An intentional, proactive customer experience (CX) has unmatched power for attracting new customers and earning their lifelong loyalty. But this is easy to say and harder to do. To really deliver for your customers and your organizational goals — and achieve scalable growth by operationalizing CX — you need a calculated CX strategy.
People today have countless options for where to shop and how to solve their challenges. Customer experience can be a differentiator to attract these shoppers. So CX leaders like you need to reach customers in personalized ways on the channels they use most if you want to break through the noise. And once you have their attention, every step in their journey can deepen their loyalty — or cause them to look elsewhere.
There are so many places you can focus. Everyone in your organization has the power to create great experiences, but it takes a strategic effort to make the most use of your time and scale your efforts successfully.
This article offers a step-by-step approach to creating your CX strategy — from setting a vision to implementing and refining your plan — to empower you to turn CX into a true revenue generator for your organization.
Ready to set up for success? Let’s dig in.
Understanding the Basics of Customer Experience Strategy
Every department or business function needs a strategy. Customer experience is no exception.
Your CX strategy should reflect where your organization currently stands with its customer experience and define a clear vision for where you can go next. A well-defined CX strategy can help you drive tangible business outcomes: Greater customer retention, a stronger brand reputation, and faster revenue generation.
Of course, these won’t happen overnight. The strategy explains every step you’ll take so you know where to focus, how to measure your success, and gradually expand your footprint.
The Core Elements of a CX Strategy
A well-built CX strategy involves a few critical elements. Each of these plays a distinct role in your efforts and helps you align every member of your organization so you can operationalize CX effectively:
- Customer Experience Vision Statement: A CX Vision Statement is a starting point to explain the experience you hope to provide customers. Vision statements are aspirational, so they need other elements to bring them to life — but these are great thought starters to get excited about what you want to accomplish.
- Customer Experience Mission Statement: Unlike corporate vision, mission, and value statements, the CX Mission Statement articulates your brand’s promise to customers, the experience every customer should receive, and how this will move your business forward. It’s the first step in bringing your CX Vision Statement to life. This is also essential for aligning everyone in your organization and empowering them to support your CX strategy.
- CX Success Strategy Statement: Every CX Mission Strategy needs goals. Your CX Success Strategy Statement extends your organizational and leadership goals to define specific outcomes for your CX program. You’ll identify metrics you’ll track to prove these outcomes, and we explain metrics more below.
- Customer Touchpoints: Your CX program centers on customer touchpoints, which are every point of interaction with customers (both direct and indirect). Customers navigate touchpoints from before they’re even customers and transition from general awareness to actively investigating your product or service, to onboarding and ongoing support.
- Measurement: Back to metrics, you’ll need tools or processes to continually check in on your program’s success and see how far you’ve come. You may follow specific metrics like customer retention, customer lifetime value, and overall customer satisfaction. How you measure will be directly related to how you’ve defined success.
5 Steps for CX Strategy Planning
To create your CX strategy elements and guide your daily efforts, follow these five steps:
Step 1 – Define Your CX Vision and Goals
Start with your foundation. Define the CX Strategy elements we explored above, including a customer-centric vision statement and measurable CX goals.
Why are you starting on this journey of customer experience? What do you believe it will do for your business outcomes and customers? Your vision might be broad — like creating a customer experience that is a differentiator — but that’s not enough to set up for success. That’s why we recommend a CX Mission Statement to concisely state what you’re doing for customers and what everyone in your organization should understand as your mission.
Your vision and, ultimately, your CX Mission Statement will guide the entire CX strategy, and the best strategies align with your overarching business goals.
Goalsetting is a crucial step. (And ironically, one of the most overlooked in CX!) Remember, your customers are having a customer experience whether you define it or not. That’s why being intentional is so vital to a successful program.
Be transparent about where your customer experience is today and what you can accomplish in a clearly defined timeframe. You may aspire to accomplish many things with your CX program. I often hear about common goals like:
- Improve Net Promoter Score (NPS)
- Reduce customer churn
- Increase customer lifetime value
The Experience Investigators team uses SMIRC goals for CX: Social, measurable, inspiring, relevant, and contextual. SMIRC goals make each of your aspirations more tangible, so you know exactly what you’re working toward:
- Improve NPS by 20% within the next 6 months, because this will lead to more purchases per customer.
- Reduce customer churn by 10% by improving the post-purchase support experience.
- Increase customer lifetime value by creating personalized up-sell and cross-sell campaigns based on each customer’s prior purchases.
Each of the above examples includes CX metrics you may choose to track. However, a quick word of advice: Any metric can give you some insight into your success, but no metric is worth your sole attention. Measurement should include both customer feedback data AND operational data. (Have questions? Here’s a resource.)
Keep an eye on your metrics, but don’t obsess over them and fall into the trap of overmeasuring your results. Set a clear cadence for which you’ll measure, and pay some attention to any metric you can access so you don’t miss key indicators of where you may want to focus. Remember, metrics themselves are never outcomes. They are measurements of what outcomes you want!
Related resources: Download our free CX Mission Statement Workbook and CX Success Strategy Statement Workbook.
Step 2 – Understand Your Customers Deeply
With your vision and goals set, it’s time to get to know your customers. (After all, they’re the people you’re helping!)
Customer personas represent customers in groups of shared attributes. Personas help you envision real peoples’ thoughts, feelings, and preferences so you address every group’s unique needs as you execute your strategy.
Personas may be fairly general at first, which is okay. Build personas around the key differentiators between groups — such as tech-savvy millennials who value convenience and personalized service, or safety-focused parents who prioritize trust and knowledgeable support — and get more granular as your intelligence grows.
And keep in mind that people are people, not personas. Personas are a tool to help us get closer to our customers, but no person behaves exactly the same way all the time. There are good reasons for personas — but they are tools, not mandates. Be careful about assuming your persona is the one representative you need. Keep listening to customers and watching behaviors to really understand their nuances and differences. Personas are powerful tools, so don’t be afraid to experiment with how you track behaviors and create these groups.
A bank’s customer personas may look something like this:
- Homeowners who primarily visit physical branches and access home loan and mortgage services
- College students who have a debit card and prefer using mobile apps and websites
- Middle-aged adults who have both a checking and savings account, and they use a mix of in-person and digital services
A clothing retailer may rely on more detailed customer personas, like the following:
- Adult women who frequently shop in-store and prefer the convenience of trying on items before making a purchase
- Adult male customers who shop infrequently but in large volumes, primarily online
- Younger adult customers of all genders who are most likely to shop when offered a discount and frequently access their loyalty program offers
Ongoing customer listening efforts help you improve your personas and journey maps and understand which touchpoints may be most important to prioritize for each group. Surveys, interviews, and feedback forms all provide insights and improve your understanding of the CX metrics you’re following. Be sure to listen for untold customer feedback, too.
Using AI for Customer Persona Development
You don’t have to build your customer personas alone. Artificial intelligence (AI) is incredibly powerful at analyzing large volumes of data to identify trends and key differences between groups you should be aware of.
Even if you have a pretty good understanding of your customers, AI can help validate your knowledge, enrich your persona details, and uncover new areas to consider.
Follow these steps to have AI build or enrich your customer personas:
- Assess your internal data resources: If your organization has a data scientist or a data expert, they are the perfect resource to guide your efforts. Explain how you’re looking to build customer personas using the organization’s data and ask the data expert about how you can accomplish this effectively.
- Gather customer data sources: It’s okay if your organization doesn’t have an internal data expert who can help. Collect customer data from your customer relationship management (CRM) tool or survey and feedback sources. Consolidate everything into one secure location if possible.
- Feed the data into your AI tool: Choose an AI tool to analyze your data, ensuring the solution will keep all customer information confidential. Most free tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude also offer paid versions that are necessary for data confidentiality. Remember: Any information you give to a free AI tool feeds the insights it gives to all users.
- Upload your existing customer personas: If you have existing customer personas, provide those to the AI tool so it can compare your personas with the data you shared.
- Ask the AI to analyze your data: Once the tool has your data, you can ask it questions to inform your persona development:
- What key customer segments can you identify in this data?
- What customer traits or characteristics influence engagement or purchasing decisions for these segments?
- What goals or challenges do these segments share?
- Which communication channels do these personas prefer?
- Can you suggest attitudes, behaviors, and motivations based on this data?
- What demographic or psychographic information could enhance these customer personas?
- Critique my existing customer personas based on the data I’ve shared.
Step 3 – Map and Optimize Customer Touchpoints
Customer journey mapping exercises will enmesh you in each persona’s journey to understand how they find you, what they seek at key steps of their shopping journey (also known as customer touchpoints), and how you can maximize their post-purchase satisfaction.
Related resource: Customer Journey Mapping Examples: 4 Use Cases to Inform Your CX Strategy.
Evaluate each customer touchpoint for its consistency with your customer experience vision and whether it effectively meets your customer’s needs. There are a lot of areas you can focus, so focus on one channel at a time and first prioritize areas most relevant to your goals. This can include channels or common journeys like:
- Website
- Mobile app
- In-store
- Customer support
- Product implementation support
- Loyalty program
- Referral program
- Returns or refunds
For example: If customer churn is high for new customers and your customer feedback shows that the onboarding process is lengthy and complicated, consider creating tutorials or onboarding videos to guide customers through that process. Monitor for a decrease in customer churn during their first months and an increase in total customer lifetime value to see if your efforts are paying off.
This is another opportunity to use AI to your advantage and suggest which customer touchpoints are most critical to the overall experience and supporting your organization’s goals.
Step 4 – Develop a CX Implementation Plan
Every member of your organization plays an important role in shaping and reinforcing your customer experience (whether they realize it or not).
Aligning CX and customer service is often considered given the direct overlap, however, customer service isn’t the only area to focus on.
The most successful CX teams align every department around the CX mission and foster collaboration across marketing, sales, support, and technology teams to ensure consistent CX. Your strategy for building this alignment will partially depend on where CX lives in your organization, but there are several ways to drive ongoing alignment:
- Communicate about CX constantly (seriously, don’t stop talking about it!) and consistently share customer journey insights, celebrate wins, and highlight how your metrics are improving.
- Invest in CX education for employees so it becomes a priority for everyone from their very first interview to onboarding and beyond.
- Prioritize a great employee experience so everyone feels empowered to share feedback and explain what hurdles they face in supporting the customer experience mission.
Meet with cross-departmental leaders regularly to discuss their goals and how a great CX will help their team thrive. It helps to start with one or two departments whose leaders have previously shown support for CX. This way, you can drive some immediate benefits and demonstrate to other leaders how CX can help them.
Step 5 – Measure and Refine Your CX Strategy
Measuring your results is essential to see the impact of your efforts and demonstrate the actual business value CX creates.
Your Customer Experience Success Strategy Statement should give your measurement based on the metrics you identified. You need some way to measure those metrics and communicate your results to organizational leaders.
Many CX management tools can provide you with in-depth reporting capabilities, including Medallia and Qualtrics, and you can couple those insights with information from Google Analytics to get a deeper understanding of how people interact with your website and content.
Related resource: Customer Experience ROI: Tying CX Investments to Business Success
Ongoing measurement, customer listening, and evaluation help you understand what is and isn’t working so you can adjust your strategy accordingly:
- Use customer feedback channels to identify urgent issues to address
- Partner with sales and support reps to know what content they need to help customers more effectively
- Run through each customer journey to find hurdles they may face that you can fix
A customer advisory board (CAB) can help many organizations access customers who are willing to share their thoughts and feedback regularly. Running a CAB requires initial setup and ongoing investment, which you may not be able to focus on right now.
At a minimum, follow a quarterly cadence where you revisit your CX Mission Strategy, assess your metrics, and reflect on what is or isn’t working. You may decide it’s appropriate to shift course mid-year, which gives you time to get on a better path and still drive measurable results before the end of the year.
CX Strategy Implementation
It’s not enough for organizations to say they are “customer-obsessed” or “prioritize the customer in everything we do.”
A strong customer experience strategy enables you to create a truly customer-centric brand. No matter where you are in your customer experience journey, the CX strategy will provide the direction you need to drive meaningful improvements and prove your results to executives.
Stay committed to your strategy and be willing to shift course as new opportunities arise or as your customer expectations evolve. Every action you take has the potential to make someone’s life easier and help them thrive. It’s a uniquely rewarding opportunity, isn’t it?
To gain ongoing guidance, tips, and strategies to keep evolving your CX strategy, check out these resources:
- Sign up for The Weekly Win, my email newsletter. Each week, I examine a CX topic, explore recent news, or discuss a challenge I overcame to help inspire innovation in your strategy.
- Access my LinkedIn Learning CX courses for a detailed walkthrough of many planning and strategy elements, including journey mapping, linking CX to business outcomes, and operationalizing CX.
- Tune into the Experience Action podcast, where I answer questions from CX change agents like you. You can record a question for me to answer on an upcoming episode at askjeannie.vip.
If you are looking for expert guidance in building your strategy or guiding your day-to-day efforts, hiring a customer experience consultant can quickly accelerate your CX success. Learn more about how a CX business partner can help your organization, and start a conversation with me here to see how Experience Investigators can move your program forward.
Jeannie
