5 Steps To Leverage the Power of Customer Experience and Brand Strategy
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As a business owner, your success is not an accident; it takes hard work, dedication and the right strategies to get your business off the ground and keep it running. Only entrepreneurs will spend 80 hours working for themselves before they'll spend 40 hours working for someone else.
But in order to achieve this success, one of the most important strategies goes beyond your hard work and dedication. And that is customer experience.
In my opinion, creating a successful business hinges on two elements, customer experience and brand strategy. In this episode, we explore 5 Steps to leverage the power of customer experience and brand strategy.
Step 1: Customer experience is more than just customer service.
[02:05] Typically, when people think of customer experience (CX), they often think of excellent customer service. But there's so much more to it than that. CX is a holistic approach to understanding what customers want from their interactions with your brand and determining how to give them what they want in a way that makes your business profitable. So you see, it extends way beyond service. It includes brand, strategy, brand style and brand story. It includes marketing messages and having a marketing presence that continuously captivates your ideal client's attention.
By taking a holistic approach, you create journeys that make the entire experience magical for your customers. So much so that they go on to become raving fans telling anyone who listens about how great you are. Those are the best kind of customers.
Step 2: Create a Brand Strategy That Resonates
[03:27] The first step in creating an effective CX strategy is developing a strong brand strategy. Your brand strategy should be built around your core values, a mission statement, and a purpose that reflects who you are and what you stand for as a company, brand or business. You should also clearly define who your ideal client is so that all aspects of your CX are tailored towards meeting their needs. When you get this right, this will attract the right kind of customers. And it will also weed out those who aren't likely ever to convert into paying clients or customers. Saving you time and money. Bonus!
Step 3: Brand Story
[04:40] Craft a story about how your program, product or service solves your ideal client's problems. Your story needs to be compelling enough so that it captures their attention and makes them want to learn more about what you offer and how you can help them.
One of the best ways to do this is to speak in your customer's language. Take the words that they use and apply them to your marketing message and in your brand story. When you do this, it shows your understanding which builds trust and results in your ideal clients engaging with you rather than with another company offering similar solutions.
Crafting an effective brand, strategy, and story takes time, but it helps ensure that those who are drawn to your business are the right people. And when you draw the right people to your business, they are much more likely to remain loyal customers for years to come.
Step 4: Your Journey Map
[05:51] A journey map is a visual representation of how customers interact with your business so they can achieve their goals. It's a tool to help you better understand your customer relationships which benefit your business. It enables you to see the steps your customers have to take whilst engaging with your business. So if you're losing clients somewhere along your journey, using customer journey mapping could help you identify exactly where the bumps are and then help you figure out how you might smooth out that journey.
It is also a highly effective tactic to identify opportunities to cross-sell and upsell to effectively increase your customer lifetime value and, ultimately, your profits. It's a great way to really get clarity on the touchpoints your customers have with your business.
Once you've established your brand, strategy and story, it's time to design the journey and experiences that ‘wow’. When you're creating these journeys, consider every single step that your customer has to take as part of doing business with you, from that first contact all the way through to where your marketing message is delivered and what the sales conversations are going to look and sound like.
Strive for near perfection when it comes to customer service because this will help solidify your position as the ‘go-to’ for the programs, products and services you offer.
Click here to get your free customer journey map checklist, where I will explain how you identify exactly who the journey you've created is for. This will help you clarify what the journey is within your business right now and how to create your own visual representation. There are some samples available as well.
Step 5: Delivering on Your Promise With Great Customer Service
[10:03] The last piece in completing the puzzle is delivering on whatever promises were made when you were designing solutions for clients with great customer service. Make sure that with every interaction, you are striving for perfection with that interaction. Whether it's employees, representatives of yours or even automated processes, ensure their interactions are professional and seamless, stress-free, hassle-free, yet friendly so that customers feel appreciated at all times during their journey with you.
This is essential because when people feel appreciated and valued, employees and customers alike are much more likely to remain loyal to your business. The key is having a knack for understanding what people need before they even know they need it. This requires staying ahead of trends in both industry news as well as consumer behaviour regarding all sorts of programmes, products and services that come into the market. Even if they're outside your own industry.
When done correctly, this can help keep your current customers engaged while also enticing new ones into becoming loyal followers of your brand. It's through providing solutions in this way companies create those long-lasting relationships with their customers. And when done right, these relationships can be extremely profitable in terms of revenue growth over time.
In A Nutshell!
Growing a successful business isn't easy, but it doesn't have to be impossible, either. Success hinges on customer experience and brand strategy because, without customers, we have no business. By leveraging customer experience through building a strong brand strategy based on core values, defining who your ideal client is, developing solutions tailored towards their needs and delivering on whatever promises were made through great customer service, you can create an amazing journey for each person who interacts with your brand.
With these components in place, it won't be long before word spreads about how great working with you really is. And in no time at all. You're going to find yourself at the top of the list when people look for businesses like yours, and you can bet your bottom dollar that the sales and growth will follow suit. Following these steps will set up high-achieving businesses like yours for long-term success by creating lasting, profitable relationships with your customers. Something certainly worth striving for if you ask me.
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