Revolutionising revenue streams and prioritising customer experience as a CEO

The job of what a CEO does has changed and shifted rapidly, especially in recent years. The reliance on technology, remote working, and working trends have all impacted what CEOs should see as “important”. 

“Experience” has now become the CEO's new buzzword. Whether that’s customer experience, user experience, employee experience - the list goes on! We’re going to highlight customer experience in this article, breaking down what it is, why you should prioritise it, and how it can be prioritised to boost revenue streams and improve business performance.

What is customer experience?

Customer experience is all around us, and whether you pay attention to it or not, it’s going to impact your business. Customer experience can vary depending on the industry that you work in and the type of service you provide. For example, traditional customer service that is face-to-face in shops and salons. This is the same customer experience that can be given to someone over the phone when purchasing an insurance policy, sorting out banking enquiries, or wanting to get more information on a product or service. 

If your organisation operates more digitally, customer experience can also extend to how customers interact with your platforms such as your website, your app, a chatbot, and the marketing content you send to them.

“Your customers are experiencing your brand and their journey with your brand, whether you invest in the experience or not.” - Experience Investigators

As customer experience is omnipresent, it isn’t necessarily something you can opt out of as a CEO. However, it is something that you can start to invest in and pay attention to.

Why should you prioritise customer experience?

Quite simply, it’s an expectation that a great brand or organisation would do so. Customer loyalty and happiness are everything, and it can be the difference between making or breaking your brand. 

If you’re not deliberately shaping a customer’s journey, then it’s not going to be a great experience. This leaves you susceptible to being bad-mouthed or left for a competitor. If you don’t invest in your customer experience ensuring that it builds trust and loyalty, then your customers won’t give you those two things as a default. 

“The customer journey needs to be a step-by-step process so that customers know where they are at all times. They need to realize value quickly, so they’re motivated to continue use, and the overall experience has to be gratifying. If they like using your product, they will continue to do so.” - Upland Software

How can it be prioritised?

There are a few ways that you can start prioritising customer experience, and it doesn’t require a ton of budget or a customer experience team to get you started.

#1 Create evergreen content that adds value to your customer's lives

Content is a great way to stay connected with customers and give them answers when they need them most. Building evergreen content such as basic-level blogs, in-depth FAQs and information on your product and service is crucial. 

It enables you to provide a consistent level of transparency and will also ensure that you aren’t inundated with customer questions due to a lack of information online. This is pretty easy to do and will save you time in the long run.

#2 Ensure there are touchpoints for feedback and that the feedback is read and used

Feedback is important so you can know what you’re doing well, and what you’re not doing so well. If there aren’t regular touchpoints for feedback, then it’s important to create them and also read and implement that feedback regularly. 

This shouldn’t just be external feedback, either. Getting feedback internally from employees on the customer experience and what they’re seeing and experiencing is equally as valuable.

#3 Create a basic customer experience roadmap to highlight your initial blind spots

Just like creating content and having feedback touchpoints, you want to create a customer experience roadmap that is relative to your business, product, or service and highlight obvious places where you can measure the customer experience. Once you ascertain this, you can start to build in solutions and metrics to track the customer experience and most importantly, improve it.

Finally, you want to consistently adopt a mindset of continuous improvement. Just because your roadmap is ‘working’ 6 months down the line doesn’t mean you shouldn’t look to change it simply because the results are good. You want to always strive to improve.