What Is Customer Experience Strategy?

Customer experience (CX) strategy encompasses all of the plans that a company makes to ensure positive, high-quality customer experiences. Customer experience spans all of the interactions between a business and its customers. More specifically, CX is defined by how customers feel about those interactions over time. Customer experience strategy, then, is how a company defines its CX goals and puts in place long-term, data-driven plans that empower employees to meet or exceed customer expectations.

CX strategy usually incorporates both qualitative components—such as a company’s mission or vision—and quantitative elements, such as customer data analytics. A customer journey map is a key building block of a successful customer experience strategy. That’s because it specifically defines every interaction in a customer’s relationship with a brand, from their first moment of awareness through their most recent transaction or engagement.

While customer experience can have organic elements, it’s not something that can simply be taken for granted. Companies need the right mix of planning, processes, people, and tools in order to deliver exceptional customer experiences. Customer experience strategy, then, is the glue that binds everything together. It defines not just what a company will deliver to customers, but also the when, where, how, and why. In the absence of a well-defined CX strategy, companies tend to take an improvisational approach, which can lead to mixed or poor results.