Where do you start with your CX Strategy?
Your customer experience (CX) strategy details the choices your organisation makes when it comes to delivering an experience to your customers - influencing how they think, feel, and behave as they interact with your organisation, your products and services.
I've seen many people struggle to know where to begin, so here's a quick survey of the four major starting points in defining a CX strategy for your organisation.
1. Your brand. This is often expressed as a promise to your customers, about what you'll do for them. A strong brand statement can usually be turned around and defined as an experience, from the perspective of your customers. It is typically a simple exercise in expressing the expectation your brand sets in terms of how it will make the customer think, feel and/or behave.
If you have a generic brand proposition, you'll end up with a generic CX strategy. You might either redefine your brand into something stronger, or else take a different approach to your CX strategy...
2. Company Values. What your company stands for - your values - often carry with them an implied set of principles as to how you'll treat customers, and what that translates into in terms of their experience.
A lot of companies have very generic values, and they end up as fairly bland experience principles that don't really say very much about your organisation.
When done well, however, your company values can be translated into experience principles that create an explicit intent in terms of how you want your customers to feel, and how staff should engage with them, in ways that are well-aligned with those overarching value statements of who you are as an organisation.
3. Differentiation. Take a look around at how all your competitors treat their customers, and understand what customers think is important. Identify ways in which you might engage with customers differently so that they feel special, in a way that's important to them. This might result in a qualitative change to your product or service, your supply chain, your retail/distribution strategy, or your after-sales service - in a way that sets your organisation apart from others.
And finally, there's
4. Innovation/Reframing. One of the powerful design-led innovation tools available to us is to reframe an existing solution/problem in different ways, thereby opening up creative insights and new ways of approaching a customer need. Reframing a problem in terms of how customers feel and think can help drive innovation beyond established conceptual boundaries.
There is a degree of overlap between some of these, but these distinctions work for me.
A government department is likely to approach the task using 2. Company Values; an existing market player might focus on 3. Differentiation; and a new entrant might need to look at 4. Innovation/Reframing.