Why Every Company Needs a Customer Experience (CX) Strategy

Written By Nina Hoeberichts

You’re collecting feedback, answering support tickets, improving your user’s onboarding—but is it adding up to something meaningful?

What you’re doing is reacting to the customer experiences, but what might be missing is a solid strategy on how you envision your customers to interact, communicate and get value out of your businesses products and services. You can be proactive in orchestrating you customer’s journey.

This is why having a CX Strategy is important - at its core, it connects your business value to the customer experience.

The risks of not defining a CX Strategy

If you don’t sit down and think intentionally about a strategy on how you plan to deliver value to your users and customers, it can lead to a misaligned vision. You risk creating a product or service that are not aligned with your customers expectations - in the long run, this means more churn.

It can also lead to disjointed efforts that don’t align with your customer’s expectations. You might see your teams duplicating work or working in silos - because there’s nothing holding them together, and there is no overarching vision or mission that defined how the customer experience and journey should look like.

Not defining a CX Strategy can also mean that most of your efforts go to reactive “firefighting” instead of long-term improvements that match customer’s needs and expectations.

Additionally and most importantly, if you are experiencing low customer retention or high churn you most likely don’t understand what your customer’s expectations are, and there are therefore gaps in their journey you need to understand, assess and repair on a continuous basis.

What does a good CX strategy do?

people mapping a customer journey with post its

First and foremost, the CX strategy establishes what a good Customer experience would look like for your products and services - and this should be aligned with your company vision as well.

A good CX Strategy also looks at how you collect customer feedback and insights on a continuous basis, and most importantly, what do you do with this feedback that makes it actionable? How do the insights feed into your company and product roadmap? And how is your (CX) team set up for success so that customer centricity becomes a culture thing instead a ‘task on top’?

Defining how you measure your customer’s experience and if your products and services meet their expectations is another aspect you need to define.

Most importantly perhaps, is the intentional effort to truly understand your customers and users, their needs and their motivations and how your business creates value for them. By doing so, you can create a employee-centric and customer-centric environment that is aligned with your company’s vision.

All of the above and more can be understood and fleshed out when defining a CX strategy for your organisation.

Signs your business needs a CX strategy

There may be various signs that your business is in need of a more defined CX Strategy. These may include:

  • You’re collecting customer/user feedback but not acting on it (or you’re not collecting any at all). Or, maybe you don’t know what to do with it.

  • CX lives only in one team (e.g. Customer Success) - the rest of the teams don’t really ‘understand’ who the customer or user is and don’t really care.

  • Teams and employees see customer experience is seen as something ‘on top’ of their regular task instead of something truly integrated into their work and processes.

  • Nobody owns the customer journey

  • You're doing “CX stuff” but can’t show business impact

  • Internal teams aren't aligned on who the customer is and what the journey looks like

Start small, but start smart

Creating a CX Strategy doesn’t need to be something that takes 6 months or more. You don’t need a 50-page deck—you can start with a simple framework and iterate from there.

The most important thing is that the senior management team is onboard and understands the importance of having a Strategy defined for your customer’s experience.

Most companies fail because they try to do everything at once. All you need to do is start small, but intentional. It starts by understanding who your customers are and what value they get from your product and services.

✨ Want to build a CX strategy that actually works?
Buy the CX Strategy 101 Guide or book a free discovery call to see how CX Sprinkles can help you

Nina Hoeberichts