Top 8 CX Strategies for 2016

You need to make 2016 the year you create an unfair competitive advantage from everyone else. Become the brand you Customers cannot live without and make price irrelevant. Follow these 8 Customer Experience strategies:

1.    Executive Sponsorship – Customer service has to be as important as finance, sales, operations, and technology. It needs to be talked about at board meetings and strategic planning sessions, with leaders and everyone else in the company, including frontline employees. The senior leadership team has to provide the necessary resources to create long-lasting change. People must be able to tell that the leadership of the company is truly committed and passionate about the Customer experience. The best Customer service companies in the world have leaders who are obsessed over their company’s Customer experience, down to the smallest detail. They passionately articulated their vision for world-class experience every time they spoke, to anyone and everyone who would listen. And their companies are all known for world-class Customer service. Service Aptitude starts at the very top.

2.    Return on Xperience – Watermark Consulting released its annual  Customer Experience ROI Study. They studied stock performance of the Top 10 and Bottom 10 publicly traded companies in Forrester Research’s annual Customer Experience Index rankings. Probably not surprising is that the top 10 CX companies did better than the bottom 10. What might be an eye opener is by how much better the top 10 outperformed not only the bottom 10, but also S&P 500.

3.    Customer Satisfaction is overrated – I believe the most important Customer service metric a company can have is not their Customer satisfaction rates, but rather their Customer retention rates. Are you getting them to return and do business with you again? That is it, stop right there. They can give you a high mark on Customer satisfaction or are likely to refer, but that doesn’t mean they are coming back. If they don’t come back, what good is a 9 out of 10 Customer satisfaction score? Focus on the percent of that return and refer other Customers. That is the key.

4.    Stop competing in price wars – There is always someone willing to make it crappier and sell it for less. Discounting is just a race to the bottom. Making price irrelevant is achieved when your Customers are so happy with you, that they have no idea what your competition charges. Price is something you offer when you have nothing else.

5.    The currency for millennials is purpose – Why do some companies have a large percent of their workforce unmotivated and apathetic, while other excellent companies have the majority of their workforce willing to make ridiculous sacrifices in a cult-like culture of Customer satisfaction?  NewDay USA accelerates growth by inspiring Millennials.

6.    CX strategic blue print – From years of studying and working with world-class customer service organizations, I have found that there are principles they all have in common that differentiate them from other organizations and elevates them to a different customer service level. These X-Commandments of world-class service are irrefutable.

7.    Customer Experience Executive – The fastest growing C- level position in recent years is the CXE – Customer eXperience Executive, also known as the CXO (Chief Xperience Officer). While MBA programs have prepared leaders for accounting, finance, marketing, HR, and operations management, there remained a need for education to design and manage the Customer’s experience. Get your Master’s in Customer Xperience

8.    The Art of the Experience – Customer experience is where process meets design and art. It is about creativity and innovation put into a system that allows you to build unique and memorable moments that people crave, and compels them to need to enjoy again. You have to be an artist to build an incredible Customer experience.