Aspiring entrepreneurs and small business owners have many aspects of their business to consider when scaling. Unfortunately for many, customer experience (CX) is often put on the back burner in order to prioritize other core business functions. For smaller teams with limited resources, it can be even more difficult to find the budget, personnel, or time to invest in the customer experience. However, customer experience is vital for a myriad of reasons and should be top of mind in the pursuit of sustainable business growth.
If you’re a leader looking to scale your business or invest in the customer journey, read more to learn about the benefits of customer experience, how CX can help you scale, and how to create your own CX Critical Care Plan.
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How Does CX Benefit Businesses?
According to Grand View Research, the global CX Management market reached $8.8 billion in 2021 and is expected to grow 18.1% every year from 2022 to 2030. Due to the ever-increasing importance of CX, businesses must continue to evolve with constantly changing expectations to keep up with a fast-growing market.
Teams that focus on scaling customer experience are more sustainable for long-term success and can reap the benefits:
- Loyal customers and increased customer lifetime value (CLV): The cost of acquiring anew customer is significantly higher than the cost of retaining a customer. Not only that, but satisfied customers are more likely to return to a business, which can lead to repeat sales, higher retention, and a loyal customer base.
- Increased revenue: According to CX Index, 86% of customers are willing to pay more fora superior customer experience. These customers are willing to pay up to a 16% price premium following a positive experience.
- Competitive advantage: A positive customer experience sets a business apart from its competitors, making it more attractive to potential customers.
- Improved customer insights: Gathering customer feedback and data can help a business understand customer needs and preferences, which can inform decisions about product development, marketing, and other areas.
How Can CX Help a Business Scale?
If you want your customers to have a positive experience, you need to invest in CX, but customer support can be difficult to nail down. Alternatively, excellent customer experiences create a lasting impression that causes customers to turn into repeat buyers and promote a business through word of mouth.
“You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work back toward the technology, not the other way around.” – Steve Jobs
CX can help a business scale by forming a positive reputation. Additionally, by understanding and addressing the needs and pain points of customers, a business can improve its products and services, making them more attractive to potential customers. As a way to improve operations and increase efficiency, customer feedback can be used to invest in scaling your business and continuing to give customers what they want or expect from your business.
Your CX Critical Care Plan
Understanding the importance of customer experience for growing brands is the first step intaking action to scale CX. The next step is strategy; that’s why your business needs a CX Critical Care Plan. This framework mapped out by Influx will help to effectively manage and improve CX.
- Review past data and future projections. Are there any trends or areas that need attention?
- Evaluate your customer experience SOPs. Using customer feedback as a guide, determine if there are any improvements to products or services that can elevate CX.
- Create a customer policy and a vision. Your customer policy promotes making the customer feel valued and matches your mission. This will direct your company’s customer service strategy. Your vision should be succinct and clear so that employees can easily recall it.
- Build a strong team to carry out your CX Critical Care Plan. This may involve recruiting and hiring, training your existing team, or outsourcing to a partner.
- Empower agents with defined objectives and guidelines. This entails developing an organizational culture that uplifts your team, recognizes their contributions, and supports them as they learn from their errors with the same compassion we expect them to provide consumers.
- Test and tweak your plan, making adjustments as needed.
- Set up ticket tagging so that specific tags assist in isolating problems and quickly identifying them.
- Keep your staff and consumers enthusiastic about your company with exclusive offers, VIP programs, fresh content, and new product launches.
- Constantly review and record performance data to proactively spot any areas of weakness or to stay up-to-date with market trends and expectations.
- Continue evolving your strategy to align with your company goals and customers. For CX Critical Care Plans, there truly isn’t a one-size-fits-all template, but regularly evaluating, testing, and reaffirming your strategy keeps the momentum going.
Your CX Critical Care Plan should change with your consumers and advance as your company does. According to TELUS International, 44% of consumers said that nothing–not even price, convenience, or if it’s a brand they truly like–excuses a poor customer experience. Because the outcome of one bad experience is so detrimental to a business, taking the time to prepare a CX Critical Care Plan is one step in the right direction to scale operations through improved customer interactions.
