A Guide to Developing Customer Experience Strategy

The Seven Strategic Questions Critical to Improving Your Customer Experience

1. What customer experience do you want to deliver?

Ask yourself this question. In most cases, organizations cannot provide a clear answer. Everyone has an opinion, but nobody can identify what it is. This causes overlaps, gaps, lost opportunities and cost. Most customer experiences are accidental. They “just happen.” Customer experiences – both good and bad – frequently occur because a company makes decisions without considering the consequences. The main challenge is to identify the ideal experience you want to offer your customers; a Customer Experience Statement (CES) is the first step.

A CES puts the ideal customer experience into words; it defines your business value, and it differentiates you from you competitors. The CES has a part in both B2B and B2C markets.

2. What are the emotions you are trying to evoke?

More than half of a typical customer experience is rooted in emotion. Customers are people, and people are driven by emotions. Emotions are the bedrock of existence, yet most organizations miss this fact, allowing for half of their experience to be left to chance.

3. What drives and destroys value for your organization?

What drives or destroys customer retention, customer loyalty, increase spend, Net Promoter Scores? Our research helps us weigh which parts of the customer experience drive or destroy the most value for your organization. The Emotional Signature® technique aids this process because it determines the most efficient way to allocate resources.

4. What do customers really want?

What customers say they want can be vastly different from what they value. Other customers don’t even know what they want. To understand this you must get into the head of the customer. The subconscious mind is the key that unlocks the real drivers of value to the customer. Most customer desires reside below the surface of conscious experience. Paradoxically, while customers often struggle to articulate their desires, the cost of misjudging customer desire is extremely high. An accurate gauge of customer desire is of paramount importance.. Once this is discovered you will be able to determine where to put your resources.

5. How customer-centric is your organization?

Customer experience is a manifestation of your organization. If your company is product-centric, then you will offer a functional customer experience. If your company is customer-centric, then you will offer an interactive customer experience. Changing the customer experience means reorienting your company’s business strategy in a way that translates to customer loyalty and retention gains.

6. What is your subconscious experience?

The subconscious experience incorporates all the elements of the customer experience that are seen, felt, heard and processed by your subconscious mind. Do you know what kind of unintentional signals your organization sends to your customers? We have undertaken a great deal of research that keeps us at the cutting edge of understanding this subject. This research led us to the realization that the subconscious experience is every bit as important as the rational experience and the emotional experience.

7. Is your customer experience deliberate?

Have you deliberated over the experience you are providing to your customers? Most experiences “just happen.” They are a consequence of many different decisions the organization has made without understanding the impact or implications to the customer. Your experience should be deliberate.

Contact us to begin defining your strategy today.