Having a solid brand name amongst customers is one of the biggest dreams of brands around the world and most businesses spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to be on the top of their customer’s minds. While advertisements and relentless marketing campaigns will always be one of the ways to achieve it, companies realize that giving the ultimate experience to one’s customers can put them in an altogether different league. The kind of experience a customer has with your brand will be a huge reason for why they want to remain with you or not. The plenty of choices that a customer has today makes it even more challenging to pique and retain the customer’s interest.

With all that said, companies are still struggling to understand the pulse of customers and how to leverage it. There are a lot of things that a company does which forms a part of customer experience. Of course, a large part of it is associated with your customer service team’s performance but providing a good customer experience platform is much more than that. It starts from as simple as decreasing the load time, writing good copy on the website, hassle-free payment process and so on. Apart from having a dedicated customer service team, there is the social media bandwagon that you need to get into and perfect conversations and provide good experiences there as well.

What is meant by customer experience (CX)?

It can be defined as the total of interactions that a customer has with your brand over their entire lifecycle. It has been time and again declared that customers who have had a good experience with a brand will be willing to purchase from you again. If a business wants the customer who will stick with them and even go out of their way to spread a good word about them, you need to give them a kick-ass experience.

Many people confuse customer service with customer experience. For example, if you are hiring a caretaker to cook, if their work ethic is top class and they make sure that they use the best ingredients to create a mélange of recipes that satisfy your taste buds, then it is good customer service. But if they go out of their way to make sure that along with the spread there is also a recommendation of wine with your favorite music playing in the background, now that is customer experience. Isn’t it easy to understand the difference between the two now?

Benefits of creating a customer experience strategy

Understanding the needs of your customer will help you in thinking in terms of their perspective. It will give you the added advantage of finding innovative ways to satisfy your customer. Without knowing what your customers want, it is impossible to deliver a stellar experience, but you can make sure that you cater to almost all their needs without having to do anything out of the ordinary. The needs, expectations, pain points, values, struggles and more of the customer should be the heart of your strategy to improve the customer experience. Here are some of the benefits associated with creating a customer experience strategy.

1. Helps you identify service issues

When you create a customer experience map, you travel through each of the customer interaction touchpoints that a customer will access too, this makes it possible for you to identify areas that need betterment. Finding such service issues would have never otherwise happened if you hadn’t gone out of your way to create a customer service map. In fact, the only other way for you to have found out about inadequacies in the service you provide is by directly asking your customer in the form of surveys. It might even help you weed out the problem of lack of communication between your employees.

2. Reduces cost and drives sales

There is a huge advantage that comes as a result of creating customer service maps to the customer since you identify areas where processes can be optimized. The optimization process involved not only reduces the time taken for the average customer in accessing your service and purchasing them but also reduces cost in a big way. When the sales cycle is reduced significantly, the reduction in costs is significant which means the buying experience with you is better as well.

3. Improves customer experiences

The fact that you take the time to improve your customer’s experience using tools, strategies and other major changes will eventually produce results. This will also create a culture where you are proactively looking for methods to up the ante by innovating and following good practices. You can expect these changes to snowball into big benefits that will eventually increase customer loyalty.

4. Increase in sales

Since the average sales cycle increases tremendously because of implementing a customer experience strategy, you can expect more sales because you have satisfied the end custo