25 Questions to Create a Game-Changing Strategy in 2022

As you set your sights on 2022 and begin to prepare for your strategic planning sessions with your Executive Team, there are three key areas to consider outside of the routine strategic categories.

Learn more about the three areas of focus you should be looking at in the New Year to help propel your organization forward and create a game-changing strategy. The list of questions will help you steer the conversation and allow you to go deeper.

Any deep-dive topic should be related to either issues you’re facing, opportunities you see on the horizon, or changes in the marketplace, your customers, or your company culture.

Personalization

Consider what you can do to personalize your offering, including what you can do to treat a customer more like a person and less like a wallet.

To add more value and personalize your offerings, here are three areas you’ll want to feel confident in:

Accessing data – how will you get it and how will you use it?
Identifying patterns – do you have a process for identifying meaningful customer patterns in the data that you’re gathering?
Using mass customization – how are you using technology and data to customize your messaging and offerings?

Here are 10 questions to ask as you explore improving personalization in 2022:

How can we improve findability of our product?
How do we improve curb-side pickup?
How do we improve our customer feedback to learn how customers like to be served and what they really want?
How do we move from segmentation to personalization?
How are we saving time for our customer and making their lives easier and better?
What data would we like to get from our customers in exchange for product recommendations, personalized experiences, or discounts?
How can we leverage a deep understanding of customer preference, structures and unstructured customer data, conversations in and across all channels to preemptively anticipate a customer’s needs?
Can we use education to provide a more authentic personalized experience?
Are there opportunities to go direct to the consumer and cut out the middleman in our space?
If we are the middleman, how will we add value to our customers, so we don’t get cut out?

Customer Experience

Consider what you can do to significantly enhance the experience our customers have when they interact with you.

To add more value and improve your customer experience, here are three areas you’ll want to feel confident in:

Establishing a company mindset – how are you driving a customer-focused mindset throughout your organization?
Creating customer memories – how are you creating memorable experiences for your customers?
Building deeper relationships – how are you forming relationships with your customers outside of their transactions?

Here are 10 questions to ask as you explore improving the customer experience in 2022:

How will we make our customers feel special? How will we wrap a story around our product or service?
How will we convert our product or service to an experience…customers want to buy an experience?
Are there opportunities to add services to our products or products to our services?
How will we make our offering the most innovative…customers expect connectivity and up-to-date technology resulting in a frictionless experience?
How will we create efficiencies for our employees to provide a better customer experience?
How will we drive the concept of empathy throughout our organization…actively putting ourselves in our customer’s shoes?
How will we get everyone in the organization and partners to own the customer experience… move the organization from product-focused to a customer-focused organization?
How will we move our customer experience to the same level as Amazon and Apple? (These companies have set the pace and created new expectations for all customers, B-to-B and B-to-C, alike).
Do we have the right leaders and/or do they need training? Do our staff-level executives and managers have a customer perspective and mindset?
How will we build relationships, not just transactions? How will we more actively manage the customer relationship with social media…manage the power shift from the corporation to the customer?

Convenient and Safe

Consider how you can make it more convenient and safer to do business with you.

To add more value and make it more convenient and safer to do business with you, here are three areas you’ll want to feel confident in:

Making it frictionless – how are you making the process to purchase intuitive for your customers?
Removing silos – how are you making the customer journey seamless and convenient, regardless of silos in your organization?
Practicing empathy – what mechanisms do you have in place to see your customers’ viewpoints?

Here are 5 questions to ask as you explore improving convenience and safety in 2022:

How will we improve the ease of interaction with our customer?
Is there anything we need to make our products or services more convenient for our customers?
How will we eliminate friction in our customer delivery process?
How will we make our environment safer for our employees and customers to do business with each other?
How will we make using our products safer?

Your Performance Partner

At Mahoney Performance Institute, we empower leaders at every level to reach and exceed their goals in their organization and in life. Leading your team through the strategic planning process not only builds comradery and a path forward for you organization, it also:

Creates a common language for growing your business together
Designs a vision for everyone to rally around
Increases the confidence for everyone in your organization that they are on the right team

The team at Mahoney Performance Institute offers expertise and customization based on your organization size and industry to help you create a game-changing strategy.