Crafting an effective customer experience strategy

Your customer experience (CX) is a direct reflection of your brand. And with today’s hyper-competitive market, a strong customer experience strategy is no longer just a nice-to-have. It’s a necessity. In fact, research shows that organisations that prioritise their CX are likely to achieve a growth in revenue of 4-8% higher than market averages. But crafting a successful CX strategy requires setting clear objectives, understanding customer needs (thoroughly!) and continuously refining the experience – a task which can be quite daunting at times.

This article will guide you through creating an effective CX strategy, leveraging user feedback along the way, and learning from real-world successes to ensure your brand stands out.

Want to quickly scan through to a certain section of the blog? Go ahead!

• Why a strong customer experience strategy matters
• Steps to creating a customer experience strategy
• The role of user feedback software in CX
• Case studies: successful customer experience strategies

Why a strong customer experience strategy matters

There are many reasons a good strategy is conducive to creating and maintaining a great customer experience.

For instance, with the right strategy in place, organisations can create higher satisfaction levels among customers. This – in turn – fosters a sense of loyalty and therefore also higher retention rates. Sounds good, right?

Then there is the competitive advantage it offers. A good CX is what we’re all after. Done right, it can differentiate us from our competitors and help us continuously attract new customers.


Source: Tidio

Why do you think brands like Uber, Spotify or IKEA have such a hold on the market? All of them have put their customer experience at the forefront of their business objectives. The result? They have cultivated strong customer loyalty, achieved high levels of customer satisfaction, and differentiated themselves from competitors, leading to sustained market leadership and continuous growth.

That being said, no two CX strategies are alike. In fact, the biggest challenge for most organisations lies in identifying how they can align their CX strategy with organisational goals and objectives. (So be sure to keep your own objectives in mind while reading this!)

Ready to dive in?

Steps to creating a customer experience strategy

As with every strategy, defining your customer experience strategy should start with setting your objectives.

1. Set clear objectives

Identify what you want to achieve with your CX strategy.

Questions to ask yourself might include:

• Do you want to create a digital strategy or an omnichannel strategy?
• What does the current customer service process look like? (A lot of times this is a good starting point for understanding what you organisation excels and where you might be able to improve)
• Are there certain aspects of the customer experience you want to focus on?
• What do you want to know / learn about your customers?
• How do you hope you learn more about these customers?

Once you’ve laid out all of your goals, it’s time to get crackin’.

2. Understand your customers

A good understanding of what your customers expect from your brand is crucial. So you need to explore your options when it comes to getting closer to your customers. How can you learn more about them and really understand what makes them tick?

There are many different ways to do this. However, if you want to get to the source of your customers’ frustrations, then gathering customer insights is a great place to start.

After all, you can base all of your decisions on assumptions but if your customers can guide you, then why not give them a voice?

A few ways to gather customer insights include:

• (Digital) user feedback (e.g. surveys)
• Interviews (e.g. one-on-ones or focus groups)
• User testing (e.g. A/B testing)
• Customer panels
• Social listening
• Behavioural data (e.g. heatmaps or clickstream data)

As you can see, there are a lot of ways to get in touch with your customers and get the input you need to craft a beautiful customer experience.

So once you’ve defined how you’re going to listen to the voice of the customer (with your objectives in mind), it’s time to start creating.

Want to learn how to develop a product your users will love?

Watch our webisode and get tips and tricks on how to create the ultimate user experience in your product.

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3. Design the customer experience

Designing and implementing a good customer experience starts with mapping. Mapping out personas and mapping out the journey. Let’s have a look at how you can do this.

Map out your buyer personas

Persona mapping is a great way of encompassing your ideal customer’s characteristics, goals, needs and much more. Start with some high-level segmenting, e.g. demographics, geographic and/or technographics. And then dive deeper into the details of these users. Look at, for example:

• Which demographics do you customers fall under?
• What problem are they looking to solve?
• What kind of information are they seeking?
• What motivates them to make a purchase?
• What are their biggest needs?

This kind of information will help you target your customers appropriately and effectively map out your journeys.

Map out customer journey(s)

Journey mapping will then help you visualise the online experience from your customer’s perspective. In this phase – using the personas from above – you will identify key touchpoints along the way and pinpoint different emotions and interactions across each stage of your journey.

Not sure where to start? Here are the top customer journey mapping tools that can help facilitate the process.


Note: your initial journey maps need to be based on reality, well researched and underlined with data.

Customer Experience Map versus Customer Journey Map

Do you know the difference? Find out here.

Read the blog

Collect user insights

To support your customer journey mapping efforts, it’s therefore important to gather user insights. These will strengthen your approach and help you get down to the root cause of the frustrations and struggles your customers experience across your channels.

Using your chosen methodology, whether that’s user feedback, interviews, or collecting behavioural data (or ideally, all of the above!), start actively collecting insights from your users. This will fuel your customer experience strategy and give you guidance on how to improve your customer experience.

Monitor and improve

Using the insights you now have at your fingertips, you can make meaningful changes to the customer experience. These changes will not only help satisfy your customers but also contribute to a great customer experience for future customers.

But don’t stop there! Your CX flow will change constantly, meaning you need to keep a pulse on expectations and satisfaction with the experience. That means monitoring your customer experience regularly and continuously iterating.

That’s right, the job is never done!

The role of user feedback software in CX

As you can see, there are many ways to listen to your customers. In fact, in an ideal scenario, you would marry all of these data types together for a clear and overarching understanding of your customers. However, there is one method that stands out from the rest.

Digital user feedback is crucial for supporting a robust digital customer experience strategy because it provides direct, real-time insights from the users themselves. Unlike other types of customer data, such as heatmaps or even user interviews, user feedback solutions like Mopinion capture the subjective experiences, preferences, and pain points of customers as they interact with your brand on digital platforms.

This qualitative data is unique because it reveals the ‘why’ behind user behaviours, enabling organisations to understand customer intentions and frustrations in context.

The benefits of incorporating digital user feedback include the ability to make informed, customer-centric improvements, enhance user satisfaction and loyalty, quickly identify and address issues, and continuously optimise the digital experience to meet evolving customer needs.

If it’s effectively prioritised, organisations can actually create a more personalised experience and environment for customers that fosters improved engagement.

Case studies: successful customer experience strategies

Need proof of what kind of results a good strategy can achieve? Read more about how these organisations give their customer experience a boost.

Away’s Story

Away, an American luggage and travel accessories brand, was in search of a way to enhance its digital shopping experience. Initially only engaging customers on social media post-purchase, the brand quickly realised there was a gap in insights during the shopping process. This led them to the implementation of user feedback. By integrating feedback surveys into their website, they now gather both qualitative and quantitative data at critical stages of the shopping journey.



Thus far, this approach has allowed Away to:

• Understand customer needs better,
• Streamline internal discussions, and
• Make informed decisions to improve the overall customer experience.

The feedback collected also helps refine their digital operations, optimise product information delivery, and address specific customer pain points, such as the need for clearer lock instructions.

Read Away’s full story here.

Etos’ Story

Etos, a widely popular Dutch drugstore chain with over 550 stores, launched its webshop in 2019 and quickly needed to adapt to changing customer needs during the pandemic. To enhance their online customer experience, Etos also integrated customer feedback into their CX strategy. This allowed them to gather crucial insights at key moments, such as during checkout and on content pages.



Feedback forms help Etos measure the ease of ordering, assess the quality of their content, and optimise website features like filters. Additionally, their feedback aids in refining their AI-powered search results, significantly boosting click-through rates for product suggestions. As Etos expands to mobile, they continue to prioritise customer feedback to refine their digital presence and ensure an exceptional customer experience.

Read Etos’ full story here.

A winning CX strategy isn’t created in a day

Equipped with the right tools and advice for crafting a successful customer experience strategy, you’re ready to get started. But remember, creating a truly effective CX strategy isn’t done in a day. It takes time to gather your thoughts and craft a feedback program that helps you collect meaningful customer insights. It’s also a continuous process that must be looked after carefully and consistently.

Good luck!