If you’re running a marathon, you wouldn’t simply show up on the day of and run 26.2 miles for the first time. Getting ready requires developing a long-term training strategy and sticking with it.
Business owners need to view customer experience the same way. A successful strategy requires a long-term view, and a willingness to put sustained effort into your customer relationships over time. That means continuously working to improve interactions at every customer touchpoint, from your website to your customer service emails to your social media presence.
Learn how to create and carry out a customer experience strategy that caters to your customer needs.
What is customer experience?
Customer experience (CX) is the sum of every interaction customers have with your brand throughout the entire customer journey, from becoming aware of your product to seeking help from your customer support team after a purchase.
What is a customer experience strategy?
A customer experience (CX) strategy is your roadmap for building positive interactions across the entire customer journey. It requires that you identify pain points, remove friction, and work across departments toward customer success. A well-thought-out customer experience strategy turns customer preferences and data into actionable insights.
For example, a high cart abandonment rate can lead you to embed the cost of shipping into your products. This way, you can offer a frictionless “free shipping” experience that encourages customers to complete purchases, which is exactly what happened for Island Creek Oysters.
Whether your customers are browsing your website, visiting a pop-up event, navigating a mobile app, engaging with social content, or looking for help from your customer service team, a successful CX strategy optimizes the entire customer experience. By considering all these data points and thinking from the customer’s perspective, you can improve overall customer satisfaction.
Why a customer experience strategy matters
A Salesforce study found that almost 80% of customers say the customer experience matters as much as what they’re buying. Just one negative experience can push someone to a competitor. On the other hand, an effective customer experience strategy can benefit both your customers and your business in the following ways:
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Grow your customer base. A positive customer experience could be the deciding factor between your business and other brands, and there’s plenty of opportunity to beat competitors. According to market research company Forrester’s 2024 Customer Experience Index Rankings, customer experiences have been declining for the past three years.
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Increase revenue through brand loyalty. By answering customer needs with an excellent customer experience, you can make an emotional connection and build a relationship that beats the competition. More than 60% of customers surveyed in a Consumer Trends Index Report say they are willing to pay more for brands they love.
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Build more brand awareness through word of mouth. A great customer experience can make all the difference in bringing new business. Salesforce found that 75% of customers would recommend a company after having excellent experiences.
How to build a customer experience strategy in 6 steps
- Learn about your customers
- Map the customer journey
- Define your metrics
- Collect customer feedback
- Enable team collaboration
- Continue optimizing
You can use your customer experience strategy as a framework to develop and evaluate the performance of your customer experience. This helps ensure you meet customer expectations. Here’s how to build your own:
1. Learn about your customers
Learning about your customer base means you can create experiences tailored to them. To get to know your buyers, conduct focus groups, send surveys, and leverage findings from trustworthy data sources. You can use this information to develop a buyer persona (a.k.a. customer persona), which represents the hypothetical needs, emotions, and expectations of the average person interacting with your brand.
Be specific and create one or several personas, defining their age groups, careers, hobbies, preferred languages, challenges, and motivations. Then validate your personas through testing to determine the accuracy of your hypotheses. For example, a marketing team might run two slightly different digital ads to see which best appeals to a specific buyer persona.
2. Map the customer journey
A customer journey map outlines the experiences of your customers as they move through the buying stages, which include:
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Awareness. This is when a customer learns about your brand—typically through broad-reach touchpoints like a social media campaign.
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Consideration. Your potential customer hasn’t decided to purchase from you yet, but they might look at product reviews to gather more information.
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Acquisition. This stage is when they make a purchasing decision after interacting with a touchpoint they’ve likely sought out, like your brand’s website.
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Service. This encompasses all post-purchase interactions, like customer service.
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Customer loyalty. In this final stage, buyers recommend you to friends and family if they had a good experience.
Once you have your customer journey map laid out and identified how you’re attempting to reach customers at each stage, you’re ready to gather customer data and feedback. This way, you can begin to identify exactly where your customer experience is working and where it can use improvements.
3. Define your metrics
What’s the most crucial element to reaching a goal? Mapping out measurable milestones to gauge if you’re on the right path. The key is determining the metrics that matter for your business and customer experience goals. For example, if your business goals are mostly around growth, you might want to explore metrics that measure how willing people are to come back for repeat purchases. This way, you can align your broader business goals with your customer experience goals.
Some of the most common and reliable metrics used to measure your customer experience include:
Customer satisfaction score (CSAT)
If your goal is to maintain a high level of customer satisfaction, a customer satisfaction score (CSAT) survey measures customer happiness or overall satisfaction with your products, services, and business interactions. This survey asks participants to rate their satisfaction on a scale (like 1 to 5 or 1 to 10). The number of satisfied customers divided by the total number of participants, multiplied by 100 is your CSAT score.
Net Promoter Score (NPS)
Net Promoter Score (NPS) is another efficient and effective metric to measure customer satisfaction. It’s a survey that can help reveal insights, like what customers think of your company or how you perform against competitors. Survey respondents are categorized into promoters, passives, and detractors. Then, based on the number of respondents in each category, your NPS is calculated with the following formula: NPS = [(number of promoters / total number of respondents) - (number of detractors / total number of respondents)] x 100
Customer effort score (CES)
To assess how frictionless your customer experience is, you could develop a customer effort score (CES) survey to measure how easy it is for customers to accomplish tasks throughout the customer journey. The survey can come in different forms—like a numbered scale from 1 to 5, or emoticons that range from frowning to smiling—to gauge how easy a task is. Questions should focus on specific touchpoints to help reveal where customers get stuck, like getting customer support, checking out, or troubleshooting.
Customer lifetime value (CLV)
Customer lifetime value (CLV) can help you gauge customer loyalty and long-term growth by measuring the total amount of money a customer is expected to spend on your product over the course of their relationship with your business. The formula to calculate CLV is: (average value of a sale) x (number of repeat transactions) x (average retention time in months or years for a typical customer).
Use one or a combination of these metrics to set benchmarks and track improvement.
4. Collect customer feedback
Now it’s time to get feedback directly from customers about their experience so you can tackle any snags in their journeys. You can do this in several ways, including tapping your social media followers and asking for feedback in comments or polls, adding feedback widgets to your website, and even going through reviews on sites like Google. The key is to ask questions that align with the metrics you’ve outlined in your customer experience strategy.
Some top customer satisfaction survey questions include:
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How would you rate your overall satisfaction with the product/service?
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How likely are you to recommend our product/service to a friend or colleague? (Net Promoter Score question)
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How easy was it to use or navigate our product/service? (Customer effort score question)
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Were there any challenges or difficulties you experienced while using our product/service?
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Do you have any additional comments, suggestions, or feedback for us?
Collect as much feedback as possible over a set period (such as a month or quarter) so you can capture a snapshot of your overall customer experience at that time. Look for themes in the feedback (such as website navigation bottlenecks or issues with setting up your product) so you can write an action plan for addressing the most pressing issues.
5. Enable team collaboration
A CX strategy requires that your entire organization is on the same page. Each department—from the leadership team to marketing to sales—needs a clear understanding of how they should support customers throughout their journeys. You can gather everyone to review the details of the strategy so all team members understand what role they’ll play and be held accountable to accomplish.
6. Continue optimizing
After implementing new changes, you’ll want to measure the success of your CX efforts and see where you still have room to improve. For example, you may find that even after implementing improvements, you still need to work on your website’s user experience (UX) or improve your customer service team’s average response time.
Remember, making improvements isn’t a one-and-done process—it’s something you’ll work on for the entire life of your business.
As you collect more feedback and data, it can be difficult to keep track of all of it. That’s where customer relationship management (CRM) software can come into play. CRM platforms like HubSpot sync Shopify customer data and relevant metrics in one place so you’re not straddling multiple dashboards.
Customer experience strategy FAQ
How do you craft a customer experience strategy?
Create a customer experience strategy by developing customer personas, mapping out every touchpoint where you engage prospective customers, defining metrics that align with your business and customer experience goals, and using data and customer feedback to refine each touchpoint for a seamless experience.
How do you measure the success of your customer experience strategy?
There are many metrics you can use to gauge your CX strategy success, but a few common ones include customer satisfaction score (which measures how happy customers are with your brand), customer effort scores (how easy it is for customers to complete tasks), and customer lifetime value (the total net profit from a customer throughout their entire relationship with your brand).
What challenges are common when developing a customer experience strategy?
A successful CX strategy requires the entire organization to be on the same page, so it can be difficult to align all of your stakeholders when they may have competing goals and resources to prioritize improvements. Additionally, tracking data from multiple channels can also become overwhelming. Using CRM software can keep you organized.
