With the continuing cost of living crisis and inflation on the rise again, it’s hard not to be despondent when it comes to growing your business.
The old adage that it costs more to win new customers than it does to retain the ones you have definitely rings true. It also makes a shift in thinking from a profit-driven approach to a customer-driven one even more essential.
Most successful businesses prioritise the needs of their customers already, so moving to CX-led thinking does not require completely reinventing the wheel.
Instead, it is more about building a strategy based around long term partnerships with your customers, gaining an understanding of what they need and tailoring your communications, products and services to meet those needs.
Put simply, great CX is about putting the customer first and the following five principles lie at its core.
We’ve put these tenets to the test at Purple Square, as we’ve shifted our business model from leading with technology expertise to ensuring CX is at the heart of all the work we do.
1. Strategy and vision
Successful organisations have a clear and shared vision for what defines great CX. Knowing where you are; where you’re going; and understanding the challenges you need to overcome, and the gaps you need to fill to get there, are essential when it comes to defining this vision and developing an effective CX strategy.
It can be difficult to stay focused on a long term vision, especially in the face of uncertainty. As such, it helps to define your ultimate aim (or ‘North Star’) to establish a clear direction of travel while still leaving room for flexibility in how you achieve it.
For example, underpinning a five-year strategic vision with quarterly and yearly targets can help teams to stay motivated as they work toward more tangible goals.
Taking things step-by-step also means you can measure what’s working (and what’s not) along the way. This allows you to adjust to extenuating circumstances much more easily than trying to keep a huge five-plus year long transformation project on track by working toward a single nebulous goal at its conclusion.
2. Operations
To achieve great CX, you need to ensure that your clients are at the heart of your marketing operations. This means you need to understand your interactions with customers and what touchpoints are most important to them – and have the processes and systems in place to effectively manage and optimise them.
To achieve great CX, you need to ensure that your clients are at the heart of your marketing operations.
Having established, consistent marketing operation processes in place that your team can – and does – follow is essential. This structure helps to establish best practices and minimise risk, allowing your team to optimise the way they work, unlock new opportunities and deliver a consistent and meaningful CX.
3. Data and insight
Your data is an essential tool that can provide valuable insights into your customers, helping you to understand and build meaningful relationships with them. Before you rely on it, however, you need to know where to find it, whether or not you are confident in it and if you can make use of it.
Consolidating disparate inbound and outbound data not only makes it more accessible for anyone on your marketing team, but can help to provide an audit trail for customer information, determining its source and whether or not it can be relied upon to provide the foundation for targeted campaigns and customer outreach.
