In a world where customer engagement has become everything, the best companies have learned that their success hinges on how well they do at ensuring outstanding experiences for all their customers. To achieve this goal, your organization needs to develop a foundational customer engagement strategy built around five essential pillars: customer-centricity, creating a strategic plan, engagement model development, service quality assurance, and consistency of delivery. Here’s how you can use each of these elements to level up your customer engagement strategy.
Customer-centricity
Customer-centricity is the core of customer experience strategy, and it’s about more than just customer satisfaction. It’s a mindset that permeates every aspect of your business—from how you interact with customers to how you create products and services, to how you organize your teams and prioritize projects. The goal is to focus on the customer first and then make decisions based on what they need.
Customer-centricity requires a cultural shift in which employees feel empowered to act in the best interest of their customers without being constrained by rules or bureaucracy. This can be difficult if you’ve always operated under a traditional command-and-control structure where decisions were made at the top of an organizational hierarchy, but research shows that when employees are given greater autonomy over decision-making, they have higher levels of satisfaction with their jobs.
Creating a CX strategy
Before you start creating a CX strategy, it’s important to first define your business goals. Your CX strategy should align with your organization’s overall goals and objectives, so it helps to know what they are before moving forward and setting specific targets for customer experience leaders to achieve.
It’s also important for companies to set clear metrics for measuring success—whether that’s increasing sales revenue, boosting customer loyalty, or achieving other key performance indicators (KPIs). That way, everyone involved in improving CX can be held accountable for achieving their target goals.
Engagement model
A customer engagement model is a framework that helps you understand and prioritize the customer experience. It’s a tool to help you think about your customers and their needs so that you can focus on providing the best possible experience for them.
There are three core dimensions of a good engagement model: context, content, and channel. Each of these dimensions is equally important, so they must be considered together as part of an integrated approach when designing or redesigning your website or app.
Consistency of delivery
Consistency is a key component of great customer experiences. To be consistently successful in your efforts to create a great customer experience, you need to do two things:
- Create a clear, detailed understanding of what your customers want from you.
- Align everyone who works for or with your organization around this common understanding.
Service quality
Service quality is a measure of how well a company delivers on its promises. Service quality is the direct result of your customer experience, which is the sum of all interactions with the company.
For example, if you order an item from Amazon and get that item delivered in two days with free shipping, then you may rate your entire experience as positive—but if something goes wrong during delivery (like a package gets lost or damaged), your rating could sink to neutral or negative.
Conclusion
The key takeaway here is that a customer experience strategy is not about one specific thing. It’s about a set of foundational pillars that combine to create an effective CX strategy. These pillars are what make the difference between good service and great service, or even the difference between being in business or going out of business.
