How To Build Profit Through Customer Experience Strategy

A lot of small businesses and startups focus all their attention on acquiring new customers but this can be a lot more expensive than keeping the ones you have.

By creating a great customer experience (CX) strategy you can increase customer loyalty, encouraging them to become repeat purchasers, advocate for your business, and recommend you to their friends and family.

This guide is based on a webinar we hosted with customer experience experts Julian Douglas and Michael Killeen from the CX Academy. It will take you through what CX is, how it can benefit your business and a framework you can use to implement a CX strategy that suits you.

The CX Academy provides online courses to help deliver the skills and knowledge users need to create and execute an effective customer experience strategy.

Customer experience is the overall impression customers get of your brand throughout their whole buyer journey, from the pre-purchase stage to purchase and beyond. 

Customer experience focuses on how you make your customers feel when they are dealing with your business and the emotions you bring out in them. The goal of a great customer experience is creating a loyal customer base who will come back and purchase from your business again and again. These kinds of customers are also more likely to recommend you to their families and friends. 

By focusing on improving your customer experience you can deliver short-term, medium-term, and long-term effects. 

• Customers will repeatedly purchase from your business 
• Companies that perform well in customer experience tend to have customers that are more likely to purchase and try their other products 
• Customers will be less price-sensitive since people are usually willing to pay more for great service 

• Customers will promote your business through positive word-of-mouth 

• The cost to acquire new customers will become lower since you can rely more on positive word-of-mouth rather than expensive marketing campaigns to promote your business 
• When you make it easy for customers to do business with you, they will contact you less with complaints

• You will create a stable customer base who will become repeat buyers – companies that perform well in customer experience are more likely to keep doing business with you 
• You will be able to charge higher prices for great service and still maintain high sales because customers are willing to pay more for great services 
• You’ll build a positive reputation for your business and make customers want to recommend your business 

Part of creating a customer experience strategy is knowing how to deal when things go wrong, and your customers complain. For example: 

• Most customers won’t tell you if something is wrong. Instead, they’ll just leave your company
• An unhappy customer can tell between 9 and 15 people about a bad experience. In comparison, a happy customer might only tell 3 people about their experience 
• It takes around 12 good experiences to make up for one bad one 
• Most customers are less likely to buy from a company that doesn’t reply to complaints – this can make them feel like a company doesn’t care about them

By responding to your customer’s complaints and dealing with them you can turn a bad customer experience into a good one – you will make your customers feel like you care about their experience as an individual.