Guest blog: The Ultimate Guide to Launching and Branding a Successful Customer Experience Program

If you want your brand to stand head and shoulders above the competition, developing an unbeatable customer experience is essential. However, consistently achieving customer satisfaction across all aspects of your business is a considerable challenge.

In this guide, we will talk you through how to launch and brand a successful customer experience (CX) program to ensure your business is operating at the top of its game.

What is a customer experience (CX) program?

A customer experience program refers to the applied processes and methods that enable an overall customer experience management strategy. 

Simply, it refers to how you manage the experience and happiness of your customers across the business, using a range of tools and practices to make life easier for your clients. This can cover the initial points of contact, interactions, support, and feedback, as well as developing your brand to improve the overall perception of your business.

Launching a customer experience program – What do you hope to achieve?

Customer experience programs are usually many-faceted, especially for larger organizations, with meticulous planning to ensure every aspect of your operations receives enough attention. That is why it is essential that you set clear goals and define key performance indicators (KPIs).

For your CX program to be successful, the goals and KPIs need to be adapted constantly to keep up with changing trends, new processes, and the evolution of consumer habits. As the business progresses and grows, so must your targets to ensure you continue to meet your clients’ needs. 

One great starting point would be to measure customer response rates and increase employee engagement to ensure everyone is on the same wavelength. Maximizing the amount of feedback you receive is one of the best ways to identify what improvements need to be made, driving your overall customer experience program.  

How to launch and brand a customer experience program successfully

Implementing a bespoke customer experience program that looks to assess every aspect of your business can be daunting. You must be prepared to identify failings within the business and bring these issues to light to improve and grow. 

You may even face opposition to some ‌of the changes you propose. However, it is always vital that you stick to your goals, use the available data, and implement the necessary changes to benefit your customers.

Below is our 4-step plan to launch and brand a customer experience program. 

1. Push for change actively

If your CX program is to be successful, you must be at the forefront of it and actively driving change. Gathering feedback, data, and metrics is all well and good, but it will count for nothing if there is no one pushing the business to make the needed changes.

Using your chosen customer experience software, you can highlight problem areas and aspects of the business that require attention, but it is up to you, or the person managing the program, to enforce the changes. 

Some of the easiest changes to make are also the simplest to identify. It cannot be overplayed how effective a well-constructed survey can be to gauge how content your customers are. 

When developing your CX program, you must:

• Implement robust processes to help gather feedback and data.
• Know your customer journeys inside out, including every step taken, what tools and software are used to engage with customers, and what the desired end goal is for every action taken. This can be achieved by creating a customer journey map. 
• Speak with management and the wider team so action can be taken to improve business operations. In particular, ensure to include customer-facing team leaders who are in the best position to drive change. 

2. Prioritize

It is advised to pinpoint high-priority areas that need improvement from a customer experience perspective to kick things off. That way, you can focus your efforts and establish a process that can be applied to other parts of the business.

For example, you may find that many users are exiting a particular page of your website before clicking the desired call to action or finalizing a transaction. That is an obvious issue that needs to be identified and corrected. Therefore, it can be considered a high-priority area that needs attention first. 

3. Ensure your CX program is an extension of your overall branding strategy 

Your customer experience program must act as an extension to your overall branding strategy, helping to encourage engagement and build recognition. As well as helping your customers associate the program with your brand, it also makes it easier for employees to understand how it translates across the overall business and their roles in delivering change. 

Your co-workers need to see how the CX program is a valuable tool that can help improve the business and make their lives easier. This can be achieved in the following ways:

• Create a name for your CX program that is easily identifiable and can be associated with the overall brand.
• Conduct thorough training for employees, so they fully understand the benefits of the program. 
• Provide clear communication to the customers, so they are aware the program will improve their experience going forward.

4. Conduct surveys and collect data

Once you have branded your customer experience program, identified areas of importance, and decided on clear goals, it’s time to engage with your customers. Conducting surveys and requesting customer feedback is the best way to understand why certain aspects of your business or website are not delivering the desired results, thus impacting your profits and revenue. 

Collecting numerical data in terms of measurable analytics, combined with written feedback, can assist you in really narrowing down any issues to gain a clear overview of how your customers are interacting with your product. 

Two effective methods for gathering such data are Customer Effort Score (CES) surveys and Net Promoter Score (NPS) surveys:

• A CES survey is launched within the user interface once an action has been completed, requesting feedback on its ease of use. 
• An NPS survey is usually sent via email to your core customer base, asking them to score aspects of your business and provide written feedback. This data can then be cross-checked with user activity metrics. 

Surveys can also help you identify new tools and software that can help improve your service offerings. For example, scheduling software plays a significant role in improving customer experience, creating helpful reminders, and improving organization. GetWeave is one of the leading scheduling tools of 2022, used by a range of businesses across many sectors.

Take action and continue to improve

Finally, ensure that the data you collect is put to good use and necessary action is taken to improve interfaces, train customer-facing employees, and adapt processes. Your customer experience program is not a one-time thing; if it is to be successful, it must be created for long-term use, reacting to changes in user behavior and industry trends.