CX Strategy Guide
A research framework to help you grow your CX program with priorities that matter
Mapping out a growth or refinement plan for your customer experience (CX) research program could seem like a potentially daunting and complex task. But it doesn’t have to be.
This step-by-step approach can help you understand the best way to prioritize your evolving CX research efforts in order to maximize your investment and resources.
Step 1: Lay the Foundation
Step 1: Lay the Foundation
First, identify your North Star metrics and monitor them. This is the core of your CX program.
Where to look
- Experiential data (satisfaction, retention)
- Aspirational data (NPS, advocacy, loyalty)
- Customer emotions
- Assessment of key journeys and touchpoints
What you'll discover
- North Star Metric performance and trends
- Areas of customer satisfaction or dissatisfaction
- A better understanding of the relationship customers have with your brand
- Key drivers of customer satisfaction and/or loyalty
The Goal: Monitor elements recognized as key to the customer relationship with a brand in its entirety.
The Benefit: Insight into opportunities for future, and stronger, customer connections.
Step 2: A Deeper Dive
Step 2: A Deeper Dive
Next, move on to identify critical customer moments. It can be the difference between going from a pain point, to an opportunity, to strengthening a customer bond.
Where to look
- Transactional or customer journey experiences
- Win-loss data
- Segmentation data
- Product evaluations
- Key drivers of your employee experience
- Key aspects of your brand experience
What you'll discover
- Specific pain points within and across channels
- Opportunities for process improvement from connecting research results with business intelligence
- Where efforts should be focused to grow acquisition and retention
- Potential areas to improve personalization efforts in key customer segments
- Validation (or not) that new products and services meet important customer needs
The Goal: Uncovering possible missed CX opportunities hiding in plain sight.
The Benefit: A broader and more holistic look at the drivers of CX offers more opportunity for improvement and growth.
Step 3: The Long View
Step 3: The Long View
This more evolved stage of the CX program is all about safeguarding what you’ve built with your customers up to this point. That means widening the view to stay relevant now and in the future.
Where to look
- Industry trends and competitive position evaluation
- Impact of digital on the customer experience
- Impact of regulatory requirements on the customer experience
- Level of relevant personalization customers are looking for
- Satisfaction with companies in adjacent and other industries
What you'll discover
- How to keep pace with innovations in digital experiences and personalization
- Areas for improvement based on competitive position
- A better understanding of the influence of experiences with adjacent and outside industries
- How legal/regulatory requirements affect satisfaction
The Goal: Prevent your CX program from operating in a vacuum that only addresses what is happening at the organizational level.
The Benefit: Insight to allow for swift action to keep pace with rapidly changing developments.
Even as a customer experience program reaches a more advanced level, never lose sight of the need for ongoing monitoring. If there is one thing that is a CX certainty, it’s that customer needs and expectations are constantly evolving. Having a line of sight into them can help you react quickly or, better yet, get ahead of it.Â
Let's Connect.
It all starts with a conversation.
Let’s Connect.
It all starts with a conversation.