4 tips for long-term customer experience strategies

Every organization and individual you interact with is wondering about the long-term impact COVID-19 will have. Around the world, we’re all under intense pressure to find new ways to function. Call it a plague, call it the Second Great Depression, just don’t call it easy. As far as long-term customer experience strategies go, are we armed with the right ones?

As businesses are more closely scrutinizing how they can continue to run their operations and deliver positive customer service, they are also examining their CX strategies. CX, or customer experience, is a customer’s entire journey with your brand. CX all comes down to how a person feels about the experience of interacting with your company. When someone has a great customer experience, you are delivering your promise, providing a valuable product or service and creating an enjoyable experience with your customer across every touchpoint.

Let's look at four tips for successful long-term customer experience strategies you can utilize during this difficult time.

Without customers, there is no business

Naturally, customers are the lifeblood of business. The way a company communicates with its customers and the public can make or destroy their reputation, particularly during a crisis. An organization can either rise up and demonstrate great value and service to their customers, or they can sink under the pressure. This holds true more than ever in times like these. 

If your business hasn’t seriously considered their CX strategy before now, it’s certainty time. If your business hasn’t reevaluated their CX game since these events have unfolded, there is major work to be done. Customer experience measurement is, and will continue to be, a pillar of business development. Long-term customer experience strategies must change and adapt with the times.

Long-term customer experience strategies drive revenue

When there’s a lot to do, panic can sometimes take over and trick you into putting on your “I just have to get through these next few weeks” hat. That hat, while appearing necessary at the time, will not set you up for success. When you neglect customer experience in the short term to direct your efforts to the items that seem to bring in revenue, you risk compromising future revenue. 

While the pandemic wasn’t planned (not that any pandemic is) making fast decisions without reliable data can endanger the livelihood of your business. When it comes to CX data, you can use scores like (CSAT, CES and NPS) to track and calculate customer experience success.

Breaking down the scores

A net promoter score (NPS) is completely based on the answer to a single question. “How likely are you to recommend our brand to a colleague, family member, or friend?” The customer rates your organization on a scale of 0 to 10, and they have the option to provide more information. The scoring is based on the idea that customers fall into one of three categories: promoters, passives, and detractors.

A customer satisfaction score (CSAT) asks a series of questions to determine how satisfied a customer is with an interaction on a rating scale of 1 to 5. CSAT is flexible and extremely customizable. The questions are personalized on the customer’s most recent experience. The customers are asked to rate their satisfaction ranging from very dissatisfied to very satisfied with questions such as “How would you rate your satisfaction with your recent customer service interaction?”

The customer effort score (CES) measures how much effort a customer endures to have their needs fulfilled by your company, and is scored on a numeric scale. It’s a customer service metric that aims to improve systems that frustrate customers. The idea is that customers will be more loyal to brands that are easier to do business with. In other words, less customer effort grants a more positive customer experience. 

You can read more about measuring the scores here.

Use Tethr for long-term customer experience strategies

The easiest way to measure CX success is through the Tethr Effort Index (TEI). TEI is the market’s first machine learning-based, predictive effort score. Leveraging more than a decade of research on customer experience, TEI enables companies to track customer effort at a conversation-level, and immediately drill down into high-effort interactions that are likely to create disloyalty and churn. Rather than pestering your customers to provide feedback via surveys, the TEI score is automatically assigned by the Tethr platform at the completion of every customer interaction, allowing managers to immediately understand the effort level of an interaction, speeding up time to deliver critical customer interventions and eliminating the need to wait for survey responses to trickle in. Now that's a serious long-term customer experience strategy.

When it comes to CX and the journey to provide an effortless experience, it takes gathering and interpreting reliable data to make the right decisions. Learn how to do that here.