What is a Customer Experience (CX) Program?

When your customers have a great experience, they’ll be more loyal and less inclined to switch brands. They’ll freely recommend your products and services to others and they’ll spend more, providing more value to your business. In fact, satisfied customers are 5 times more likely to buy from you again.

It’s not surprising, then, that many organisations, across a whole range of industries use customer experience management (CXM) as a major strategy to measure and analyse customer experience, with a view to improving it.

So, what makes a good all-around customer experience (CX) program?

Across-the-Board Company Engagement

Either directly or indirectly, everyone in your organisation has an effect on the customer experience, not just the front-line customer-facing teams or marketing department.

If leaders value customers, those reporting to them will too. All key decision-makers, from the CEO, through tiers of management to the shop floor need to understand the organisation’s vision of customer experience, and feel empowered to deliver on it.

So to get started, you need a vision, buy-in and an employee engagement program that enables all your staff to deliver on it.

The Right Kind Of Data

At the heart of any customer experience program is data. That covers everything from customer feedback to your core operational metrics like revenue, profit and sales that are impacted by your customer metrics.

Most organizations have plenty of operational data. Things like revenue, website analytics and shopper behavior all tell you what’s happened in the past.

But where a customer experience comes into its own is by layering in experience data– the data that tells you why it happened.

So putting customer feedback alongside your operational data is at the foundation of any program – it gives context to your customers’ actions and allows you to start making connections and understand the levers to pull to impact your operational metrics.

Customer feedback needs to be collected and monitored systematically, from all your key touchpoints, i.e. your website, call centres, stores, mobile app, even social media and online review sites. But beyond just collecting the data, you’ll need to make sense of it too with analytical tools like text analysis, key driver analysis and easy-to-use statistical tests.

FIND OUT MORE: Learn about Predictive Analytics 

This allows you to start making connections and finding gaps in the customer experience so you know where to focus your improvements.

Tech to Turn Data Into Actions

So you have the vision, the strategy and a customer experience platform to collect and analyse the feedback you receive.

But the technology needs to go one further and give you the tools to report on it all and ultimately, turn your data into improvements.

So look out for things like role-based dashboards that keep people in the organisation up to date with the metrics that matter most to them and action planning, that allows you to manage and monitor your improvements.

Plus, you can add in closed-loop follow up, so front-line staff can quickly act on customer feedback to help solve issues faster, before they become critical problems.