Customer experience optimization: How to build journey-centric CX

Improving the customer experience is a multifaceted process – and one that’s ongoing in nature. So how do you go about making moves in the right direction in an era when customer expectations are higher than ever?

What is customer experience optimization?

Customer experience optimization is the process of using data, analytics, and insights to fine-tune every part of your customers’ journeys. At its best, that means using what you know about the current customer experience to improve every part of it. This includes:

The omnichannel experience

Do customers enjoy a consistent, interconnected experience no matter which channel or platform they’re on?

UI and UX on owned channels

Is using your website or app intuitive? Or are there areas where you’re losing potential customers thanks to a difficult user experience?

Customer service and after-sales support

If things go wrong, are you known for your next-level customer service? Or do customers leave support calls feeling more frustrated than when they started?

Customer personalization efforts

Are you making the most of your customer data to offer people memorable, personalized experiences?

But CX optimization isn’t a one-off process, and it’s not a case of chipping away at isolated problems with a ‘checkbox’ mentality.

Instead, it’s an ongoing, business-wide mission. True customer experience optimization requires a unified approach to channels and touchpoints – with connected customer datasets that can help you spot and fix issues you’d otherwise miss.

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Benefits of customer experience optimization

In today’s consumer-driven environment, customer experience is where business is won or lost. People expect more than just top-notch products; they expect that the brands they buy from provide seamless experiences and consistently great customer service every step of the way.

PWC research suggests that a huge 73% of customers cite CX as the number one driver for purchase decision-making, and that 16% will happily pay a premium if that experience is stellar. Forbes, meanwhile, suggests that 74% are likely to buy based on experience alone.

There’s a lot at stake at both ends of the spectrum. 32% of customers will stop buying from a brand after just one bad experience, while customer-centric brands tend to be up to 60% more profitable than their rivals.

The good news is that investing in customer experience optimization often benefits every part of the business because it requires thinking in a more unified, cross-departmental way to improve the overall customer journey.

By focusing on journeys rather than isolated problems, you’ll be able to:

Optimize investments to drive the greatest value

Not all touchpoints are created equal, but you’ll need to learn which ones are responsible for the most ‘moments that matter’ – the key interactions that can make or break customer loyalty. Optimization here means understanding end-to-end customer journeys and learning what to prioritize.

Align organizational perceptions of experiences with customer perceptions

Businesses often operate under the assumption that things are firing on all cylinders when, in reality, your customers think differently. The truth often lies in experience data running across channels and departments, making pain points easy to miss with a siloed view of things.

Uncover root causes

Fire-fighting urgent issues is a reactive way to think about customer experience improvement. If you join the dots and think more outcome-based and journey-centric, you’re more likely to understand the underlying issues driving customer churn.

Create consistent, on-brand experiences

With a holistic approach to your CX optimization efforts, you’ll naturally create a unified experience that allows customers to flow from touchpoint to touchpoint without any drop in service quality or brand consistency.

9 tips for optimizing the customer experience

We like to group customer experience optimization strategies into three buckets, based on the mindset shifts they unlock within the business:

• Journey-oriented (vs functionally oriented)
• Connected (vs isolated)
• Outcome focused (vs problem-focused)

Here are the processes and steps to take to effectively make the jump from where you are today, toward a more customer-centric culture of change.

Journey-aligned customer experience optimization strategies

1. Develop a journey-centric vision and strategy

Experience management is about moving towards ‘better’. That requires a clear goal, so it’s worth coming together to define what that is. Having a clear, customer journey-focused vision that articulates your aims is really helpful because it helps you work backward from your ultimate North Star.

For example, if you know that your vision is to make things as simple as possible for your customers it’ll become easier to map potential customer journeys against that aim – and then outline the milestones, initiatives, and metrics that will help you make things more streamlined.

2. Establish standard processes and practices

Customer service optimization isn’t an ad hoc, quick fix. It requires that businesses outline some pretty ironclad processes that help form an ongoing culture of change. What’s really important is breaking down silos and connecting departments.

That way you can avoid duplication, combine data from multiple places, and codify ‘best practice’ frameworks and playbooks across the business.

3. Build journey-centric governance structures

It’s vital that there’s a clear line of reporting behind your CX optimization efforts. A dedicated team with roles and responsibilities that the whole business understands can really help, here – and help solidify that this is an ongoing process that’s being taken seriously.

It’s also a good idea to formalize the cadence of meetings, measurements, and updates – the more you can turn moving parts into processes, the better.

Connected customer experience optimization strategies

4. Incorporate journey-level metrics into a comprehensive measurement portfolio

Journey metrics track the whole spectrum of activities and touchpoints customers engage with. KPIs like time to resolution are outcome-based, and they speak to the success of a process, whereas ones like CSAT are blunter instruments.

Monitoring effective metrics here will help you find the moments that matter along your customer journeys – and clue you into where things need to change.

5. Use a journey lens to build your listening strategy

A robust understanding of people’s end-to-end journeys can only come from a listening portfolio tuned to the right signals. That means getting smart with the tools in your arsenal and going beyond structured data.

For example, if you’re focused on the customer support journey, you’ll probably want to capture chat/call transcripts, operational efficiency metrics (like average handle time), and digital analytics from help center pages – and then combine these to reveal pain points.

6. Uncover and track key drivers across journeys

What’s driving people’s perceptions and behaviors? To find out, you’ll need to start by defining journey-level goals directly tied to the business outcomes you care most about – like improving time to resolution for a support journey or increasing average order value for a purchase journey.

Your goal is then to use the analytical tools available to you to isolate the metrics that feed those outcomes. Tracking those drivers will boost both journey-level success and your broader organizational objectives.

Outcome focus customer experience optimization strategies

7. Identify target segments

An experience designed for everyone satisfies no one. Customer experience optimization isn’t about building a one-size-fits-all approach, then – it’s about identifying and designing things around specific target segments, often captured in the form of audience personas.

Segments are great for prioritizing your goals (focusing on higher-value customers, for instance), but if you try and lift the customer experience for every segment based on their individual needs, then you’ll naturally build more tailored experiences and solutions that address their specific wants, needs, and pain points.

8. Prioritize moments that matter

Improving journeys is like directing a movie – you don’t allocate equal attention and resources to every single minute; you disproportionately invest in those few places that are going to have the greatest impact on how someone feels about and remembers the experience. In movies, this might be the final climax scene.

In Customer experience optimization, these are the “moments that matter,” which are the episodes during the journey that have the biggest impact on customer or employee loyalty. For example, a moment that matters could be a product breaking or the first time someone receives their bill or paycheck. If you prioritize some of your efforts here, you’ll make a big impact when it counts.

9. Test improvements through small-scale experimentation

The CX improvement process is a never-ending one, built on a loop of monitoring, adapting, and monitoring again. But you needn’t throw the baby out with the bathwater when making changes to processes and interactions. Running small-scale pilot experiments allows you to test out ideas and CX tweaks in a controlled environment – and establish rock-solid links between what you’ve changed and the results.

First, select a specific journey stage or interaction to focus on. Then, based on research, build out a hypothesis about how a given change will impact a key journey metric. Then design an experiment with both a treatment and control group to test its impact. Was your hypothesis right? Once you know things work, you can roll these changes out to a wider audience.

How Qualtrics can help

Being able to do all of the above requires tools that can listen to customers on every touchpoint, understand the content of support calls, track behavioral heuristics, and – crucially – bring all that together into insights you can work with to drive positive change.

Qualtrics’ Experience Management software uses the latest in AI, machine learning, and natural language processing tools to do just that – bringing together dozens of signals and metrics for every single customer interaction to provide a single, coherent picture of your brand’s customer experience.

With Qualtrics® you’ll use intuitive data analytics to turn customers into fans by curating journeys that build loyalty, satisfaction, and lifetime value.