In recent months, I’ve been talking to several senior leaders about how to design your customer experience (CX) strategy in 2021. Some of the issues they will have to tackle if they are to deliver the great and stand out experience that so many of them desire.

To help with that, I’ve been talking about four best practices or objectives that the companies that lead their fields on customer experience have in common.

1. Ask the right questions

Firstly, these companies have clear answers to the big strategic questions regarding their brand, service and experience strategy, and how they connect to their overall business objectives.

These questions include:

• What is your brand, service and customer experience strategy?
• How does it support the achievement of your business objectives?
• What is the human touch and technology balance?
• Where is it now and where would you like it to be? And why?
• Will it change for different types of customers?
• Will it change depending on the stage of their journey?

Secondly, most, if not all, of their CX initiatives are focused on delivering business value and a Return on Investment (ROI).

The way they do that is by linking their customer experience strategy to the improvement of one or more of the key levers (customer interest, conversion rate, average spend, number of transactions in a given period and the cost to serve) that exist in most businesses.

Westpac, the fourth largest bank in Australia, and their ‘No Me’ program provide a great example of how this strategy works in practice.

2. Use data to segment your customers

Analysing their customer data, Westpac discovered that there were groups of customers with similar profiles. One group had adopted the same three products in the same order and for the same reasons over the course of their lifetime. However, they also identified a second group who only had the first two of those products and that there was a 90% chance that they would adopt the third product when the time was right.

Now, rather than compiling a marketing campaign and sending it out to the second group, they worked with the tellers in their branch network and modified their systems to alert the tellers to offer the 3rd product as a ‘next best option’ to the second group of customers when they next came into a branch. Doing so, the tellers were able to achieve a 40+% conversion rate when they offered the 3rd product.

This strategy allowed Westpac to improve both their average customer spend and the number of transactions in a given period for this customer group. In turn, this allowed them to clearly prove the ROI of their initiative.

3. Be brilliant at the basics of customer service 

Not what you think the basics are. But what customers consider are the basics like being easy, quick and efficient to deal with. This doesn’t happen as much as customers would like as too many organisations get caught up with ideas about how to surprise and delight their customers.

The problem with that is that many customer experience strategies ignore the fact that we, as human beings, value the avoidance of risk, failure, mistakes and disappointment between 5 and 17 times more than any surprise, delight or other fancy new initiatives. That means that organisations miss a huge opportunity to build relationships with their customers that sit on a foundation of trust and reliability.

4. See things from your customers perspective 

To do that, don’t just rely on feedback from customer surveys. Also, use analytics, engage and draw on insights from employees, and spend time with your customers. This will help you to go beyond data and build a detailed and visceral understanding of your customers and what is important to them, which helps you make better decisions.

Summary

Now, these four best practices are not easy to do or to do consistently. But, they do offer a recipe for how firms can create a great strategy to designing and delivering a stand out customer experience.

This post was originally published on Freshworks’ site here.

Thanks to Pixahive for the image.