Having a good customer experience, and keeping on top of it is essential for a business to remain competitive, stay on top of their customers wants and needs and generally deliver a good product or service. We investigate five steps your business can take to stay on top of its customer experience (CX).

1. Is CX in your business plan?

Is customer experience important to your business? Do your employees know that and live by that value and do you make it easy for them to focus on this? It’s important that you include clear objectives and goals in your business plan relating to customer experience and educate and empower your team to understand it from both their perspective and the customers.  

Is the customer at the heart of your plan? How do you want customers to feel when purchasing from you? What actions do you want them to take? And how should they describe your company when asked to review their service? It’s important you understand what messages you want to convey and have a clear pathway to achieving this that is shared amongst your organization. 

2. Make best use of your skills and talents

Improving your customer experience doesn’t have to cost hundreds of thousands of pounds. Look at the resource you already have in the company and the different roles employees can take to support that customer vision.

It is important however that this is led from the top of the organisation and all individuals understand the role they have to play and the benefit they’re bringing to the team.  

3. Confirm your data is manageable and accessible

Do you know how your customers are currently engaging with your service and who your customers are? To get a full picture of your customers you must have all of that data in one place.  

Having your data in a safe, cloud-based system can allow for anyone in your organisation to access and store their data effectively in one place, giving you one version of the truth. It should also allow for easy integration with other pieces of technology when activated that data. Also having people responsible for that data is important through your data protection and CRM team.

4. Focus on small changes first

Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither was a comprehensive CX strategy. Focus on innovating the service areas, processes and tools you currently use, one at a time.

Making small incremental changes to your CX is a more sure-fire way of achieving change that setting a large expensive roll-out that doesn’t deliver anything due to it being too heavy and complicated to implement.

5. Build towards a holistic picture

Getting a picture of your customers across various different channels is essential to understanding how they interact with you. Focus on building better data sharing between the different areas of your business and look to build a model that clearly helps you visualise what your customers are doing.

Interested in improving your customer experience? How would getting academic input, a graduate to support and funded support help you do this? Find out how a Knowledge Transfer Partnership could help.