Customer Experience Strategy Framework | Next Level Growth Strategies

Here’s a question for you. Do you believe firms that consistently deliver exceptional customer experiences benefit from tremendous customer loyalty and outpace their peers in growth and profitability?

If you don’t, this document might not be for you because this is a statement that has been empirically substantiated for decades and is essentially without controversy.

However, suppose you do believe this statement and want Customer Experience to be a strategic differentiator and competitive advantage for your organization. In that case, this document will provide you with a strategic framework that will help you strengthen your Brand, become more customer-centric, and capable of continually meeting and exceeding your customers’ wants, needs, and expectations.

Given that nearly every business has an objective of profitable growth, it stands to reason that many (if not most) organizations prioritize customer service and have a customer satisfaction (CSAT) program. And while many firms have made significant investments over the years in Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Customer Service (CustServ), and CSAT initiatives and programs, few seem to realize their full potential.

We were recently working with an organization that was grappling with this exact dilemma. After our initial review and discovery phase, we shared with them that they, in fact, had all of the parts to build a Customer Experience Cadillac. But it was effectively lying in pieces on their garage floor waiting to be assembled. They were missing an overarching customer experience strategy – that is, a blueprint for putting it all together.

This document provides a framework for developing and implementing an effective Customer Experience Strategy. This framework comprises five interdependent and reinforcing components that must all be in place and aligned around the objective of continually creating new customer value. Each of the five components is discussed in detail and will provide your organization a foundation for embarking upon your own customer-centric Customer Experience Strategy journey

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What is Customer Experience Strategy?

Customer Experience is the intrinsic and subjective response individuals have to any direct or indirect interaction with an organization. And Strategy is the collective sum of things (resources and processes) purposefully employed (or not) to achieve an objective. A Customer Experience Strategy then is the roadmap an organization lays out to ensure customers experience their Brand the way they want them to.

Ultimately, a Customer Experience Strategy is a comprehensive approach for orienting every aspect of an organization’s offering and operations to create value (for their customers and the organization) each and every time a customer interacts with any aspect of their Brand (be it product, services, or communications).

To consistently deliver exceptional customer experiences, you need to develop and adopt a Customer Experience Strategy consistent with your organization’s Mission, Vision, and Core Values. The Customer Experience Strategy framework outlined here is based on Lean and Agile principles, and as noted earlier, consists of five interdependent and reinforcing components. This framework is depicted as a circle or flywheel, emphasizing that this is a closed-loop, customer-centric strategy that requires continual feedback, continuous improvement, and ongoing optimization.

These components are:

Brand Identity Alignment
Continuous Value Creation Orientation
Brand Delivery Alignment
Customer Touchpoint Optimization
Data, Technology, and Processes to facilitate customer engagement, enable continuous monitoring and improvement of components 1-4

Your target customer is purposefully and visibly at the center of your Customer Experience Strategy. Every aspect of your business needs to be organized around the priority of intentionally delivering great Customer Experiences – each and every interaction. But this is easier said than done.

Successful development and implementation of an effective Customer Experience Strategy is dependent on many things being done right. It requires visionary and unwavering leaders who champion a Customer Experience culture committed to Continuous Customer Value Creation. It requires passionate, empathetic, and empowered teammates throughout the entire organization who fully subscribe to the tenets of a strong and well-aligned Brand and are enabled by the right insights and feedback mechanisms.

But most importantly, this requires a thoughtful, comprehensive, and realistic plan to successfully execute your organization’s Customer Experience Strategy and deliver extraordinary customer experiences.

Brand Identity Alignment

Brand Identity Alignment is the first building block of a successful Customer Engagement Strategy. The reason for this is simple; if you don’t know who you are, why you exist, what you do, how you do it, and who you do it for, you can guarantee that your customers won’t know either.

Brand Identity Alignment

1) Brand Identity Creation

2) Organizational Alignment

Brands are essentially relationships, and all good relationships are built on trust. Well managed brands establish trust through consistency and reliability. And to do this, you need to establish the rules of the road to know if you are staying on course.

Brands are interesting in that they are like two-way streets with a public transportation system lane running down the middle. Well-crafted and managed Brands serve as guardrails or guideposts for internal decision-making (your lane). AND they represent an implicit contract in the consumer’s mind about what they should expect when they interact with the Brand (your customer’s lane).

Even though organizations create and manage their Brand, once they let it out into the wild, it effectively becomes jointly owned by everyone who directly and indirectly interacts with it (this is the public transportation lane, which is represented by the dynamic brand ecosystem graphic). If any of these interconnected Brand relationships weakens or suffers a problem, it affects the entire Brand. Thus, underscoring why Brand Identity Alignment is critical for an effective Customer Experience Strategy.

Virtually every organization has a Mission, Vision, a set of Core Values, and possibly even a Customer Promise displayed somewhere on their website. These are a terrific foundation for creating Brand Alignment, but there are additional elements (17 in total) that need to be in place to manage and build a leading Brand.

These elements are:

Purpose – This is your Brand’s “WHY” – this is why you exist and why you do what you do
Vision – This is your Brand’s “LONG TERM WHAT” – this is what you want to accomplish as a result of fulfilling your why. What do you want to be when you grow up…
Mission – This is your Brand’s “CURRENT WHAT and HOW” – this is what you do – day in and day out and how you do it.
Promise – What (value/benefits) your customers can expect to receive or experience each-and-every time they use your Brand.
Essence – This is the heart and soul of your Brand. The emotional benefit. Distillation of Brand Values and Vision. The connective tissue for your core identity.
Identity – Top-of-mind words or short phrases you want people (customers, employees, influencers, suppliers, etc.) to use when describing your Brand.
Extended Identity – Words that provide context and texture to the Brand’s core identity. Antes to the category that need to be called out.
Core Values – These are the beliefs that your Brand stands for. What do you value most?
Tone & Voice – This is how your Brand communicates and speaks. It is a reflection of your personality. What words and terminology do you use and not use?
Reasons To Believe (RTBs) – Specific elements that are competencies and differentiators for the Brand. These are your organization’s proof points. They may include product attributes, experience attributes, team competencies, and offers.
Value Proposition – This tells your target audience why they should do business with you rather than your competitors and makes the benefits of your products or services crystal clear from the outset.
Target Customer – WHO your organization wants to do business with. Consumers or prospects with an unmet or underserved need that your organization uniquely fulfills.
Market We Compete In – Industry sector or vertical your target customers are in. Can reflect geography, technology, category, etc.
Functional Benefits – What things does your Brand help your customers do, get done, or accomplish? How does it achieve this?
Emotional Benefits – This is how your customers feel each and every time they interact with your Brand.
Who We Are – This is the distillation of all Brand and business components. This is your “ABOUT US” statement on your website. What you do and what you’re all about.
Visual Identity – This encapsulates your logo, Brand colors, fonts, etc.

ALL of these components are absolutely necessary for a well-defined and strong Brand. However, simply having them on paper does not ensure that there is alignment. These elements MUST be agreed upon – especially among senior leadership – and they MUST be adhered to by everyone. While Brand is commonly thought of as the thing that the Marketing team does, your Brand is in effect the result of everything that everyone throughout the entire organization does every single day. Everyone throughout the organization needs to live and breathe the Brand.

As noted earlier, Brand relationships are built on trust. Brand Trust is earned over time as a result of consistently fulfilling your organization’s promise to your customers. When Brands are not consistent, they send mixed signals into the marketplace eroding Brand Trust and weakening their competitive position. Therefore, it is imperative that everything your organization does is 100% consistent with your Brand’s standards and principles. And to enable this, appropriate Brand measurement and monitoring need to be in place and visible to everyone throughout your organization.

The takeaway here is that your Brand is not just a name or a logo or a slogan.

For your organization, your Brand is:

Who you are
What you stand for or represent
Why you exist
How you behave, communicate, and operate
How you are and how you wish to be seen and experienced

And for those interacting with (i.e., purchasing, using, consuming, supporting, etc.) your Brand, it is:

A commitment or promise by or from the Brand itself
An aid for decision making
An intrinsic and extrinsic reflection of who they are
A statement about what they value and believe in
A tacit or explicit signal about how they see themselves and how they want to be seen by others

And this is why it is critical that your Brand is well defined and well-aligned.

Continuous Value Creation Orientation

With a strong Brand Identity and with strong Brand Alignment, the next step in building your Customer Experience Strategy is to ensure that a Continuous Value Creation mindset is engrained in everyone’s day-to-day activities. Simply put, this is your organization’s culture, and this needs to be reflected in how you do everything you do.

A distinguishing characteristic of organizations with strong Customer Experience Strategies is their culture. In particular, these organizations commonly have customer-centric data-driven cultures obsessed with creating new value for their customers. In addition, they are absolutely clear about their top priority and what they are doing to accomplish it.

A Continuous Value Creation Culture is your Brand’s special sauce! This is what makes you different from your competitors. This is how you make decisions. This is how you prioritize. This is how you attract, hire, onboard, develop, and retain associates. It’s how you select suppliers and partners throughout the supply chain and value chain. This is how you attract, develop, and retain customers. It is this deep commitment to continually create new customer value that attracts people to your organization and your Brand because they share your vision, and they believe in your purpose.

A Customer-Centric Continuous Value Creation culture is the union of three reinforcing culture constructs, each capable of delivering extraordinary benefits independently. However, when the three are brought together, the sum is far greater than 1+1+1 = 3!

Innovation Culture

Innovation is the process of creating and delivering new and differentiated consumer value in the marketplace, which can create a competitive advantage. And an innovation culture is the environment that embraces and cultivates the pursuit of identifying and delivering new customer value, be it through new products, services, or processes. It is a belief that innovation is the source of new value and that innovation can and should come from every part of the organization, every single day.

Continuous Improvement Culture

A Continuous Improvement culture is a shared mindset and operational approach that lives and breathes the pursuit of minimizing defects and eliminating waste. This is done with great discipline and through rigorous measurement protocols that enable your organization to identify when defects occur AND determine the root causes to design processes that are free of waste and error.

Learning Culture

A Learning Culture is about enabling your organization to maximize its capabilities through knowledge. Importantly, learning cultures are focused on obtaining, creating, refining, and applying the “smarts” that they gain in such a way as to create new customer and enterprise value. Your Learning Culture is the glue that binds your Innovation Culture and Continuous Improvement Culture together.

There are three pillars for success across all of these cultural constructs:

Information – Continually seeking, obtaining, and efficiently managing an array of input, and feedback about your customers, competitors, adjacent markets, internal processes, and outward-reaching activities.
Interpretation – Continual analysis and synthesis of your information. That is, creating a thorough and deep understanding of what your information does and does not mean, as well as thoroughly vetting potential indicated actions.
Initiation – This is an unapologetic bias towards action. It’s about actually “doing something” as a result of your Interpretation of your Information. The Initiation pillar is about purposefully developing and launching and/or refining new businesses, products, services, or processes.

The key to success in Continuous Value Creation is deep knowledge about your customers. You need to know your customers better than they know themselves! In particular, you need to understand ALL of their met, unmet and underserved needs, motivations, desires, and frustrations. And, these insights must be widely shared and understood by everyone. Good ideas are not the domain of just a few people. Your culture must support the mantra that “everyone has a role in identifying opportunities for creating new customer value.”

Brand Delivery Alignment

“You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work back toward the technology, not the other way around” – Steve Jobs

Brand Delivery Alignment is the intentional design of each and every customer touchpoint or interaction with the goal of generating the customer experience you intend. This is about how your organization takes your Brand to market and how it responds to inbound and non-direct interactions.

While often thought of as the responsibility of Marketing and Sales, Brand Delivery is everyone’s responsibility in your organization. It begins with Brand Identity Alignment – staying true to your Brand in all things that you do (remember trust is built on consistency and reliability). It continues through every aspect of how you organize and operate your organization to create customer and enterprise value through your products and services. And this all culminates in the purposeful delivery of your Brand to the market through sales, distribution, marketing, and customer service/support.

As noted earlier with the Dynamic Brand Ecosystem, once your Brand is out in the marketplace, everyone that comes in contact with any aspect of your Brand now has a stake. And with today’s technologies, their experiences and opinions (positive or negative) can significantly impact your organization in a matter of minutes.

As reflected in the above quote from Steve Jobs, to be most effective in your Brand Delivery Alignment, you have to start with your stakeholders and work your way back into your organization.

You need to understand the role each stakeholder plays – that is, what is your objective for interacting with them as well as their objectives for interacting with your Brand. You need to know their needs and expectations based on their level of knowledge about your Brand or category. You need to carefully map out every possible way each of these stakeholder groups (Customers, Employees, Suppliers, Influencers, Competitors, etc.) intends to or may interact with your Brand, and create a plan for delivering the experience that you want to deliver to meet or exceed their experience expectation. Your Brand is your single most valuable asset, and “good enough” is never “good enough” when it comes to Brand Execution and Delivery.

Building on our Continuous Value Creation Orientation discussion, the best Customer Experience organizations not only excel at designing their Brand Delivery but also at obtaining useful feedback from every interaction point with the goal of continually improving Customer Experiences.

The very best Customer Experience organizations are exceptional at generating and capitalizing on insights about unmet and underserved customer needs and shifts in the competitive environment, all of which feed their Continuous Value Creation processes. To be successful at this, your organization needs to be a well-oiled measurement and insights generating machine. This means you have to know the capabilities required by everyone throughout the organization and ensure they are supported by the right data, technologies, and processes.

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Customer Touchpoint Optimization

Customer Touchpoint Optimization is the “moments of truth” subset of Brand Delivery Alignment. Moments of Truth are any interaction a stakeholder has with your Brand where Brand Perception can be influenced. This not only involves people (e.g., Sales, Store Associates, Customer Service / Support) but also technologies like your website, chatbots, kiosks, PIN pads, interactive phone systems, social media, and apps. And this encompasses both outbound and inbound activities.

In the spirit of Brand Delivery Alignment and Continuous Value Creation, nothing in Customer Touchpoint Optimization should be left to chance. It is imperative that you deeply understand the mindset, needs, and expectations of every Brand Stakeholder at every possible interaction point; and leverage this knowledge to thoroughly design every single interaction to deliver value-accretive Customer Experiences. This is accomplished through the development of personas and detailed journey maps. Also note, the use of “Optimization” is purposeful in that this is an ongoing process with no endpoint.

Your Brand’s Customer Touchpoint stewards (your frontline associates) need to embody the mantra “how can we be more helpful?” These individuals are frankly your most valuable brand ambassadors, and they must be set up for success to ensure all of your customer interactions deliver value. This starts with hiring people who live and breathe customer success. These individuals MUST be fully aligned with your Brand’s Mission, Vision, and Purpose and exemplify your Brand’s values. Onboarding, training, and ongoing development are integral for their success.

Similar to the Optimization sentiment above, your Brand’s Customer Touchpoint Optimization approach needs to focus on delivering, confirming, and continually delivering measurable improvements across all customer interactions. Like everything else in your organization’s Customer Experience Strategy, Customer Touchpoint Optimization requires Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time Bound (SMART) goals and performance targets. These must be established from the customer’s point of view rather than your own. That is, what specifically do your customers expect at each point of interaction, and how well does your organization satisfy their needs and expectations.

Technology increasingly plays a critical role in Customer Experience – both in helping your customer-facing associates do their jobs smarter and better and adding value as a result of direct customer interactions (e.g., modifying an online transaction by using an app). When everything goes right – meaning the customer can fully accomplish everything they intend through a flawless technological interaction – well-designed technology can be a strategic differentiator that delivers tremendous value and builds loyalty. However, when the littlest thing goes wrong, Brand Equity can disappear in a matter of seconds! And in an increasingly competitive environment, the customer may never give you another chance to recover from that failure.

Even though Customer Touchpoint Optimization employs human-centered Continuous Improvement, Continuous Innovation, and Agile principles, your UI design and development teams who are responsible for your technology-enabled moments of truth need to be fully empowered to always do the “right thing” and not succumb to the pressures of delivering their next Minimum Viable Product (MVP) based on an artificial schedule. This is not to say, however, that commitments and schedules aren’t important, but when it comes to customer experience-enabling technological solutions, getting it “almost right” today is NEVER a better option than getting it absolutely right tomorrow.

The final key to success in Customer Touchpoint Optimization is to confirm that the interaction fully met or exceeded your customer’s expectations. Successful Customer Touchpoint Optimization requires a closed-loop process, and this is where the littlest things can make the biggest difference. You need to develop your closed-loop process as a win-win. Your customer wins because this is designed to add more value to their experience by being timely, thoughtful, and thorough. And your Brand wins by continuing to build equity and obtain feedback that can guide further experience improvements. The point here, however, is to err on the side of confirmation and never assume.

Data, Technology & Processes

As we have discussed throughout, a Customer Experience Strategy is all-encompassing, and it requires commitment and contributions from every part of the organization. Success depends on an integrated and cross-functional, closed-loop process focused on delivering an exceptional customer experience each and every interaction. For this to occur in a sustainable manner, the appropriate data (information), technologies, and processes need to be in place and supported by the right training, ongoing review, and improvement.

Every function and every individual plays a role in ensuring the successful execution of your Brand’s Customer Experience Strategy. It is critical that everyone knows their role and what is expected in terms of performance outcomes. That is, how and how much are they contributing to the creation and delivery of new customer and enterprise value. Everyone needs to know if things are performing as intended, and if they are not, they need to be able to understand why, and more importantly, what can be improved.

Leading Customer Experience organizations often view data, technology, and processes (e.g., reporting, analytics, etc.) as strategic assets and mechanisms for creating a competitive advantage (more secret ingredients for your special sauce). Data, Technology, and optimized Processes are the things that help your organization do their jobs more effectively and efficiently. These resources and capabilities can also deliver value directly to customers as the extension of your Brand they engage with that provides information, services, and/or support.

With a clear understanding of the Brand’s overarching goals and objectives, each department needs to identify all of the things they need to be able to do for them to successfully deliver their value contributions. Every department MUST be a part of this process. And given your organization has a Continuous Value Creation culture that embraces Innovation, Continuous Improvement, and Learning, their list of needed capabilities will likely continue to grow over time.

A customer-centric capabilities roadmap is a useful approach for:

Listing the capabilities you have today.
What baseline capabilities you “should” have today (note – there is often a gap between your current capabilities and the capabilities you should have today to be at parity with your competitors).
What capabilities you would “ideally” like to have at some point in the future.
What capabilities you will have at some defined date between having the baseline established and your future “ideal” state.

To be clear, this is not a solutions first approach! But rather with a comprehensive set of identified needs and by employing an Agile approach, the IT organization can help each function systematically stand up their needed capabilities (through data, technologies, and processes) based on an agreed-upon prioritization criterion.

The Next Level

Success is no longer guaranteed for those who simply “get better” at what they do. If you currently have a competitive advantage and are making a profit, there is someone out there devising a way to take it from you. It is imperative you embrace this economic certainty!

No one is entitled to anything when it comes to business. The competitive marketplace is relentless, and it has zero concern about your future existence. The only way for your organization to exist tomorrow is to have customers that care that you exist today – and tomorrow.

To ensure your organization’s future success, you have to become more relevant and indispensable to your customers. This needs to be your number one priority! And to become more relevant and indispensable to your customers, you have to continually create new value for them in meaningful and exceptionally different ways from your competition.

As discussed throughout, exceptional customer experiences don’t just happen on their own. The very best customer experiences are always very well-thought-out, designed, orchestrated, monitored, measured, and continually refined closed-loop interactions. Nothing is left to chance. They are the result of a thoughtful, thorough, and effective Customer Experience Strategy.

These strategies always position the customer squarely in the middle of nearly all decisions. Organizations that excel by adopting a Customer Experience Strategy have remarkable customer-centric and experience-focused cultures. They have strong and well-aligned brands. They have teams that are fully bought in and committed to continually creating delivering new customer value. They are guided by exceptional leaders who prioritize the customer and ensure their organization is fully capable of always meeting and exceeding their customers’ expectations, wants, and needs.

Organizations that continually deliver exceptional Customer Experiences have an incredible competitive advantage. It’s called fiercely loyal customers and brand advocates who will provide your organization with its next level of profitable growth.

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