Customer experience strategy is a lot like the “big data” buzz word – Everyone wants to do it, everyone thinks they are doing it but no one really knows if they are actually doing it right!
One of the biggest issues with customer experience strategy, especially in the SMB and startup sector, is the lack of directional guidance. In other words, you have a customer experience and engagement strategy, but you often don’t know:
1. If they actually work or not.
2. If they do not work, why don’t they!
The good news is, there is a way to nail both hurdles at once.
Stop speculating, start asking!
Speculation is infectious, infact most organizations run on it when it comes to customer experience strategy. Your Customer Success team assumes that the strategy will work, that is working, till you start losing customers and clients because their experience with your brand has been unsatisfactory. If you are a startup or small business, your nightmares have merely begun because if you catch this late, you are out of business before you know it.
The simple idea is the not speculate and instead ask – Ask you customers, clients and consumers directly! Strategy, any strategy begins with data, the right data.
The easiest way to understand your customers is to simply start with an online survey asking the most basic, yet business-critical question – “How was your experience with our brand?”. This one question will give you more insight into customer experience than hours of crunching through third-party purchased market research reports that talk about everything but your own brand. Yes, research reports do help you get the gest of where the market is heading. But you cannot run a business based on “gest” alone!
Customers are ready to talk about you, to you
One of the biggest assumptions (again) by businesses is that “Why will a customer spend time giving me feedback?”. Well, they will because :
1. They are spending time experiencing your brand.
2. They are paying for it!
Time and money – this is why they will spend time giving you the answers you need to make yourself better and bigger. Your customers are tied to you – they want you to succeed even if they don’t say it out loud in client meetings.
Once you realize this factor, your approach to customer experience and the corresponding strategy changes dramatically. You reach out to customer, not as people paying to use your product/ service, but as partners in your business. If they succeed, you succeed and vice versa.
Check out QuestionPro CX and Net Promoter Score to learn more about how you can start making data-oriented customer experience strategy today!
