Customer Experience Transformation Strategy: A Key to Profitable Growth

A customer experience transformation strategy enables the promise of customer-centricity to become a reality. You’ve mapped your customers’ journeys so that you know not only every touchpoint they have with your brand but also how they feel at each point. You’ve examined where consumers are abandoning your brand as well as where in the journey consumers are most likely to convert into customers and customers are most likely to grow into fans. You’ve reviewed customer complaints and contact center interactions. And now you’re ready to use those findings to create a CX transformation roadmap that will revamp the overall customer experience so you can convert and retain more customers more consistently and profitably.

If customer experience is a road trip, starting at awareness and (hopefully) ending post-purchase, customer experience transformation serves as the roadworks crew. The goal is to ensure a smooth ride, without potholes, dead ends or detours that might lead the driver to turn around and head back home — or worse, to take a trip to a competing destination. And just like a frequently trafficked highway, a customer experience transformation strategy needs continual updates and improvements. It needs to adapt to macro and micro market changes, including customer preferences and the evolution of the competitive landscape.

The Main Elements of a Customer Experience Transformation Strategy

Like so much else in marketing (and life in general), a CX transformation begins with research, including customer journey mapping and surveys of customers and employees alike. This provides a multidimensional assessment of the customer experience in its current state. The steps below then build on this foundation.

Ideate a perfect customer experience

Because teams throughout the organization are involved in the customer experience, stakeholders from each of them need to take part in designing the improved CX and prioritizing which elements to work on first. You might consider building a cross-functional customer experience transformation team that includes members with expertise in AI, automation and other technologies as well as those with exceptional emotional intelligence and people skills to ensure the CX balances efficiency and the personal touch. It’s also important the CX transformation remains true to the brand. If much of the brand identity involves hands-on customer service, you don’t want to sacrifice that for the sake of automated efficiency; instead you should create a CX that offers the best of both high-touch and low-touch service or encompasses options for different types of consumer.

Engage and educate employees

A customer experience transformation strategy is destined to fail if employees aren’t committed to it or don’t understand it. Be sure to show how the changes in procedures, technologies and other elements will benefit them as well as customers.

Create internal CX communications

These could include an operational playbook, newsletters, promotional campaigns and feedback loops. It’s important that everyone from executives to customer-facing employees understands CX transformation is a continual process and feels empowered to point out aspects that could be further improved.

Implement, measure and evolve

As mentioned above, customer experience transformation should be a matter of ongoing improvement. Determine the most important metrics and KPIs, then embed behavioral analytics, surveys and other tools into operations so that customers and employees alike remain at the center of the process.

Improving Customer Relationships with a CX Transformation Strategy

Strengthening customer relationships is an underlying goal of nearly every customer experience transformation strategy. Among the ways it can do so are:

• Personalization. There is no perfect customer experience for every consumer. An effective CX transformation strategy strives to create optimal experiences for each of a brand’s key audience segments, incorporating communications, offerings and recommendations tailored for specific segments, and ideally for specific individuals as well.

• Seamless omnichannel experiences. Customers might be shopping primarily in stores not because they prefer it but because the brand’s website offers an inferior experience, or vice versa. By eliminating inconsistencies and roadblocks among channels, a CX transformation provides greater customer satisfaction among all touchpoints, leading consumers to engage in more ways. This is especially important as consumers are increasingly hopping from channel to channel throughout their customer journey.

• More effective customer service. In the face of increasing product commoditization, customer service can be a crucial point of differentiation. Improved customer service, with options for both high-touch and low-touch consumers, is typically a significant benefit of a CX transformation strategy.

Relevant offerings, omnichannel seamlessness and exceptional customer service are at the heart of customer satisfaction. They lead to more frequent purchases, larger order values and stronger brand loyalty.

Using CX Transformation to Expand into New Markets

Brands can use the same customer experience transformation strategy that improved their relationship with existing customers to reach new audiences as well. Again, the process begins with research. You might have already discovered when beginning your CX transformation that your brand is failing to engage with certain market sectors. When planning your ideal CX future state, you can incorporate the tactics necessary to appeal to these untapped audiences. For instance, a brand that wants to cultivate more Gen Z consumers might add TikTok and Instagram campaigns into the awareness stage of the CX journey and promote chatbots as part of the CX digital transformation, even if those aren’t relevant to improving the experience for existing, older customers.

Employee engagement and education, internal CX communications and measuring the effect of the transformed experience on the new market sector are necessary for success, just as they are for improving the experience among the existing audiences. Just be sure to also measure whether these CX changes are having any adverse effects on your other customers.

How Material can Help with Your Customer Experience Transformation Strategy

At Material we’ve partnered with organizations across market sectors to improve their customer experience — and with it their business outcomes. Our comprehensive, orchestrated approach engages all levels of the organization, unifying external customer insight with internal cross-functional knowledge. Contact us today to discover how, by converting insight into action, we can help transform your CX.

FAQ

What are some frameworks used in customer experience transformation strategy?

A CX transformation framework can be broken down into five steps.

1. Research/assess the existing customer experience.

2. Call on cross-functional partners to help design an ideal CX and prioritize which aspects to implement first.

3. Engage and educate employees on the changes and how they will improve their experience as well as that of customers.

4. Create internal communications that emphasize the transformation is a long-term process.

5. Implement the new strategy, measure and evolve.

What are potential pitfalls of customer experience transformation?

Pitfalls can arise at each step of a CX transformation. Poorly implemented or misunderstood research could result in faulty decision-making, as could neglecting the differing needs and drivers of the disparate audience segments. Failing to involve stakeholders from all departments of the organization can also lead to an unsuccessful transformation. Above all, treating the customer experience transformation strategy as a one-time tactic rather than an ongoing process and losing sight of the consumers who should be at the heart of the transformation will result in a waste of resources and perhaps damage the organization for the long term.

How can we future-proof CX transformation?

Measuring KPIs and capturing customer feedback over time helps to ensure a CX transformation strategy will continue to be effective in the future — so long as the strategy also includes tactics for reacting to feedback and metrics. It is near-impossible to predict all market changes (did anybody anticipate the lockdowns of 2020?), but a transformation plan that accounts for change management and mechanisms should provide an organization with the necessary agility.