Is Your CX Strategy Driving Meaningful Engagement?

Is your brand customer-centric enough to ensure ultimate satisfaction for all your consumers? A cursory look at most brands today might lead us to believe that they only have consumers’ best interests at heart due to a CX strategy in place.

After all, most businesses today boast of having dedicated customer experience (CX) programs with customer success managers on standby—ready to correct any mistake or right any wrong. But is this enough?

Even though there is merit in combining a customer success strategy with a plan that improves service delivery and brings value to clients, if the resulting strategy does nothing to improve the brand journey and overall experience, then it is bound to receive a tepid response from consumers.

Brands without a comprehensive CX strategy or those brands with outdated customer success policies will struggle to survive in today’s hyper-competitive marketplace. Retrofitting customer welfare programs with impromptu experience strategies is sure to be an exercise in futility.

For most organizations today, the race to become customer experience champions has become a rat race. Winning this race does not appear to be easy. Add increasing competition among brands and continuously evolving customer expectations to the mix, and the challenge only gets tougher.

What steps must a brand take to ensure the ultimate satisfaction of its customers? Besides adopting technology and implementing “foolproof customer engagement policies” recommended by “experts,” is there anything else that brands need to do to become the apple of customers' eyes?

Also read: Drive Stellar Customer Experiences With Feedback Management And Sentiment Analysis

Satisfactory is the new failing: A modern CX strategy

Until now, most business owners were content with only fulfilling client needs. It was (incorrectly) assumed that a brand had successfully completed its scope of work when its product or service addressed a customer’s queries or eradicated pain points satisfactorily.

How customers engage with brands, whether or not they repeat their purchase/subscription request, or even (ironic as it may seem) instances of bad support experiences by brands did not have any business implications. Not for long, though.

As we now know better, satisfactory is not good enough. Satisfied customers generally feel that their experience is okay—not better, just average. And the truth is nobody raves about anything average, let alone brand experiences.

Merely satisfied consumers will only reconnect with their current brand partner if they do not find an experience that costs less and is better than the ones they are experiencing.

Customers today have high expectations from brands they do business with. It does not matter how awesome a brand’s offering is— consumers will not engage with, or worse, will leave a brand if their objectives are not met. But this was not always the case.

Customer experience strategy in the experiential economy

We would be shocked if we could turn back time and observe how business is done.

Before technology had advanced as much as it has today, normalizing excessive competition among brands, the proliferation of web-enabled smartphones ushered in an age of hyper-information. The economic scenario was less friendly for consumers and more generous towards businesses.

Companies focused solely on earning profits, often at the consumer’s expense. Customer success was a myth to most enterprises, and customer outcomes usually were mediocre.

Let us fast forward to the present. Innovation and advancements in tech resulted in a digitalization wave that transformed the economy from being revenue-driven to an experiential one. In an experiential economy, customers are more inclined to try out new products and experiences, as it helps widen their knowledge and understanding.

Consumer outlook is not the only thing that changed with time. Brands focused less on profiting and became more sensitive and accommodating towards clients. Suddenly, the number of businesses vying for consumer attention increased significantly.

Besides ensuring that clients get what is due and opening up the marketplace for enterprises without favor or bias to deserving brands, an experiential economy raises the bar for all things customer-centric.

Brands and their representatives started looking beyond ‘satisfaction’ as a business goal and focused on creating meaningful consumer outcomes. That meant improving engagement, support, deliverables, and the overall experience.

Why your CX strategy should prioritize experiences

Today's consumers place a higher value on experiences than products because they offer a deeper sense of fulfillment. Research suggests a strong psychological link between happiness and sharing experiences with loved ones, making them a meaningful part of a person's identity. Unlike a physical product, an experience is more likely to be interpreted positively and can strengthen social bonds, leading to greater long-term satisfaction. This shift in values has made creating memorable experiences a core focus for modern brands.

Satisfying customers is essential, but that should not be the sole objective. Customer satisfaction should be woven through the company's strategy, values, and everyone in the organization should be involved. Besides this, companies aspiring to be customer-centric should ensure their CX strategy does not go off the mark and that their customers correctly understand their brand message.

Also read: ThinkOwl CX Playbook - Your Ultimate Guideto Customer Success

Factors causing your CX strategy to go off the mark

Here are a few examples of entrepreneurial activities that can create discord between what a brand aspires to be and how consumers perceive it.

1. Incorrect or inadequate advertising and marketing.
2. Incorrect or inadequate communication with customers and other business stakeholders.
3. Activities like incorrectly developing customer outreach programs.
4. Incorrect customer journey mapping.
5. Inadequately rewarding loyal clients.
6. Designing and overseeing inherently flawed customer advocacy programs.
7. Obsession with vanity metrics—leading to the incorrect measurement of KPIs.

How enterprises can ensure they do not drift from their CX strategy

Brand debt is the cost of failing to maintain a brand’s reputation by creating inefficient CX strategies. To avoid brand debt, enterprises should build meaningful and productive customer relationships. Doing so entails connecting and communicating contextually with customers and understanding their goals, needs, preferences, and pain points.

Five focus areas for improving your customer experience strategy

So far, we have seen that ensuring a consistent brand experience, meaningfully engaging prospects and clients, maintaining an active presence on multiple communication channels, and being willing to provide excellent products/services and reliable support can help brands earn consumer trust and foster loyalty. Let us look at the 5 essential areas.

1. Customer-centric leadership: Customer-centric leaders focus on customer quality and thus create better value for their business.
2. Customer intelligence: Insights that help better understand customers’ wants and needs, their preferred methods of interaction, and ways to improve their customer experience.
3. Customer service: Interact with customers to address their concerns, answer their questions, and assist them with their needs.
4. Employee experience: Employee experience is the journey an employee takes within an organization and includes the interactions they have with people, systems, policies, and the physical and virtual workspace.
5. CX strategy: CX strategy encompasses all of the plans that a company makes to ensure positive, high-quality customer experiences. 

Customers have an emotional connection with you. The more emotional the connections, the more memorable the experiences, and the more loyal the customers are. Loyal customers will return, again and again, raving about you to others.

Consistency builds trust. Trust builds relationships. Relationships build loyalty. Loyalty builds your business. When you choose ThinkOwl, your customers will thank you for the fantastic service they receive. Not just that, even your agents will thank you. Pay attention to details, improve service quality, and impact your clients positively with an exceptional service and support experience. Sign up for a 30-day free trial now.