The marketer's playbook to customer experience strategies

A watertight customer experience strategy keeps customers from leaking out of the marketing funnel at each touchpoint. In a world where any marketer can make enough noise to buy a single touchpoint, developing a customer experience strategy isn’t just a good idea — it’s an essential differentiator.

However, a customer experience strategy that puts the customer at the center of every interaction isn’t easy to implement; that’s why using one to drive marketing will set you apart. 

This guide teaches you how to create an effective customer experience strategy and build a playbook that drives lasting relationships.

What is a customer experience (CX) strategy?

Customer experience strategy determines what value you deliver to shoppers at every touchpoint of their journey. This means you can reel customers in from the awareness stage and keep them returning.

This strategy requires the whole team: marketing, sales, service, and support. A communicative team on the same page ensures the brand is consistent and resonant.

In short, a customer experience strategy proactively manages customer perceptions when interacting with your business. With strategy, we can ensure that customer perception is positive!

Why a customer experience strategy matters to brands

Operating by the same undifferentiated playbook as every competitor is what leaves you undifferentiated with an audience. Customers expect more than a product or service these days; they expect an experience. An experience is more personalized, and it aligns with a customer’s values — it leaves an impression.

When done right, an intentional customer experience strategy:

• Increases customer satisfaction
• Reduces churn 
• Improves customer lifetime value (CLTV)
• Boosts revenue
• Encourages positive word-of-mouth
• Builds a competitive advantage

In other words, a customer experience strategy significantly moves the needle on KPIs many brands track. Though the impact of this strategy can’t be precisely measured (as you can measure direct response campaigns), the result will pay itself forward in all aspects of business.

The building blocks of a customer experience strategy

Following some inspiration from McKinsey, we can break customer experience strategy down into its three essential pillars: inspiration, transformation, and enablement. 

1. Inspiration: Research your strategy

As McKinsey puts it, “Leaders start talking about customers, not financials.” Your inspiration for better strategy lies with the customer. Like all good user research, test your assumptions with users and empathize with their needs, desires, and pain points. 

If you’re a lone marketer, this is where it’s clear that customer strategy is a team effort. Other departments will have a wealth of customer information in the forms of surveys, calls, emails, and so on. A lot of inspiration comes from feedback.

By diving deep into customer motivations and behaviors, you can design experiences that resonate on a personal level.

2. Transformation: Baking good CX into practice

The best CX strategies are highly collaborative. This means transforming your business to be cross-functional. 

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Your company should consider customer feedback for all decisions and use data analytics to predict user behavior, identify and measure customer interaction, and assess the potential impacts of your marketing decisions.

Transformation isn’t building something entirely new; it’s ensuring that all your operations and output drivers align with your brand’s promise. 

3. Enablement: Ensuring long-term CX gains

This step is about seeking long-term improvement. You’re here to enable the marketing team’s future success by researching new tools and methods to improve customer experience.

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We live in an exciting time where technology transforms quickly. This means we have new opportunities for better customer experience. However, many of these will fall through the cracks if we aren’t keeping a finger on the pulse of change.

The playbook to customer experience strategy

Like all good strategy decisions, your approach depends on many factors impacting your brand. Your exact playbook is unique. However, following this framework will give you the path to developing your unique customer experience strategy.

Audit your current strategy and resources

If you didn’t think you already had a CX strategy, you do — but it could be more intentional. 

Before improving your customer experience, you need to understand where you currently stand. This is where inspiration comes from, recalling the building blocks of CX strategy. Assess what your surrounding teams have in place and your observations.

These are some key questions to ask as you audit your resources:

• Are we meeting customer expectations across all touchpoints?
• What does customer feedback reveal about our brand?
• Where are there opportunities for better customer communication?
• Which touchpoints do which teammates oversee?

Gather/conduct customer research

To flesh out the CX strategy, gather customer research and fill in the gaps in the questions above. Hopefully, you have already found a treasure trove of helpful resources with the earlier step. But if you didn’t, put your research cap on and talk to customers.

Use a combo of qualitative and quantitative methods to get the complete picture. Both are worth the work. These would be the insights and resources you’re looking to gather:

• Personae: Build detailed customer personas that capture demographic data, behaviors, motivations, and challenges. (Hopefully, you already have these! If not, it’s not too late to start.) These will be useful for further marketing segmentation.
• Stakeholder insights: Talk with key organizational stakeholders, including customer service, product development, and sales teams. Their frontline experience can provide valuable insights into what customers want.
• Customer call recordings/survey data: Review customer calls and surveys to identify recurring issues and opportunities for improvement. This will help you see your brand through your customers' eyes.

Build a customer journey map

Now you have the resources. Use them on a customer journey map to visualize how a customer interacts with your brand end-to-end. From initial awareness to purchase to retention, a journey map identifies key touchpoints with your brand. It will help you find gaps, places where paths branch, or where your strategy overcompensates.

Be sure to map out:

• Customer path to purchase: Where do customers first encounter your brand? What drives them to purchase? Often, this is the longest part of the customer journey map since we attempt to accrue several touchpoints with shoppers to turn them into customers.
• Purchase experience: What’s the checkout process like? Is it frictionless? Every click matters here, so detail is essential.
• Post-purchase touchpoints: What’s your support or follow-up communication? Are customers satisfied with the product or service? 

If you have a CDP like Simon Data (and a Cloud Data Platform like Snowflake) that aggregates customer data into one place, a tool like Simon Journeys can help you visualize customer experiences.

Correct misalignment in the customer journey

After building a journey map, address any gap between your brand’s goals and the customer experience. This is the most important step. We can’t give many specifics because this is where your strategy will be personalized to your brand. But we have some pointers:

Are there bottlenecks or touchpoints where customer expectations aren’t being met? Are there missing steps where you notice users typically fall off? And what’s more, do you have unnecessary touchpoints where customer engagement is nonexistent?

Build a sustainable plan for CX

While employing all this work to better CX, you’ve likely noticed practices that aren’t futureproof. There may be gaps in team knowledge or communication, faulty processes, and under/overinvestment in specific channels.

Find tools and training to futureproof your company's CX strategy and keep everyone on top of the plan. The best CX strategy requires continual learning.

Focus on long-term scalability:

• Investing in the right tools (hint: a CDP like Simon can make gathering customer insights in real-time a cinch)
• Grow with your team and share information
• Document the processes in place so you’re never caught reinventing the CX wheel

Iterate!

One of the marketing buzzwords: iterate. Now’s your chance to lather, rinse, and repeat.

As long as you have customers, you’ll have new feedback to learn from. CX strategy is not a one-and-done process — if it were, many of us would be out of a job. 

So, prove your CX strategy is worth the time! Encourage customers to share their experiences and use this feedback to drive continuous improvement.

Conclusion

Think about your most recent online interactions with companies. Were their ads attractive, their service helpful, and their messaging personalized? Or were they instead bothersome, intrusive, and poorly timed? CX strategy is still a key differentiator for businesses, so it’s a great time to double down on it. 

By following this playbook — conducting research, mapping the customer journey, building a plan, and iterating — you can use CX to power marketing. Customer-centric marketing is always best!

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