within the team, customer satisfaction is reached through everyone’s contribution.
Set CX operational metrics to track the performance, measure data, and scale.
“It’s not what they drive that counts but what drives them.”
