5 Customer Experience Strategy Mistakes to avoid
There are more than enough differing opinions showing brands how to plan their customer experience strategy and execute it.
However, the fact remains that many customer experience initiatives don’t meet up with the customer’s expectation, talk less of surpassing it.
Seeing as almost all businesses are looking to compete with and be differentiated from other brands by their customer experience, this is rightfully a significant reason for concern.
There’s no doubt that businesses need to create a good customer service experience to remain competitive in the market.
A poor customer experience strategy will affect the customer’s journey and their overall relationship with the brand.
A customer’s experience with a brand will determine whether they stay or leave the brand and if they will recommend the brand, all which are pretty important attributes right?
Let’s face it, there’s normally an abundance of options for the customers.
They can always go for the next brand, so by failing to even have, let alone execute a successful customer strategy, ultimately only your business has something to lose.
But, unfortunately, it’s not easy to pinpoint what makes a good customer experience strategy.
However, what is clear that there are several customer experience strategy mistakes that you must avoid.
Five Common Customer Experience Strategy Mistakes
1. Not creating a customer-centered culture.
You must build your brand to be focused on your customers from top to bottom.
You can’t leave the work of creating a good customer experience with the customer service team.
The very essence of the brand should be for customers.
Your products and services must be aimed at easing their burden and solving their pain points.
When you don’t have a customer-centred culture, there will be too many inconsistencies in your interaction with customers, leading to confusion and dissatisfaction among the customers.
This makes customer loyalty and retention hard to achieve.
You may have heard of the phrase ‘you accept the behaviour you walk past’.
This is true of customer experience.
If your CEO or executive team don’t demonstrate they care about customers at all times, how can they expect their rest of the organisation to?
2. Don’t think you know it all.
If you are the CEO or senior leader of your brand, you’re likely to feel like you already know so much, especially if you already have more than 20 years of experience.
You are likely to think that you’ve seen it all and know it all in what makes your customers satisfied.
The truth is, your years of experience don’t mean you know everything about customer satisfaction.
When business leaders think of themselves as AssignmentMasters, they tend to miss out on critical behavioural changes in the customers they should note.
But you should never assume you know all that there is to know about your customers.
That’s where Voice of the Customer comes in.
And once you’ve listened to what they have to say, keep listening!
You must continually study the trends and patterns in customer needs and customer behaviour to be able to keep your customers happy.
3. Poor use of data
In this digital age, businesses have an abundance of data from customers to use to their advantage.
From Artificial Intelligence and Voice Analytics there is no shortage of tools to learn more about your customers.
And we are in an age where customers are very willing to give out their information to get better experiences.
However, many businesses still make the grave mistake of not using, underusing, or misusing these customer data.
So they end up creating abysmal strategies for their customer experience because they fail to take advantage of the abundance of information at their disposal.
This is a mistake you must also look to avoid.
The reason you collect customer data is to use it to create better strategies and make better decisions, not just to create spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations!
4. Ignoring customer feedback
There is no justification for this ‘mistake.’
According to Paul Bryant, a digital marketer and content creator, “the sort of negligence that it takes to ignore feedback from customers are capable of driving your business into the ground.”
I can’t agree more with Paul.
When customers give feedback, it is because they feel the need for improvement.
So they mention areas where you should do better to satisfy them.
Ignoring this feedback and not improving your products and services as they suggest is you basically telling them you don’t care what they think.
So you shouldn’t be surprised when they walk out on your business because you don’t have what it takes to satisfy them.
You have too many competitors lurking around the corner with the same qualities you consistently fail to offer your customers.
Ignoring their feedback is telling them to jump ship.
I’d do that too.
5. Failing to track your metrics
You should be able to keep track of everything that you do as a brand.
When it comes to customer experience strategy, you need to keep track of your metrics.
There are always new metrics like Net Promoter Score, Customer Effort Score but whichever one(s) you choose, make sure you measure them consistently.
When you don’t track these metrics, you cannot identify areas where something is going wrong and correct it immediately.
Conclusion
The customer experience is essential for businesses as it helps to build loyalty from the customer, drive revenues, boost retention, reduce costs and so much more.
So having a good customer experience strategy should not be considered a ‘nice to have’ but rather a non-negotiable core strategy for your business.
So avoid these customer experience strategy mistakes to help your business flourish and if you don’t yet have a CX strategy, I suggest you start working on one!
Recommended Links:
- Training: Learn more about our CX Management training courses
- Read: 11 Common Customer Experience Mistakes
- Listen & Watch: CX Central Podcast – The truth about CX
