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Increase your ROI with a CX Critical Care Plan

Photo of Mikayla Fuller
by   Mikayla Fuller
June 20, 2022

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Positive customer experience (CX) is crucial for maintaining the growth and success of your business. Once you turn leads into customers, you fight another battle to retain them. Each touchpoint with your customer is valuable and with one wrong move, you run the possibility of receiving permanent and negative reviews, criticizing word of mouth, or the most ghastly of them all, permanently losing your customer.  

Your greatest asset as a business is your customers and your employees. Employees are the backbone of your company. Satisfied workers provide better customer service, higher productivity, and more profit. So how can you marry your two greatest assets together to ensure that you are maximizing your profits and minimizing gaps in workflow? Let us introduce you to customer experience critical care planning.

What is a CX critical care plan? 

Simply put, your CX critical care plan is the data-backed strategy behind interactions between your business and your customers. This includes a holistic approach to the customer journey; fostering awareness, your first interactions, roping them into purchasing, and maintaining a personalized relationship with each customer to keep them satisfied. Your critical care plan should place the priority on the customer and how you can keep them engaged with your brand. 

A strong critical care plan is a projection for the future of your business that utilizes past data in a way that sets you up for success. Your customer journey roadmap can act as a guideline, but fully establishing your critical care plan will take customer experience to the next level. Its focal point should be to humanize your brand and generate positive, emotional connections with your customers through empathetic support

Customer experience critical care plans should be drafted on a large, comprehensive scale and at a smaller, more specific scale for product launches or peak seasons. Having a well-thought-out strategy is key to staying organized and optimizing your efforts. Maybe you offer an early-buyer discount, conduct a survey to figure out what your customers want, or share educational content via newsletters, blogs, or social platforms to keep your brand on a customer’s radar. Each business is different, and these decisions may come with trial and error. Your critical care plan is a live working strategy and it should fluctuate as your business and customers do.

Why is a CX critical care plan important for your business? 

Developing a trained, professional team of support agents to tackle problems with empathy cuts down on management interactions. If customers feel that they are being treated with genuine concern, there is no reason for them to escalate the problem to managers. This keeps workflow consistent and allows employees to remain focused on their expertise. 

Your customers determine the overall success of your business and their happiness is of utmost importance. By molding your critical care plan around the customer, it establishes a thorough strategy to increase customer satisfaction that, in turn, increases the revenue of your business. Happy customers mean repeat buyers, customers that will spread your business by word of mouth, and customers who turn into lifetime supporters. With a detailed strategy, you will see your KPIs skyrocket all across the board. 

Your critical care plan is so much more than just robotically solving problems for customers. It means focusing on essential human-to-human connections. We all know that networking is a sizeable part of the business process and it may help to imagine your critical care plan as a detailed networking strategy between your two most significant assets. Now let’s get to the juicy part.

How to create a successful CX critical care plan: 

To build a CX critical care plan that ensures success, follow this framework and tailor it to fit your business, keeping your customer base at the forefront of your mind. This structure can be used on a large scale or small scale.

  1. The foundation of your plan will come from past data and future projections. What are the trends of the past, and what can you expect in the future? 
  2. Evaluate your current CX model. What is your customer feedback like? How can you make your product more user-friendly? Have you established what exactly it is that customers need and want from you? Ask yourself these questions and give some thought to answering them from all angles. 
  3. Shape your customer vision and policies. Your vision should be brief and crystal clear, making it easy for employees to remember. Your customer policy reflects your vision and prioritizes making the customer feel valued. This will guide the way your organization approaches customer service.
  4. Develop the right team to execute your CX critical care plan. Outsourcing to a trained customer support team on demand is something to keep in mind, especially during peak season.
  5. Prepare agents with clear goals and direction. This involves creating an organizational culture that empowers and rewards employees for their work and coaches them through their mistakes with the same empathy we are asking them to maintain with customers. 
  6. To help you work out all the kinks, test your critical care plan on a smaller level before fully implementing it. 
  7. Isolate issues with ticket tagging. For businesses that receive an overwhelming influx of tickets, specific tags help to isolate issues and immediately identify them. 
  8. Keep your customers (and employees) excited about your brand. Investing in omnichannel marketing, events, or exclusive offers are some great ideas to keep customers engaged. You may also consider strengthening your community with VIP groups. 
  9. Review your data after peak season and year over year. This is a no-brainer, but an in-depth analysis of your performance gives you valuable insights into how successful your critical care plan is and what steps you can take to improve it. 
  10. Find what works for your business and never stop evolving it. There really isn’t a perfect mold for CX critical care plans but reviewing, testing, and reviving your customer care plan on a regular basis keeps your momentum up. As your business and customers evolve, so should your critical care plan.

How Influx can support your CX

Influx can offer you a team of support agents with expertise in customer service. Our teams are available 24/7 and trained in your brand voice to deliver full-fledged customer support. Give Influx a try and watch your business thrive. But don’t just take our word for it, check out the facts.


About the author

Photo of Mikayla Fuller

Mikayla Fuller

Mikayla is an avid copywriter. If she’s not out on an adventure, you can find her somewhere with a book in hand.