In today's business landscape, building a winning customer experience strategy is essential for any organisation looking to stand out in a crowded marketplace.

One of the key decisions that companies face when building a customer experience strategy is whether to focus on acquisition or retention. Although it’s much more cost effective by focusing your marketing efforts on retaining your current customers, the right balance between the two can help a business drive growth and maximize profitability.

In this article, we'll explore the key elements of building a customer experience strategy that strikes the right balance between acquisition and retention. We'll dive into data and insight, mapping the customer journey to encourage ROI and measuring and optimising your customer experience strategy through your marketing efforts.

Section 1: Data and Insight

The first step in building a successful customer experience strategy is to gather data and insight about your customers. This information will help you understand your customers' needs, wants, and preferences, allowing you to tailor your experience to meet their expectations.

There are several ways to gather data and insights about your customers, including:

  • Conducting Surveys: Surveys allow you to gain insight into your core audience, the type of language they use and where their brand affinities lie. Collecting feedback can help you gain insights into what your customers want and how you can best serve them.
  • Persona workshops: Persona workshops provide invaluable insights to the way your actual audience interacts with your brand. Whilst the CEO may think they know their customers inside out, it is often the people who deal with customers daily who have the most accurate knowledge. Read our step by step guide here when conducting a persona workshop.
  • Use forums: Forums such as Reddit and Quora can be an invaluable source when it comes to market research. The ability for users to set themselves as anonymous encourages open discussions allowing you to get real insights into what makes people tick. 

Identifying and addressing customer pain points is another critical element of building a winning customer experience strategy. Pain points are areas of customer dissatisfaction that can lead to customer churn or negative word-of-mouth marketing. Common pain points include long wait times, poor product quality, and unresponsive customer service.

To identify pain points, you can use customer feedback surveys or social media monitoring. Once identified, you should develop strategies to address each pain point. For example, if long wait times are a pain point, you can implement a self-service portal or chatbot to reduce wait times.

Section 2: Mapping the Customer Journey

The customer journey is the complete set of interactions a customer has with a business from the initial contact to post-purchase support. To build a winning customer experience strategy, you must understand the different questions consumers will be asking at each stage of their buying cycle and develop targeted strategies to enhance the customer experience at each stage. 

The customer journey typically consists of five stages: awareness, interest, consideration, purchase, and advocacy. You should map out the customer journey for each customer segment and identify trigger points and opportunities to improve the customer experience at each stage, moving them through the purchase funnel and increasing conversion and ROI. 

Section 3: Measure and optimise your marketing efforts

Marketing plays a critical role in building a winning customer experience strategy. Marketers are responsible for creating targeted messaging and developing strategies to retain customers. You must work closely with other departments, including customer service and product development, to ensure a seamless customer experience.

You should also measure the success of your customer experience strategy using key performance indicators (KPI’s) such as customer satisfaction, customer churn, customer retention, and customer lifetime value. Use this data to optimise your approach, making changes and improvements based on what's working and what's not. This data can be used to refine and improve customer experience strategies over time as the business grows.

Ultimately, the ideal customer experience strategy incorporates both acquisition and retention, with a focus on finding the right balance between the two. By acquiring new customers while also retaining existing ones, you can create a sustainable and profitable growth model that ensures long-term success.

If you want to develop your own customer experience strategy, our hands-on Master Strategy Programme takes you through the three fundamental pillars of building a winning marketing strategy. We offer individual learner and team corporate packages. Find out more here.

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