Focus strategy on the things that matter most to your customers.

A customer experience strategy (also known as a CX strategy) is the process of improving your customer’s experience across all areas of your business. More specifically, at Ne-Lo, our approach to customer experience strategy is to bring the voice of customers into the boardroom to further inform decisions about business strategy as a whole. It’s about ensuring that clear customer insight means that their needs are front and centre during the decision-making process about anything in the company’s strategy, from marketing and brand strategies, product and service development and innovation, digital transformation, people strategy, growth strategy and more. An effective customer experience strategy can include quantitative and qualitative components detailing consumer research, market research, and competitor analysis - all of which provide you with invaluable customer and business insight. Furthermore, as a result, it gives a clear customer journey map through the various business touchpoints. We believe this customer focus is the key to exceptional customer experience and, ultimately,is responsible for the profitable growth of a business.

In short, we don’t believe it does. An effective customer strategy is all about keeping your business strategy focused on customer needs. Of course, this isn’t at the expense of the needs of other key stakeholders such as employees, shareholders, or suppliers - but we believe being the place that people love to buy from, attracting and retaining the right type of customers, means you have happier employees who find meaning in their work, profitable growth keeping shareholders happy, and better outcomes for your entire supply chain. When you have clear customer insight, it allows you to maintain focus on the needs of your customer during the decision-making process when creating your company’s strategy. Whether that’s for marketing and brand strategies, product and service development and innovation, digital transformation, people strategy or growth strategy.

Both a customer strategy and a business strategy include similar components such as detailing consumer research, market research, and competitor analysis  - all of which provide you with invaluable customer and business insight.

We are a little different in our approach as Strategy Consultants. We avoid claiming any specific expertise or offering our specialist advice. Instead, we see our role as bringing in external perspectives - or strategic intelligence as we call it - whether that be purpose intelligence, customer intelligence, employee intelligence, competitor intelligence or market intelligence. We then facilitate focused decision-making with these insights in mind. This could be applied to developing customer strategies, but ultimately it is our approach to developing any business strategy - whether that be 3-5 strategy development, annual strategic review, or any strategic decisions that need to be made at any point in time.

If we reframe this slightly as having a clear focus on key customer needs in your business strategy, then it’s vital. Rather than having a separate customer strategy, being clear in your overall business strategy on who your core customer is and what’s most important to them will focus strategy on what matters most. This is the key to attracting and retaining the right customers without competing on price.

Without having a clear customer strategy or strategies in place, we find that the focus of the company becomes diluted. Competing priorities from key stakeholders vie for attention and resources without there being an objective lens for making aligned decisions - ultimately, the company tries to be everything to everyone and becomes nothing to anyone.

When you have an effective customer experience strategy in place, which can include quantitative and qualitative components detailing consumer research, market research, and competitor analysis  - you garner invaluable customer and business insight. As a result, you’ll discover your clear customer journey map through your various business touchpoints. This customer focus is the key to exceptional customer experience and, ultimately,is responsible for the profitable growth of your business.