How to Build a Customer Experience Strategy That Lasts 

Businesses know that customer experience (CX) matters, and even C-suite executives know that it can be a powerful competitive advantage. Despite this, there are often discrepancies between knowing that you want to improve your organization’s CX and knowing how to actually implement customer-centric strategies that move the needle. You need more than surface-level fixes if you want CX to become a powerful differentiator, but knowing exactly what tech to invest in and which strategies will make an impact can feel challenging.

In this post, we’ll talk about how to build a CX strategy that goes beyond quick fixes and actually creates an outstanding CX that will help you attract new customers, retain existing clients, and stand out from the competition.

What Is a CX Strategy?

Your customer experience strategy is the blueprint for how a company designs, delivers, and improves every customer interaction. CX is separate from customer service, even though both center around serving clients. Customer service is reactive and situational, handling customer inquiries, concerns, or problems when they emerge.

Customer experience programs, however, are holistic and proactive. They seek to improve all interactions that customers have across the entire life cycle. This means having:

• Outstanding ads and outbound campaigns to attract attention.
• Flawless website navigation for an effective on-site experience.
• Streamlined purchasing processes.
• Thorough onboarding for customer success.
• Dedicated support through renewals.

Effective CX strategies bring together people, processes, and technology to ensure consistent delivery across the organization. This is how you go beyond a surface-level fix to create organizational change that your customers will notice.

What this looks like in practice

Let’s look at an example. A retail company shouldn’t just train its service reps so customers get a quick response if there’s an issue. The company also needs to optimize its mobile checkout, align return policies with customers’ expectations, and use customer feedback to refine its product design. All of these actions are part of a larger CX strategy.

Why a Durable CX Strategy Matters

Building a CX strategy isn’t just about making customers happy at the moment. Instead, it’s about creating lasting business value that compounds over time. Here’s why getting CX right matters more than ever.

Customer loyalty and retention

Better customer experiences help you retain clients longer, reducing customer churn. Investing in CX can actually make a huge impact, with Forrester’s 2024 data finding that companies prioritizing CX reported 51% higher customer retention than those that don’t.

Loyal customers are your business’s best insurance policy. They’ll forgive the occasional mistake, stick with your brand even when competitors try to poach them with tempting offers, and continue buying even when economic conditions get tough.

Brand differentiation

In today’s saturated markets, CX has become the ultimate differentiator. Your competitors can copy your features, match your pricing, and even replicate your marketing messages. But they can’t duplicate the relationships you build with customers through consistently exceptional experiences.

In our Customer Experience Trends Report, we found that 96% of company leadership believed that CX was a key driver of business outcomes. By acting as a powerful differentiator, CX can help drive customer acquisition and retention, fueling revenue growth along with it.

Adaptability

Perhaps most importantly, durable CX strategies help companies weather uncertainty. Whether you’re facing economic downturns, regulatory changes, or technological disruption, strong customer relationships provide stability and continuity.

This is particularly true because the best CX strategies should have a longstanding impact, but they should also be agile. Your team should be able to pivot and make changes as needed, adapting to keep up with your customers’ needs.

How to Build a CX Strategy

Ready to build your CX strategy and launch your customer experience management program? Here are the steps you need to take.

1. Research and empathy

Your customer experience strategy will only be effective if it accounts for your current and target audiences.

Interview customers and gather quantitative feedback. You should ideally create 3-5 personas that reflect key customer groups and apply empathy mapping to uncover deeper motivations and frustrations for each segment.

A SaaS company, for example, may discover that enterprise companies are happy to go through a longer demo-to-sale process, but smaller brands are frustrated and just want to see pricing upfront.

2. Map the customer journey

Creating a customer journey map is essential.

At this part of the process, you need to identify every single touchpoint your customers may come across, including:

• Digital touchpoints like your website, social media, email campaigns, and ads.
• Physical touchpoints like mailers and in-person store visits.
• Support-related touchpoints, including human, self-service, and automated interactions.

Mark critical moments of truth, like checkout or post-purchase onboarding, that truly determine customer loyalty. An initial Google ad may capture their attention, for example, but it may be the quick and personalized support customers receive after their first glitch that really matters.

Use visualization tools to align stakeholders on the customer’s perspective. This can help get everyone on the same page and help your team prioritize the right CX initiatives in your strategy.

3. Define the future state

Once you understand your current customer journey, it’s time to envision what an ideal experience could look like. This step is about identifying specific improvements and creating a compelling vision that guides your entire organization.

Start by applying the “5 Whys” technique to pinpoint the root causes of CX gaps you’ve identified. If customers are abandoning their carts, don’t just assume it’s a pricing issue. You should ask why they’re leaving, and then ask why that problem exists. The goal is to keep drilling down until you determine the underlying cause.

You might discover that it’s actually a confusing checkout process or hidden shipping costs that are driving them away. This is an important part of making a business case for CX that will get key stakeholders’ buy-in, so take time to develop a “north star” approach that you want to focus on.

4. Implement tools and workflows

The right tools and processes can make an enormous impact on your CX strategy.

Start by adopting omnichannel communications that allow for consistent and seamless customer engagement across all platforms. Then, use CX automation to streamline repetitive interactions like order tracking inquiries or basic pricing questions, while routing complex issues to live agents through escalation protocols.

Integrate all of your CX tools with your CRM platform. The goal is to create a single source of truth that will help you best understand individual customer needs and enable personalization at scale.

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5. Measure and optimize

It’s critical to define success benchmarks for each stage of the user journey. Doing so can help your team keep track of what’s working and what isn’t — and may even help you flag a potential issue before it can impact your bottom line.

Continuously review analytics dashboards. Adjust your strategy based on real-time trends, customer feedback, and overall business goals.

Best Practices for Enduring CX Strategy

While investing in CX can feel overwhelming — especially since it will always need continuous improvement for long-term success — the right tactics can be essential to help you create a CX strategy that’s impactful for the foreseeable future.

Let’s discuss some of the best practices to focus on in 2025.

Balance proactive and reactive

There will always be a need for reactive customer support and CX adjustments, but it’s important to balance proactive and reactive efforts for the best results.

You can use predictive analytics to anticipate potential issues or even identify new stresses in your customers’ buyer journey. Early detection of potential or emerging issues can allow for a swift response before they cost you customers, and maintaining responsive customer service channels can help you address any concerns your customer base has as they arise.

Personalization at scale

While AI will never make up for the human touch — and you should never try to replace human connection with channels run exclusively by artificial intelligence — it can help you create more relevant, personalized customer experiences at scale.

Your AI CX strategy may include using artificial intelligence or machine learning to:

• Tailor responses and messaging to individual users, accounting for their purchase history, pain points, and other essential customer data.
• Send well-timed offers triggered by specific customer interactions.
• Provide support recommendations or even upselling suggestions for each customer.

Omnichannel consistency

In our Customer Service Trends Report, we found that 60% of respondents said that centralized customer support was an important function of delivering great customer service.

Centralized support is more important than ever before, as customers are getting in touch through more channels and wanting quick, personalized responses. Having a dedicated phone line for customer service isn’t enough anymore; customers now are increasingly expecting cross-platform and cross-channel experiences — and they want them to be seamless.

CX should feel interconnected as users move between chatbots, phone, email, and social media. They shouldn’t have to repeat themselves or start all over, and support agents should be able to retrieve data from past interactions to personalize their responses.

A centralized unified communications platform like Nextiva can help, giving your agents a 360-degree customer view and the ability to engage with customers on whichever platform they use to get in touch.

Employee empowerment

If you can create a positive experience for employees, you’re on your way to creating great customer experiences moving forward.

All customer-facing workers and CX teams should be given the following:

• Training on how to leverage technology, handle customer concerns, and escalate issues to supervisors as needed.
• Clear expectations regarding your brand’s support standards and individual performance expectations.
• Technology and tools like UCaaS platforms that will help them deliver better experiences.

Simplify processes

A great CX strategy doesn’t have to be complex. In reality, too much complexity can bog things down, making it difficult for customers to get the end result they want quickly.

Find ways to streamline the customer journey. Eliminate unnecessary clicks. Remove red-tape policies that do nothing but frustrate customers, and ditch barriers that slow customers down. If customers contact you and are ready to purchase right away, for example, don’t make them sit through a demo just to get pricing.

Cultural alignment

Your CX strategy isn’t a single task that a single team is responsible for. It should be a core priority across your entire organization.

When you make CX excellence part of your company culture, it means that leaders model it, employees embody it, and customers feel it.

This may look like:

• Leaders prioritizing projects that will make it easier for customers to purchase on their site.
• Employees proactively making product suggestions that could improve the product based on customer feedback they’ve seen.
• Organizations regularly review real-time analytics throughout the customer journey to look for bottlenecks and optimization opportunities.

The bottom line is that customer support team members aren’t the only ones prioritizing the overall customer experience; your entire company is.

Measuring Success in CX

Knowing how to measure CX is essential. Without understanding which metrics to focus on, you won’t be able to assess how impactful your CX initiatives are or how to optimize them for better results moving forward.

The KPIs we always recommend prioritizing include:

• Customer satisfaction score: This is a feedback-based score that tells you how happy customers were with their recent experience. It’s a short-term but clear measure of interaction quality.
• Net promoter score: This is another feedback-based score, and it’s a long-term measure of customer loyalty and advocacy.
• Customer effort score: This metric helps you understand how much effort customers put into resolving an issue with you.
• Customer health score: This is a composite score that accounts for product usage, customer engagement, support history, and financial data to gauge overall customer relationship strength. It can be important to predict the likelihood of renewal.
• Customer lifetime value: This metric helps you assess the value of the average customer over their entire relationship with your company.

Bolstering Your CX Strategy With Nextiva

CX isn’t a one-stop, low-effort project that you can cross off a checklist once it’s complete. It’s an ongoing strategy that must adapt to consumer, market, and technology changes. You need to keep up with new customer expectations as they take hold, ideally adapting proactively instead of focusing on reactive and delayed solutions.

Durable CX strategies ultimately rely on research, market alignment, customer alignment, advancing technology, and continuous improvement. You need to keep investing in learning what your audience needs and how you offer an exceptional experience at every customer touchpoint.

While our Customer Service Trends Report found that companies invest in 6.3 tools on average, Nextiva’s unified communications and CX platform could help reduce tech stack bloat and improve CX all in one. We can help you improve customer loyalty, boost revenue, and generate brand equity long into the future.

Ready to get started? Learn more about Nextiva’s CX platform today. 👇