Building a Customer Experience Program: Guide to Getting Started

Don’t know what a customer experience program is? This post will help you get started.

Customer expectations have evolved drastically over the last decade, particularly in the last five years. Consumers want faster, more personalized support on more channels, and this is backed up by plenty of data.

Our 2024 State of Customer Experience Report reveals that only 47% of business leaders are confident in their ability to fix a customer experience issue. This is likely the cause of less formalized efforts across the enterprise. 

With so many brands stepping up their game and offering consumers more options than ever before, customer experience (CX) has become a pivotal purchasing factor. Embracing customer experience management (CXM) can help your business offer a positive customer journey — now that’s a competitive advantage.

What Is a Customer Experience Program?

A customer experience program is a strategic approach that enables a business to design and react to its customers’ interactions in ways that meet or exceed their expectations. The goal is to increase customer satisfaction, loyalty, and advocacy. This often involves being proactive and measuring sentiment and customer perception throughout all stages of product and service delivery.

Successful CX program development often begins by creating a customer journey map and diving into customer experience metric data.

The main objective of developing a customer experience program is building positive customer relationships across all touchpoints. Initiatives for in-person and digital experiences are implemented to improve the overall customer experience. Businesses often focus on key factors like product education, the buying process, customer success measures, and improving omnichannel customer support.

The Importance of a Customer Experience Program

A McKinsey study found that 71% of customers want businesses to provide personalized experiences, and 76% are frustrated when that doesn’t happen:

The importance of effective customer experience programs in 2024 can’t be overstated. A report by Zendesk found that 80% of business leaders plan to raise their customer service budgets and that 90% of businesses have said they’ve made CX their primary focus. This isn’t surprising, given the key benefits brands enjoy when implementing successful customer experience programs.

Customer loyalty

Positive customer experiences lead to repeat business and customer retention, with many consumers now actively considering their previous experiences and anticipated future experiences when making purchasing decisions. To retain customers longer and build brand loyalty, you must create positive, competitive experiences at every touchpoint.

Brand differentiation

Companies that excel in CX stand out in competitive markets. One study found that 83% of customers cited strong customer service as the most important factor in their buying decisions.

A positive user experience sets your product or service apart in a hypercompetitive market. Consumers have more options than ever before, and CX is increasingly becoming the key differentiator and even being factored into brand strategy.

Reduced churn

Promptly addressing customer pain points helps reduce customer churn, especially since poor customer experiences are a common reason for consumers to jump ship and turn to one of your competitors. 

A report from Emplifi found the following:

• 49% of customers who left a brand they’d previously been loyal to said it was because of poor CX.
• 86% of consumers would leave a brand after as few as two bad experiences.
• 49% of consumers have left a brand in the past year because of a poor experience.

Increased revenue

Brands known for strong CX are more likely to acquire new customers, and happy customers are expected to stick around longer. They’re also more likely to recommend these brands to their friends, families, and colleagues, which results in increased revenue and profitability.

This revenue growth can be dramatic and happen fast. A 2022 Accenture study found that companies that view customer service as a value center instead of a cost center see an average of 3.5x more revenue growth.

Customer insights

Gaining customer insights is a vital aspect of your customer experience program. Data like customer feedback, interaction and sentiment analysis, and key customer experience metrics including net promoter scores or customer satisfaction scores can help you better understand customer needs and behaviors. You can also leverage customer segmentation to discover how unique segments of your audience move through the customer journey.

Challenges in CX Management

Managing a CX program is no easy task, especially now that brands increasingly rely on numerous communication touchpoints to create an omnichannel experience for customers. There’s more data than ever before, often spread across many platforms, while customer expectations continually rise.

Let’s look at common challenges businesses currently face with CX management.

Data integration

Many businesses — even small ones — connect with customers on multiple platforms, including phone, email, SMS, live chat, and social media. Companies also frequently use multiple customer support platforms, potentially including help desk software, CX software, and customer intelligence software.

These platforms often have an abundance of data, but it all exists in silos, so it’s difficult to evaluate and analyze altogether accurately. This can make it hard for companies to capture comprehensive views of customer trends and create the complete individual customer profiles they need for crafting personalized experiences.

Consistency across channels

Ensuring seamless experiences across all online, in-store, and other support channels is no small task for businesses, especially since they increasingly rely on third-party contact centers and conversational AI chatbots to streamline support availability. Customers should have an equally outstanding experience throughout the entire customer journey and at all touchpoints, with consistent brand interactions, policies, and resolution rates.

Personalization

Customers increasingly expect personalized experiences, including online recommendations tailored to their interests and a support team who knows the full situation when they get in touch. However, delivering true personalization while scaling, and without infringing on customer privacy, is challenging.

Scalability

Many small businesses start out as mom-and-pop shops and are able to deliver outstanding one-on-one experiences. This becomes much more difficult to maintain as the company scales and the customer base grows. Finding ways to keep delivering high-quality CX as the organization scales can be incredibly difficult, and the business often experiences some growing pains.

Employee training and engagement

Poor employee engagement can sink otherwise strong, well-intended CX initiatives. To prevent this, make sure that all your employees are aligned with your CX goals and practices. Training for call center agents and internal employees should be critical to your customer experience strategy.

Related: What Is Shrinkage in a Call Center & How to Minimize It

Advantages of Creating a Unified Customer Experience

A unified customer experience creates consistent, personalized interactions for individual clients across the customer journey. This includes digital and in-person channels and touchpoints ranging from discovery to retention with sales, marketing, and product teams.

Businesses should facilitate a strong experience by unifying CX efforts and interactions with necessary strategies and tools. Let’s discuss how this can benefit your business.

Consistency

A unified customer experience creates consistency like little else will. Customers can expect the same level of service regardless of whether they walk into your store, call your help line, or message you on social media. They know they can always expect a positive support experience.

Brand trust

Consistency leads to stronger customer trust. Customers value a reliable branded experience and look to make purchases from businesses that can offer it. People don’t want to feel like they were subjected to bait-and-switch tactics, but they will if the sales team was attentive, yet customer support is nowhere to be found when an issue arises.

Customer journey

A unified customer experience is the best way to smooth transitions as clients move through the customer journey. They always know how to get in touch and, if relevant, who to contact with any questions or concerns. This can increase their customer satisfaction rates and overall retention rates.

Efficiency

Unified customer experiences reduce friction and confusion for both the customer and your team, leading to quicker resolutions and happier clients. If, for example, a customer sends an email about a problem and then later calls to follow up, your team should be able to track the entire history of their concern. The customer shouldn’t have to repeat their explanation of the problem, and your team should be able to personalize potential solutions based on the individual customer profile.

Must-Haves to Achieve a Unified Experience

Most businesses can benefit from CX software when implementing customer experience programs. These tools are designed to help companies assess customer engagement and feedback, facilitate improved communications, and create a stronger overall customer experience.

When choosing CX software, make sure you look for the following key features: 

• Omnichannel support: Integrate phone, email, chat, social media, SMS messaging, video, and more into a single platform. All digital customer communications should connect to your CX software.
• Customer data integration: Centralize customer data to gain detailed insights about individual customers, allowing for more personalized and informed interactions.
• Automation and AI: Use chatbots and AI for quicker, more efficient responses to create an intelligent customer experience.
• Analytics and reporting: Leverage real-time analytics to monitor performance and identify key areas for potential improvement, generating actionable insights.
• Employee tools and collaboration features: Provide agents with the tools and information they need to offer excellent service, including access to customer profiles, customized scripting, and AI support. 
• Feedback systems: Collect and analyze customers’ feedback through surveys to keep improving their experiences.

CX Program Best Practices

Whether you’re developing a new CX program or looking to optimize an existing one, there are several best practices to remember.

Let’s look at each one.

Create a customer-centric culture

Any CX expert will tell you that a customer-centric culture can be vital in driving temporary CX initiatives and permanent, sustainable change. It’s essential to cultivate a company-wide focus on the customer.

While the specifics may look different from business to business, there are several steps any company can take to create a customer-centric culture:

• Enable customer support agents (including internal and external agents) with the training, resources, and tools needed to deliver a great experience.
• Create fair customer support policies and have support readily accessible throughout the journey.
• Prioritize customer support and concern resolution.
• Communicate transparently and proactively with customers.
• Track customer experience metrics carefully and reward entire teams or individual employees who go above and beyond.

Aim for continuous improvement

Unfortunately, creating a strong customer experience isn’t a one-time effort. Customer expectations shift, businesses grow and evolve, and changes in the market can impact how your customer experience measures up.

Review and refine your CXM strategies regularly based on customer feedback and satisfaction data. Monitor your CX analytics closely to flag potential concerns early and address them before they impact your brand reputation or drive significant customer churn.

Scale personalization in useful ways

While personalization and scale may seem like contradictory concepts, advanced CX tools can help you improve customer relationships by delivering personalized experiences to your entire customer base. For example, CX software enables agents to see customers’ entire purchase and support histories when contacting them, making it easier to recommend products or solutions that fit their needs.

Both small businesses and call centers can leverage this. There’s even contact center experience software designed to help third-party vendors facilitate personalization by integrating with their clients’ CRMs.

Engage customers proactively

You know what they say: An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Anticipating customer needs and addressing them before they actually become issues is a smart way to create a great customer experience.

This may include extensive beta testing for new features and QA work when deploying site updates. It may also involve intentional customer success programs, such as creating extensive knowledge bases or improving product walk-through tutorials.

Drive cross-department collaboration

When all departments work together to create a unified customer experience, consumers can have truly seamless interactions with your personnel. Facilitating cross-department communication and collaboration is critical, so ideally, you should choose CX software with team-centered collaboration features like internal conversation threads and task management functionality.

Deliver the Ultimate CX With Nextiva

We know that customer experience management is more important and more challenging than ever.

Fortunately, the right tools and strategies can help. Nextiva’s unified customer experience software was designed to enable businesses to embrace CXM without breaking the bank or sacrificing scalability.

Our unified customer experience management platform comes with plenty of integrations, allowing you to continue using providers within your existing tech stack. We offer transparent pricing, and we make it easy to invest in a CX program that will help you attract and retain more customers, boosting revenue along the way.

Related: 14 Customer Experience Best Practices to Master CX