12/12/2022

3 steps to an Experience Strategy

Author: Corinna Wallisch

Today's customers expect exceptional brand experiences and personalised offers – at every touchpoint. The challenge is to optimise processes across all touchpoints to create an engaging customer journey. This in turn requires a well-thought-out experience strategy, which should include three central steps.

According to Forrester Research, 88% of online customers are unlikely to return to the same website after a poor user experience. Whereas, a smooth experience can increase customer conversion rates by up to 400%. Good navigation between online touchpoints as part of an experience strategy ensures that customers are satisfied with their online experience. It defines how the digital touchpoints in the company are managed and maintained. If the experience strategy is successful, it leads to higher customer satisfaction, and fewer customer losses and thus promotes business growth.

Preliminary work: Customer Journey –what’s that?

The Customer experience (CX) refers to the whole range of experiences that customers have with a brand – across all touchpoints, online or offline. User Experience (UX) refers to customers’ specific user experience when using a digital product. The customer journey describes the (potential) customer’s “journey” from the first contact with the brand to the purchase or even recommendation of a product. To create a satisfactory overall experience, an overview of all potential interactions with the respective brand is needed – this applies to digital and non-digital touchpoints (e.g., POS, call centre, app, website …). CX tools, the creation of personas and customer journey mapping have proven to help understand the entire customer journey. To involve customer experience and user experience equally in the strategy and to optimally combine them, a cross-functional team of UX/UI designers, product owners and developers with the right skills and knowledge is needed to create and design a user-centred interface. But how to get there?

Step 1: Define SMART goals

The first step to developing an experience strategy is to define the goals. The so-called SMART rules help here. The goals should be Specific, Measurable, Attractive, Realistic and Timed. Everyone from the management to the digital product team must know the goals and how they will be achieved. It is important to set them down in writing and communicate them transparently. Suitable formats are, for example, workshops in which vision, mission and business goals are defined. In addition, benchmark analyses can be used to get an overview of the market.

Step 2: Collect customer feedback

The next step is to create a persona, i.e., a picture of a typical customer. This helps to better understand the target group with its needs, challenges, and goals. For this purpose, a picture that is as vivid as possible is drawn by highlighting professional and personal aspects, such as typical character traits. To learn more about the clients, direct contact with them is necessary. There are various possibilities – on-site studies, user testing, qualitative or quantitative interviews or co-creation workshops. Experts can then help to collect and evaluate customer feedback and integrate it into the concept of the Experience Strategy. Knowing the needs and desires of customers is the key to business success.

Step 3: Measure success with KPIs

In the last step, concrete KPIs for measuring success should be defined in the experience strategy, which is continuously reviewed and adjusted if necessary. This is because success measurement factors are the common language between management, departments, and project teams and therefore an important decision-making tool for business success. A maximum of two primary goals should be defined per phase, against which the strategy can be reviewed. In addition to the analytics dashboard, user testing or time-on-task metrics can be helpful.

Conclusion

For customer-centric companies, it is significant to address an experience strategy. It is important to create a concept that enables easy, seamless navigation between the different touchpoints of the brand without losing users. If the goals are clearly defined, customer feedback is incorporated into the strategy and the successes are measured using concrete KPIs, nothing stands in the way of the transformation to a customer-centric and successful company.