5 Steps to “Define Your Why” for Modern CX: Customer Experience Strategy Template

Our customer experience strategy template from our Modern CX playbook helps teams complete the first, most important—and often overlooked—step in creating an omnichannel CX program.

Customer experience surveys alone aren’t enough. Your customers expect more. Their journeys are complex, unfolding across countless interactions and channels that offer a wealth of insights. 

CX leaders who successfully embrace omnichannel CX to capture and act on these signals will not only create better experiences for their customers, but they’ll deliver an impact on their organizations that’s undeniable. 

The stakes? The chance to boost employee and customer retention, cut costs, speed time to resolution, and fuel revenue.  

Curious what your company needs to do to evolve your current CX strategy into a true omnichannel CX program? We’ve put together a new playbook, Modern CX, Made Achievable, that explains the process. It’s based on the real-world framework that our own Medallia Experience Advisory experts use to help leading global brands build and manage omnichannel customer experience programs.

Let’s explore the very first—and often overlooked—step you need to take: Defining the reason for your omnichannel customer experience program. This is important because if you aren’t clear about why your organization needs to modernize your customer experience program, your teams won’t be either, and you’ll quickly slip back into silos.

A solid “why” will serve as both a north star and your insurance policy when roadblocks appear.

The CX advisors behind this playbook, Connie Leary, VP, Experience Advisory; Amy Anders, Principal CX Advisor; and Mary-Catherine Dolan, Senior CX Advisor walk us through this process using the “Define Your Why” customer experience strategy template below.

Customer Experience Strategy Template: Define Your Why

Download this free customer experience strategy template

Step 1: Define your “why”

“Documenting your objectives—your reasons for pursuing an omnichannel customer experience strategy—is the first and most important step in the process,” says Anders. 

But you can’t just set your why and forget it. The objectives you list in this step should serve as guideposts and filters for decision-making moving forward. Plan on regularly checking in to make sure your CX efforts are still aligned to supporting what you’ve defined here. 

Doing this work now will help ensure continuity through periods of leadership and structural change, and prevent teams from slipping back into old habits of operating in silos or taking a channel-specific approach to CX. 

Step 2: Tie it to your brand promise

Too often, brands think about CX by channel. They’ll say things like, “We want to have the best in-store experience” or “We want to improve our app checkout process.” 

But true omnichannel success happens when CX teams take a bigger-picture approach and align their strategy to the company’s overall brand promise, that is whatever your company is promising to offer customers, explains Anders. 

The goal of any omnichannel experience program should be in support of more effectively delivering on the company’s brand promise to customers. 

Step 3: Show the cost of inaction

“Be sure your ‘why’ ties back to specific areas of friction or pain or gaps in the customer experience and demonstrates what the lack of an omnichannel customer experience program is costing your business,” says Dolan. 

At one large financial services brand she works with, the CX team demonstrated the cost of inaction by linking their current efforts to a higher risk of churn. To make the case for a more modern customer experience program, they quantified what that higher churn rate would mean for the organization financially.

They showed how not having real-time data from across experiences and channels was preventing the company from seeing—and solving—customer challenges in the moment, leading to higher turnover.

Step 4: Frame the business case in executive terms

Make the case for adapting your customer experience program using terms your leadership cares about. Leary recommends tying your “why” to business outcomes and specifying how a modern CX program will help the company:

• Make more money 
• Save more money
• Reduce risk more efficiently 

“CX teams won’t get the resources or buy-in necessary unless they can prove the value of investing in omnichannel CX,” says Dolan.

For instance, at one large financial institution she works with, the CX team made the case by focusing on the business priority that mattered the most to leadership: lowering the cost to serve the customer. They spelled out how updating the customer experience program would help the business improve digital self-service, reduce the number of calls to the contact center, and save money.

As another example, another brand in the financial services industry is tying their CX efforts to helping the organization grow their brand promoters. This will deliver a direct financial benefit to the company, as their promoters have been found to have a greater share of wallet and churn at lower rates compared to the brand’s detractors.

Step 5: Define success from the start

What outcomes do you hope to achieve by launching an omnichannel CX program? Be specific.

Anders explains that teams should define and monitor success across three different categories: Unlocking structural and behavioral successes, positive gains in CX metrics, and improvements across key business outcomes.

1. Structure and behavioral success metrics

Some structural and behavioral outcomes you may want to achieve through your CX efforts include being able to:

• Measure the customer experience across channels
• Identify and solve customer pain points across channels
• Collaborate as a team across channels

2. CX metrics

Specify which CX metrics you’d like to see improve as a result of your new omnichannel CX efforts.

3. Business KPIs

List the business KPIs you’d like to positively influence with your modern approach to CX.

“The ultimate measure of success will be the degree to which your CX program impacts the success of your business, whether that’s by increasing sales, strengthening customer engagement, or driving whatever you’re trying to achieve as a business,” says Anders.

For example, a brand in the retail industry might set the following goals across each of these three categories:

• Behavioral/structural: “By launching an omnichannel CX program, our goal is to close the loop with customers across channels.”
• CX metrics: “By launching an omnichannel CX program, we want to be able to measure and boost NPS across channels by X%.”
• Business KPIs: “By launching an omnichannel CX program, our goal is to grow same-store sales by X%.”

Ready to use this customer experience strategy template?

We’ve got this helpful template you can use to define why you need a modern CX program for your business. 

Plus, check out the complete playbook, Modern CX, Made Achievable: Your Step-by-Step Guide for moving beyond surveys with confidence and sustainable success, which is packed with even more templates you can use to bring your omnichannel CX program to life.