Satisfied and loyal customers are the backbone of any successful brand. Great customer experience across all customer touchpoints ensures you have customers that are content with your products and brand. Delivering an exceptional CX, however, is a lot easier said than done.
It is essential that you work with all the functions in your organization and put together a great CX plan. No one department can ensure a delight CX, since customers interact with various representatives from marketing, sales, support, billing, etc., before, during, and after purchase. With this blog, we’ll tell you how to go about building a great 3-year customer experience plan that works effectively.
How to build a CX plan that works effectively?
Let us look at designing and implementing a customer experience plan for a 3-year period. Setting a time period such as this will help you better design and execute your plan. It is very easy to lose track or start will all the enthusiasm in the world only to see it trail off after some time.
Year one: Define and refine
Year one is crucial, you need to have a concrete plan that every department is on board with. Every function needs to participate in devising the plan, an excellent CX is a cumulative effort. Ensure you record employee and customer feedback from all departments, note their concerns and come up with effective solutions.
Implementation
Now that you have devised a plan together with your teams, it is implementation time. Do you have all the necessary budgets, tools, and resources? Plan your steps accordingly so you have a smooth execution and does not overwhelm any of your teams.
LEARN ABOUT: Effective Customer Success Plan
Close the loop
Angry or dissatisfied customers are your greatest churn risk, they will switch to a competitor brand as soon as an opportunity presents. A dissatisfied customer will tell more people than a satisfied customer and it can seriously your business. It is best you follow-up with customers who’ve had a less than desirable experience and address it right away. It is ideal to survey your customers after their interaction to gather timely feedback. You also need to ensure that all customer complaints are resolved in a timely manner. Create and assign tickets efficiently to reduce turnaround time. QuestionPro CX, one of the leading CX management platforms, can help close the loop with your detractors or disgruntled customers. Several small to big organizations have had great success with our enhanced closed-loop mechanism.
Analytics
Analytics plays a key role in giving you direction to refine your customer initiatives. It lets you drill-down which customer touchpoints need looking into, what are the gap areas, etc. If you are conducting regular customer satisfaction (CSAT) surveys with tools such as QuestionPro CX, you can easily uncover patterns based on consumer feedback. This helps you isolate problem areas and quickly deploy measures to fix them.
Year two: Steady-state measurement
Year one gets interesting now that you’ve set up all your processes and systems. Keep in mind the below parameters for year two.
Analyze feedback
Many of the basic and important things will not change from year one but now you need to look at customer feedback more closely. If you wish to convert your NPS passives and detractors into promoters you need to take their feedback and act on it. It is far easier to convert them into promoters than acquire new customers, you already have a relationship with them.
Look at trends deeply
You might have uncovered trends in year one and you took actions accordingly. It’s time to take a look at these patterns and trends closely. How did your actions and new initiatives affect these trends? Do you see a repeating pattern? Now that you have historical data to make more informed decisions, use it to address persistent problems.
Gap and business analysis
Year one you should actively look into finding gap areas and bridging them. Year two is when you should look at how those changes affected your business revenue. You should look at your customer satisfaction score, your NPS, and revenue to see how well you are doing with respect to the previous year.
Year two vs year one
At the end of year two look at how you did in comparison to year one. How many customer complaints did you resolve, what was the turnaround time? Take a look at your systems, processes, and resources, see if you need to make any changes there, and why? If you have been conducting customer surveys regularly, this will give you some great insights into your customer strategies and initiatives.
Year three: Replanning
By this time you would have learned a lot from your mistakes and also the data that you’ve collected over two years. All things considered, you must have ironed out all the kinks. There are still, however, a lot of things to be done.
Reconsider touchpoints
Now that you have data from 2 years, you can revisit all the data and reconsider your customer touchpoints. Which ones had problems or customer complaints? How can they be fine-tuned to ensure customers are satisfied along with every phase of the customer journey? Looking at these touchpoints will give you an idea if you need new systems or additional resources to ensure output and performance.
Conduct a CX audit again
It never hurts to re-evaluate things especially when they can positively influence your customer service and experience. Maybe your customer service is doing far better than billing, what can you do to improve it? Reassessing and reauditing will bring to the fore issues that need attention, and also aspects that worked so well, you can replicate them elsewhere.
Replanning
Year three is when you start planning gain for a 3-year plan. Use the information and insights from your previous plan and get closer to making it near-perfect. A perfect CX plan may not exist but you can certainly aim for it.
QuestionPro CX can help you manage your CX programs efficiently. Did you try our platform, why don’t you sign up? It’s free and takes less than a minute.
