Tethered to smartphones and accustomed to nonstop innovation, today’s customers are more informed and less loyal than their predecessors. The experience a brand offers is now its key differentiator — and customers are voting for great experiences with their wallets. More than 50% of consumers have stopped buying from a company altogether because a competitor beat them on experience.

For brands that take customers’ rising experience expectations to heart, there’s an opportunity to carve a reputation as a premium company in their industry — while achieving unparalleled business success. According to Salesforce’s State of the Connected Customer two-thirds of customers will pay more for a great experience.

We know that implementing these insights might mean building (or rebuilding) your customer experience strategy and that requires input and buy-in from key company stakeholders.

Four steps to help develop customer experience strategies and earn stakeholder buy-in

Discovery

To start, ask yourself what your brand’s typical customer experience is like right now. Do you measure and analyze results against those experiences? Do you have the right technology, people, and processes to support your business and customers? The answers to these questions will help you identify what you’ll need as you develop a strategy to take customer experience to the next level.

Setting the Scope

Whether establishing or refining your customer experience strategy, bringing in new teams and perspectives will be crucial. Integrating these new perspectives will take time and patience, but the benefits will be well worth it.

Your team and stakeholders should agree on current customer experience obstacles, what you aim to improve and how you’ll improve it — and how you’ll measure success. It should be a group endeavor to determine the scope of your new customer experience strategy. Don't do it in isolation, everyone needs to agree.

Deployment

Once you've set the scope and developed all of the materials needed for your new customer experience strategy, you can start to bring all the hard work to life — make sure everything connects, works, and doesn’t break. Take the time to switch on and test new channels one at a time. Be thorough in your tests.

Optimization

This is where all the work you’ve put in — developing your new customer experience strategy, bringing together the right stakeholders, planning your new customer experience initiatives, and measuring success — pays off. If you've created experiences that are true to your brand and resonate with your customers, you will unlock new levels of customer interest and business success.

With great customer experiences at the heart of everything your company does, you'll stand apart from competitors and cement your reputation as an innovative and engaging leader in your industry.

Get started on your new (or improved) customer experience strategy with tips and checklists from our Practical Guide for Delivering Better Customer Experiences.