Every company wants loyal customers. But loyalty doesn’t happen by accident; it’s earned through every interaction. That’s where a customer experience (CX) strategy comes in.

It’s not just about having good service reps or an easy checkout process. It’s about building a plan that connects the dots across your entire organization and focuses on what really matters to your customers.

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The Future of Omnichannel CX in 2025 and Beyond

Learn how operationalizing AI insights can make customer feedback campaigns, including surveys, more targeted, personalized and contextual.

In this guide, we’ll break down why having a CX strategy is essential, walk through proven best practices, and show how tools like CallMiner can help you turn insight into action. Whether you're starting from scratch or refining your existing strategy, this article will give you a practical path forward.

• Why you need a customer experience strategy
• Best practices for an effective customer experience strategy
• Transform your CX with CallMiner
• Frequently asked questions

Why you need a customer experience strategy

Without a strategy, customer experience ends up being whatever happens by default, and that doesn’t always go smoothly. One team might be doing things one way, another team something completely different. Customers feel the disconnect. They don’t know what to expect, and they don’t stick around when things feel disjointed or frustrating.

A strategy gives your company direction. It helps you make decisions based on real customer behavior instead of guesswork. You’ll know where to focus your time and resources, whether that’s improving response times, fixing a clunky process, or training your support team to handle issues better.

It also helps you measure what matters. When you’re clear on what kind of experience you want to deliver, it’s easier to track if you’re hitting the mark. And when things go off course, you can see it early and adjust.

In short, a good customer experience strategy helps you keep customers longer, earn their trust, and strengthen your company’s reputation.

Best practices for an effective customer experience strategy

1. Take an omnichannel approach to CX. “As more and more people access the internet from their phones, smart TVs, laptops and desktops, the importance of adequately handling every available communication channel has only intensified. Businesses will need to keep up with their customers' preferred communication mediums if they are to have any chance of surfacing in a sea of competitors. Adopting an omnichannel strategy involves handling every possible touchpoint in such a way that they all align with each customer's journey.

“To get omnichannel customer experience right, you should aim to keep communication consistent across touchpoints. This means you will need to go beyond a mere multichannel approach to handling distinct channels—agents interacting via each channel must have full access to interaction data from all other channels to create an effective omnichannel customer experience.”

- Four ways to create a better customer experience, CallMiner; X: @CallMiner

2. Study your competitors’ CX strategies. “As more companies compete on customer experience to differentiate their brand, showing how you stack up to others in your industry can help you make a compelling argument for stakeholder buy-in. Studying your competitors’ CX tactics can also help you flesh out your own strategy. NPS benchmarking allows you to compare your NPS to flagship companies in your industry easily.”

- Alex Bischoff, The fundamentals of an impactful customer experience strategy, Delighted; X: @delighted

3. Create a customer-centric culture. “Any organization striving for long-term success must prioritize establishing a customer-centric culture. It’s all about embedding customer-focused values and strategies that drive long-term profitability. Such a culture enhances customer loyalty and positively impacts business performance.

How, then, can businesses cultivate this culture? The answer lies in empowering your customer support team and encouraging proactive customer service. Leadership is instrumental in driving customer-centric innovation.”

- 10 Proven Customer Experience Best Practices for Business Success, SuperOffice; X: @SuperOffice

4. Offer choices and flexibility. “Another way companies can provide a superior customer experience is by offering customers flexibility through choices. For example, a company may offer multiple subscription plans to suit different segments of customers. This flexibility can empower customers to choose which plan is best for their situation.

“Additionally, companies can offer customers the ability to choose between payment methods or communication channels to offer another level of convenience to their customer experience.”

- 11 Best Practices in Customer Experience, Indeed; X: @indeed

5. Invest in employee training and development. “Invest in comprehensive training programs to ensure that employees have the necessary skills, knowledge, and resources to deliver exceptional customer experiences. Provide ongoing development opportunities to keep employees updated on best practices and evolving customer needs. Build out a customer room so that they have 24/7 access to everything they need to know about customers and the customer experience.”

- Annette Franz, 7 Best Practices to Build a Customer Experience Strategy at Scale, CX Journey; X: @annettefranz

6. Use customer insights to inform your CX strategy. “Almost every aspect of your business feeds into the customer experience, resulting in a wealth of CX insights to parse through. With so much data at your fingertips, painting a clear picture and focusing on what matters most can be difficult. Consequently, many companies only measure a fraction of the CX insights that they should.

“To develop their measurement strategy, companies should view their CX measurement framework as consisting of three pillars of insight:

• Who their customers are
• What their customers do
• What their customers need

“Using a three-pillar approach to customer experience measurement, you can carefully and effectively focus your resources where they’ll have the greatest impact.”

- Guide to Customer Experience Measurement, Hanover Research; X: @HanoverResearch

7. Implement customer experience analytics. “Analytics identify the experiences that are working and not working. They reveal the opportunities that will yield the most customer satisfaction and financial impact.

“They can define the delivery of optimal CXs, whether by people or technology automation, for every touchpoint in the customer journey. That’s important because every interaction either improves or erodes the customer’s perception of the brand.

“Customer experience analytics also calculate ROI. That's essential because demonstrating a payback is the needed proof that the company's investments are working. Without this verification, increased investments are less likely and existing investments will come under increased scrutiny when budgets get tight.”

- The 3 Most Powerful Customer Experience Best Practices, JohnnyGrow; X: @gojohnnygrow

8. Use buyer personas to inform product design. “By designing products and services to benefit the customer from the start, you can create a much stronger offering and positively impact the customer experience across the board.

“A simple way to improve products and services as they are developed is to make and use detailed customer profiles or ‘buyer personas.’ These personas should be specific and provide an accurate foundation upon which you can build out your company’s offerings.

“By basing design choices on such buyer personas, you can make important decisions about what matters most and what details can be left out. The most important step in using customer profiles is to work with real data to define their traits more accurately. Personas made up on the spot are far more likely to get the important parts wrong and wreck your actual users’ experience down the line.”

- Tips & strategies for improving customer experience, CallMiner; X: @CallMiner

9. Listen to and act promptly on customer feedback. “

Feedback (both positive and negative) is a goldmine of actionable insights. It lets you know what’s working and what’s not. It also helps you understand your customers better — their needs, expectations and experiences with your brand.

“Listening to what customers have to say about your brand can steer your business in the right direction. It can help you fix issues, improve existing products and services, and even develop new ones that are likely to be successful.

“More importantly, listening shows customers you value their opinions. It helps you build an emotional connection with them that leads to loyalty and unforgettable experiences.”

- Mahnoor Sheikh, How to develop a winning customer experience strategy, Sprout Social; X: @SproutSocial

10. Get everyone on board with your CX strategy framework. “A customer experience strategy takes dedication and expertise from every department—not just those in consumer-facing roles. As issues come up, you’ll need the support of various stakeholders to execute customer-centric initiatives.

“Secure buy-in by showing teams why customer experience is a profitable differentiator for your company with these stats:

• Our CX Trends Report revealed that 74 percent of consumers will forgive a company for its mistake after receiving excellent customer service.
• A McKinsey & Company report found businesses that implemented an enterprise-wide customer experience program saw 15 to 20 percent increases in sales conversion rates, 20 to 50 percent declines in service costs, and 10 to 20 percent improvement in customer satisfaction.

“Once your organization understands the benefits of building a customer experience strategy, it’s time to recruit help. Encourage other department heads and company leaders to show enthusiasm about the customer experience and emphasize why it’s important. If high-level managers are prioritizing CX, others will naturally follow.”

- Emily Miels, Customer experience strategy: A step-by-step guide, Zendesk; X: @Zendesk

11. Create an empathy map. “An empathy map is a tool used to better understand the needs of customers. It allows teams to provide a complete picture of the customer and what actions they might take as a result of their beliefs, emotions, and behaviors. Empathy mapping uses 4 quadrants labeled as ‘think’, ‘feel’, ‘say’, ‘do’ to help make sense of different aspects of the customer’s experience and preferences.”

- How to create a customer experience (CX) strategy, Qualtrics XM; X: @Qualtrics

12. Orchestrate your position in the marketing ecosystem. “Gone are the days when converting customers was merely a matter of beating your competitors. Today’s competitive companies take an active role in orchestrating their position in a marketing ecosystem to influence the customer journey.

“Marketing ecosystems grow by co-evolving with one or more company’s growth. This is fueled by digital technology, embracing knowledge, intelligent integration, and resource sharing for critical activity links within the ecosystem. Co-creation and resource sharing (e.g., customer data) related to creating a compelling customer experience positively push companies to grow with the ecosystem.

“For example, Starbucks varies its approach to global expansion depending on the marketing ecosystem it’s operating within. Because India is a heavy tea market, Starbucks opted to not develop its offering within the coffee market. It relied on its joint venture partner’s (Tata’s) supply chain, distribution, fulfillment networks, and market-specific resources. Starbucks focused on leveraging its brand and resource complementarity with Tata in the growing Indian metro markets. Meanwhile in China, Starbucks gained insights from regional ecosystem partners that indicated that it’s viewed as an aspirational brand for young middle-class Chinese individuals. This enabled the company to anticipate market developments and changing consumer tastes.”

- G. Tomas M. Hult, 8 Best Practices for Creating a Compelling Customer Experience, Harvard Business Review; X: @HarvardBiz

13. Build trust with transparency and authenticity. “Like Generation Z and the Millennials before them, we can expect Gen Alpha to think of brands not just as a means to an end but as partners with whom their own values align. According to Shopify, ‘Transparency in business practices and a strong social impact position will go a long way to building trust with Gen Alpha as they age into consumers.’

“The Drum advises that brands ‘figure out what transparency means to their business – and how they can best commit to it and communicate it in a way that builds trust and credibility.’ This includes being transparent about your company’s mission and values, as Gen Alpha will likely seek out brands that reflect their own worldview.”

- Generation Alpha and the future of CX, TELUS Digital; X: @TELUS_Digital

14. Continuously update your customer personas. “Most companies understand that having accurate, well-crafted personas is a critical driver of growth, but many companies miss out on the potential value by taking a ‘fix it and forget it’ approach. Successful CX leaders treat personas as a continuously evolving tool, applying changing customer data to create experiences that resonate from the customer’s point of view. People change constantly — and personas should reflect those changes. Stay in close touch with teams that handle customer feedback, and keep personas fresh.”

- Customer Experience Guide for CMOs to Drive Loyalty, Gartner; X: @Gartner_inc

15. Develop a customer experience index. “A customer experience index is a useful measure that helps you evaluate the quality of your customers’ interactions and track the efficiency of your customer experience strategy.

“Developing a customer experience index lets you measure customer satisfaction, customer expectations and loyalty and determine the factors that affect customers’ behavior. Measuring the CX Index also allows you to tie together the quality of your customer interactions with the revenue from your CX investments, enabling you to put your money where it really matters.”

- Anurag Pandey, 10 Ways to Build a Successful Customer Experience Strategy, Hiver HQ; X: @hiverhq

16. Allocate an ample budget to your customer experience strategy. “While spending requirements depend on numerous factors, many organizations have prioritized CX spending in recent years and plan to increase it further. The core contact center platform takes the biggest slice of CX budgets, with CRM, AI and analytics as other high-priority investments.

“A small or poorly used CX budget could result in a competitive disadvantage. If organizations don't invest in CX, they can jeopardize customer satisfaction.”

- Robin Gareiss, Customer experience strategy: 5 tips to build a valuable CX, TechTarget; X: @TechTargetNews

17. Make interactions easy for customers. “At all stages of the buying journey, the ease of transaction can make or break your customer’s decision to purchase. You can differentiate yourself from highly similar competitors with:

• Pleasant and helpful support teams
• Simple, intuitive, and quick payment options
• Customized product options
• Useful product upgrades
• Proactive solutions to user issues

“74 percent of customers switch brands when they face a difficult purchasing process, and 50 percent do so when they don’t get an easy-to-use mobile experience. At each point, the customer seeks convenience and simplicity.

“Setting up self-service portals with case studies and walkthrough videos that explain your product and its benefits is one way to make information easily accessible to customers.”

- Cari Murray, 8 customer experience strategy best practices, Outreach; X: @outreach_io

18. Use journey innovation to discover new sources of value. “Journey innovation finds new sources of value, such as new services, for both the customer and the brand. This involves companies mining their data and insights about customers to figure out what other services they might appreciate. The best companies also design customer decision journeys that allow open-ended testing and frequent prototyping of new services or features.”

- What is CX?, McKinsey & Company; X: @McKinsey

19. Audit your business’s channel flexibility. “Most customers do not use one channel to access a brand. Companies focused on optimizing the customer’s experience understand they need an omnichannel approach. Consumers should be able to move fluidly across multiple channels while still receiving a consistently great customer experience. That means integrating every channel to create a seamless experience for the user.

“Audit the channel flexibility of businesses by asking:

• Can customers switch between desktop and mobile without much effort?
• Is product and service information consistent across all channels?
• Can the user find reliable help through business-managed social media channels?
• Does a customer’s information travel with them between channels for streamlined interactions?
• Do the channel options meet the needs of different customer demographics?”

- What is Customer Experience Strategy?, The Walker Blog; X: @WalkerInfo

20. Combine surveys with conversation intelligence. “Surveys, a core capability of CX programs, have the potential to identify pain points, measure the impact of initiatives, and track trends over time. However, they remain imperfect. While traditional survey capabilities are aimed at soliciting and collecting direct customer feedback – helping support data-driven decisions and personalized interactions – they are often sent to customers without a true understanding of any given interaction, meaning they are general and ask questions that lack important context of the true experience.

“With CallMiner, organizations can gain greater insight into CX by leveraging conversation intelligence data alongside solicited feedback. With this information, CX leaders can improve survey design and create more personalized experiences. For example, with CallMiner, CX leaders can send surveys referencing specific customer challenges, such as an isolated payment issue, instead of a generic survey.”

- Megan Keup, Is your CX strategy obsolete? How AI is revolutionizing customer insights, CallMiner; X: @CallMiner

21. Implement customer-centric marketing to boost customers’ confidence and control. “Four in 10 consumers spend more time verifying the reliability and accuracy of brand, product and service information than they did five years ago.

“Customers want to be in control of their end-to-end journey. They’re turning toward hybrid experiences — such as browsing on their phone while shopping in-store — that let them engage in ways that make them feel confident about their purchase decisions.

“For each persona, look across the entire customer journey to gain context and insight into how your brand can most effectively support customers’ needs for confidence and control. Use existing customer journey maps or create new ones as needed to adapt CX design to provide confidence and clarity — regardless of channel.”

- Leah Leachman, Use Customer-Centric Marketing to Boost Customer Experience and Loyalty, Gartner; X: @Gartner_inc

22. Invest in the right tools and technology. “In order to align your services to match customer expectations, it is very important to invest in the right technology and tools. It is one of the customer experience best practices that need to be focused on by every business.

“Identifying the right tools and deploying them will help to encourage customers to have greater interaction with your brand. However, the end goal is to fulfill customer expectations and make them feel happy.

“Businesses that are customer-focused should add digital tools along with the traditional ones to engage customers. The tools will help to monitor customer behavior and take proactive actions. They also help to handle customer complaints faster and provide effective solutions.”

- Snigdha Patel, 12 Effective Customer Experience Best Practices & Tips, REVE Chat; X: @REVEChat

23. Implement customer success strategies. “Monetize CS services to become a profit center. To shed the long-standing view that they are a cost center, CS teams should look to monetize their services. By offering tiered levels of service that include premium onboarding, specialized training, and dedicated value consulting, CS teams can provide high-value services that drive deeper adoption and achievement of customer outcomes. This not only offsets operational costs but also reinforces the value of CS as a strategic investment.”

- Shari Srebnick, Ask Again Later? No Thanks — The Future Of Customer Success Is Now, Forrester; X: @forrester

24. Provide easy access to quick solutions. “Being constantly connected has taken its toll on patience and what consumers are willing to tolerate in terms of waiting and response times. People also have their favored communication methods, apps and social media and are more likely to feel inconvenienced if they have to step outside these to contact a brand.

“Seamless interaction across popular platforms, with consistent messaging throughout, is a must for any customer-experience-savvy strategy. Time-savings and frustration mitigation can be achieved by ensuring CS staff have a holistic knowledge of company policies and procedures, as well as ready access to customer and product information.

“When mistakes happen, as they will, speedy resolutions arrived at with a sincere apology and follow-up can mitigate the damage. The way to ensure these speedy resolutions is to empower your frontline CS staff to see issues through from start to finish each and every time without having to resort to escalation or passing the buck.”

- Michael Podolsky, How Exceptional Customer Experience Makes Businesses Stand Out, Forbes; X: @Forbes

25. Offer custom-tailored experiences. “One of the most effective ways to build trust with your customers is to create custom-tailored experiences. Not only will this add value to whatever service or product you offer, but it will also make every interaction more meaningful.

“Insurance Elevated provides an example of how personalization can drive growth for a startup. The company customizes every insurance plan based on customer needs like financial goals, family dynamics, and future plans. This gives the customer a tailored experience and customized insurance package.

“There are many ways in which you could create customized experiences for your customers but the easiest is to make your products and services as flexible as possible. No matter your industry, if your customers feel listened to and not taken advantage of, loyalty will follow.”

- Joel Comm, 3 Best Practices for Creating Memorable Customer Experiences, Inc.; X: @joelcomm

Transform your CX with CallMiner

Improving customer experience starts with understanding it, and that’s where CallMiner comes in. CallMiner Eureka helps you capture and analyze 100% of customer conversations across all channels, so you’re not relying on hunches or limited feedback. You get the full picture of what your customers are saying, what they’re feeling, and why they’re reaching out.

With that insight, you can identify patterns, spot friction points, and act on what matters most. And because Eureka surfaces trends in real time, you can adjust quickly and improve experiences as they happen.

If you're serious about building a strategy that not only looks good on paper but actually works in practice, CallMiner can help you get there. Book a demo today to learn how.

Frequently asked questions

What’s the difference between multichannel and omnichannel CX?

Multichannel CX means offering support across several channels (like phone, email, chat), but each one may operate independently. Omnichannel CX connects those channels, so customers can switch between them seamlessly without repeating themselves or losing context.

How often should you update your CX strategy?

Review your CX strategy at least once a year, or more often if customer expectations shift, your offerings change, or new data reveals friction points. Regular updates keep your strategy aligned with what customers actually need.

What are common CX strategy mistakes to avoid?

Common mistakes include ignoring customer feedback, using outdated personas, focusing only on one part of the customer journey (like post-sale), and relying too much on gut instinct instead of data. Skipping cross-team alignment is another big one.

How can small businesses compete with larger companies on CX?

Small businesses can stand out by being more personal, responsive, and flexible. Use customer feedback to make quick improvements, empower your team to solve problems on the spot, and build real relationships—things big companies often struggle to scale.