Customer Experience Strategy, Explained

Author: Michelle Despres

What is Customer Experience Strategy? At RevGen, it means partnering with clients to thoughtfully design a comprehensive plan of action for implementing customer-centric enhancements across their people, processes, and technology. Customer Experience (CX) Strategy is a foundational practice that helps ensure success in meeting business goals and overcoming market challenges. 

It’s common for us to think of business in industry categories: healthcare, construction, and telecom. However, it’s important to remember that any business relying on customers for success is a customer experience business.  

In both the B2B and B2C spaces, customers choose where to invest their time and money based on the quality of their experiences. Their experiences with a retailer, an insurance provider, or a tech company can all impact the decisions they make as consumers and at work. That makes it even more important for companies to prioritize the experience to differentiate themselves not only from their competition but also within the much broader market.  

CX Strategy is not only necessary to kick off CX efforts; it is required throughout the entire implementation and improvement process. Organizations with existing CX activities or even those further into CX maturity are not exempt from needing strategy to meet their CX goals. You may recognize examples of this: 

• A company that approaches CX as an issue of nomenclature, changing the name of “customer service” to “customer experience” without incorporating any changes to their processes or digital experiences.  
• A survey asking, “would you recommend us” from a company without plan of action for when you answer “no.” Your issues remain when they ask you again 6 months later. 
• An organization, perhaps even your own, which invests significant resources to purchase and implement CX management tools, yet the data sits unused once it’s collected. Actionable insights are left undiscovered, a significant opportunity squandered. 

CX Strategy successfully transforms intent into action with a unique-to-you, ambitious, and achievable plan to support your CX goals. Because our work embeds design thinking, CX efforts are iterative and dynamic, offering flexibility as you mature. We provide a clear path to that maturity, empowering leaders to create lasting change. Our strategic approach leads to measurable results in metrics across categories: Revenue and Margin, Competitive Benchmarks, and Customer and Employee Experience. 

You may be looking to realize the value of your existing technology investments or to better optimize CX in your current process. You may want to know what steps to take to achieve your long-term CX goals and mature CX competency over time, or you may be new to the discipline of CX and not know where to begin. 

CX Strategy focuses on solving your specific business challenges and identifying how those solutions create an advantage in the market through the following components: 

• CX Strategy Design: Define why this work matters and what you hope to accomplish and link them to existing strategic initiatives and financial metrics to define success. 
• CX Organizational Structure and Governance: Identify roles and responsibilities and create infrastructure and governance for CX activities. 
• CX Education and Competencies: Understand the business discipline of CX and build competency throughout the organization. 
• Customer Understanding Foundations: Use existing customer intelligence to determine what matters most to customers and what opportunities exist to deliver that value. 
• CX Roadmap: Define the steps for implementing customer-centric enhancements in people, process, and technology to achieve CX goals and mature CX competency over time. 
• CX Metrics: Realize the value of CX investments, both new and existing, through fundamental CX and success metrics. 
• CX Culture: Embed CX in organizational culture and ways of working to increase retention and revenue and improve employee experience. 

CX Strategy in Practice

We begin with an exploration of the market challenges our client is facing and an understanding of overall business goals. A well-designed strategy creates a vision and sets boundaries for CX efforts. Without a vision, it can become unclear where your efforts are leading and what results you hope to achieve, while boundaries ensure cohesiveness and help define timelines and scope of any initiatives. 

In practice:  RevGen helps lender be more competitive and meet the expectations of next generation customers 

In partnership with our client, we determine how CX work will be organized, managed, and championed within the organization. We help define the activities and resources necessary to maximize results and create a competitive advantage. In our work, we embed change management activities that support organizational adoption and unify teams by focusing on a shared purpose. 

In practice:  RevGen helps financial services company improve customer and employee experience by identifying roles and functions for new Chief Customer Officer 

We assess the depth of CX skills on the team and create a training plan to address gaps. We ensure that team members understand CX competencies and can execute with confidence. We also consider companywide CX education to embed the discipline in the entire organization. 

In practice: RevGen helps Fortune 500 client achieve immediate impact by planning strategically, defining roles and responsibilities, and equipping the team with necessary CX skills  

Once we know the why, what, who, when, and how, we start work to understand customers. Clients are frequently surprised to learn about the sources of customer data they already have. We help uncover this data and develop insights from what we learn. 

In practice: Using customer feedback, RevGen helps a homebuilder create an optimized experience 

This work leads to the creation of a roadmap defined by the vision and goals of the organization. The roadmap prioritizes work from the outset and eliminates confusion, so that everyone is working towards the same goals at the same time. Intentional planning allows you to manage the boundaries of your efforts and keeps you within scope as you execute. Without a plan, resources are used ineffectively and wastefully. Our work maximizes efficiency. 

In practice: RevGen helps home warranty business address customer server concerns through an actionable roadmap to improve performance

The success of any CX effort is dependent on knowing where you want to go and why and then making a plan to get there. Developing that strategic plan is easier said than done.  

RevGen’s dedicated team of CX practitioners will be by your side throughout the CX transformation journey.  We begin by defining the necessary organizational changes and then lead you through execution of those changes. We then propose operational changes and assist you with implementation. Finally, RevGen equips you with the tools to navigate and sustain cultural change, part of our mission to empower our clients. This triadic approach ensures meaningful and lasting systems change that improves both customer experience and employee experience, experiences that drive results for your business. 

To learn more about CX Strategy and the other services we offer, visit our Customer Experience site.

Michelle Despres is a Senior Manager in RevGen’s Customer Experience practice and specializes in CX program creation, implementation, and management.