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 vote 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 out 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. Here are four steps to help develop new 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 can help you identify your needs as you develop a strategy to take customer experience to the next level.

Setting the scope

Whether establishing or refining 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 to improve it — and how you’ll measure success. It should be a group endeavor to determine the scope of a new customer experience strategy. Don't do it in isolation, everyone needs to agree (or at least able to voice their opinions on the strategy).

Deployment and optimization

Once you've set the scope and developed all of the materials needed for the 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 tests.

This is where all the work put in — developing the new customer experience strategy, bringing together the right stakeholders, planning the new customer experience initiatives, and measuring success — pays off. If you've created experiences that are true to brand and resonate with 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 a 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 new Practical Guide for Delivering Better Customer Experiences.