Customer Experience Consulting: How Can It Help Your Business?

Customer experience is a powerful way for businesses to differentiate themselves from the competition.

Research shows that customers make purchasing decisions based on customer experience. They are willing to pay more for a positive experience, and they are more likely to forgive the mistakes of the companies they are loyal to.

When every interaction with a customer is an opportunity to excite them or lose them, it’s helpful to turn to a consultant to develop a strong customer experience strategy.

Everything you need to know about Customer Experience consulting:

1. What is Customer Experience (CX)?
2. What Does a CX Strategy Consultant Do?
3. CX Consultant Responsibilities & Services
4. When Should You Engage with CX Consulting Services?
5. 6 Ways CX Consultants Can Help Your Business
6. Types of Projects CX Consultants Work On, With Examples

What is Customer Experience (CX)?

Customer experience is how your customers perceive and interact with every touchpoint of your business. It determines how your customers feel about you, whether they feel like you understand their needs, and how likely they are to interact with your brand or products in the future.

How do you build a strong customer experience?

To have a strong customer experience, you need to leverage a collaborative approach of business strategy, market and user research, technological opportunities, and constraints analysis.

This CX strategy creates a viable path to ensure the most effective journeys that a customer is expected to take. In turn, these journeys can result in greater market share through customer acquisition, conversion, and retention through loyalty to a digital purchasing process.

What Does a CX Strategy Consultant Do?

A customer experience strategy consultant listens to the needs of the business stakeholders, and partners with leadership and technologists to explore and evaluate key opportunities. This consultant analyzes the expectations and requirements and conducts market and user research to find strategic fits.

The consultant defines the user persona in the target audience to guide the product and marketing teams to design and deliver on the most strategically valuable journey these customer personas will take to meet or exceed their goals and business objectives.

CX Consultant Responsibilities & Services:

• Conducting market and user research and analysis
• Strategic discovery –unearthing business motivations and goals
• Understanding detailed opportunities through technology choices and orchestration
• Empathizing with business stakeholders, customers, and the employees who facilitate and support processes
• Synthesizing multiple priorities and data models for clearly defined recommendations
• Finding the sweet spot for opportunities by asking the right questions
• Representing customer experiences elegantly and effectively using the tools of UX strategy artifacts such as journey maps, roadmaps, persona, gap-fit analyses, and competitive analyses
• Creating and refining an omnichannel experience to streamline interactions across all touchpoints
• Integrating digital strategies, UX design, business processes, and analytical insights to improve customer experience holistically

When Should You Hire a CX Consultant?

You should hire a CX consultant when you are noticing trends in declining user engagement and conversions, or you see indicators for increasing market share but are unsure how to capture it.

However, situations don’t need to be dire for you to benefit from the support and skills of a customer experience consultant.

If you aren’t feeling fully empowered to deliver on your customers’ needs, or if you are not even sure what your customers’ needs are, CX consulting services can offer the necessary strategy and approach.

Furthermore, if your employees are struggling with certain tools and features, or if you are combining multiple product lines from mergers and acquisitions and need to reposition the offering to an existing customer base – these are all situations where it is extremely beneficial to turn to an expert.

6 Ways CX Consultants Can Help Your Business:

1. Defining the value proposition of your products and services from your customer’s perspective
2. Thoroughly researching and assessing your customers’ pains, gains, and tasks from a panoramic perspective, then using that to shape UX and UI design
3. Guiding developers to engineer the user interface, data, frameworks, platforms, and channels to ensure CX feels as effortless as possible
4. Ensuring you have the right technologies and business processes to increase customer loyalty
5. Developing products and designs that lead to improved customer satisfaction rates and increased customer retention
6. Using data and insights to analyze the impact of the CX strategy on your organization

Types of Projects CX Consultants Work On, With Examples

The work of a customer experience strategy consultant is incredibly varied. As one example of the type of projects CX consultants are often tasked with, let’s look at one of AIM Consulting’s previous experiences. For a more detailed look, see our CX strategy case study.

Example of Customer Experience Consulting Project:

A B2B company had expanded its digital offerings over a few years, resulting in user experience issues for its clients in the form of navigation and online experience.

The company sought AIM’s help to improve customer satisfaction and experience by consolidating its offerings into an integrated solution, accessible through a singular, secure customer portal.

AIM’s business analysis, UX design, and visual design experts guided the company on the proper steps to building a product backlog. They also executed the digital design from concept to final compositions, all while providing Agile coaching to the organization and preparing the client team for the successful delivery of future projects.

The consultants empowered the client with all of the knowledge, skills, and best practices to produce the portal it needed to satisfy its customers.

As a result of the new processes and skills, the brand was able to design products that led to higher customer satisfaction, loyalty, and revenue.

Originally published on AIM Consulting's public thought leadership insights here.

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Need Help With Your CX Strategy?

A successful CX strategy goes far beyond good customer service. At AIM Consulting, we apply industry-specific best practices to help increase your overall revenue by providing more meaningful insights, products, and interactions. To learn more about how we do this, check out our overview on CX Strategy consulting services or you can contact me directly.
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