What is Customer Experience Management?

What Is Customer Experience Management and Why You Need It?

You might focus on delivering the highest quality product, being the first to market, or having competitive prices. However, there is one more thing that needs your attention – providing amazing experiences to your customers. Great experiences stay with them and make them come back, often with their friends and family. So, how can you improve it? Is there a tool to manage effectively? Let’s jump in!

What is customer experience management?

Customer Experience Management (CXM), is a system used by businesses to monitor, manage, and respond to all customer interactions. This system helps you go beyond your customers' expectations, leading to increased customer loyalty, satisfaction, advocacy, and sales.

In other words, CXM is focused on achieving a digital transformation that puts customers at the heart of the business. Its primary focus is on personalizing and coordinating the entire customer experience, enabling you to implement it on all channels in real time and at a massive scale.

What is CXM in comparison to CRM?

Although Customer Experience Management (CXM) may appear to be similar to Customer Relationship Management (CRM), there are some key distinctions when contrasting them. You might say that CXM is an evolution of CRM that helps manage relations with customers from a different perspective.

CRM reveals how a customer is perceived by the company, while CXM outlines how a company is seen by the customer. CXM is a strategy that focuses on the customer, placing them at the core of marketing, sales and customer service in order to foster brand loyalty and encourage repeat business.

Why customer experience management is important

80% of customers say that experience a company provides is equally important as products or services. It means that the success or failure of an organization is largely dependent on a great, repeatable customer experience. By focusing more on customer satisfaction and making technology more user-friendly, it creates a beneficial situation for both the business and the customer. 

In today's competitive and interconnected world, customer experience is a major factor that sets businesses apart. The outcome of this for a business could be more leads, conversions, or loyalty to the brand, while the customer benefits from personalized experiences, higher satisfaction, and a positive relationship with the brand.

There are several reasons why CX is important:

1. Gathering customer feedback is essential for improvement. Data from web surveys (the so-called Voice of the Customer), mobile app feedback, and phone/chat conversations can be used by your business to enhance customer experiences and keep them loyal.
2. Employees who are content with their job will provide customers with a better brand experience. There is a strong connection between employee experience and customer experience. Companies that have the best customer experience focus on collecting employee feedback in order to improve their experience and retention.
3. Satisfied customers will naturally promote a brand to their friends and family. Customer endorsement is often more influential in buying decisions than advertising or marketing efforts.
4. Monitoring and measuring customer sentiment can provide insight into your competition. Customers compare brands when making their decisions and providing feedback. Knowing this information can help your company position itself better against its competitors.

What are the main challenges on your way to providing great CX?

Now that you know how relevant customer experience management is, it’s time to… put theory into practice. However, there are some challenges that can get in your way of providing great CX. For example, a lack of customer data can make it impossible for you to identify and resolve CX issues. 

Lack of quantitative data is one thing – ignoring or not gathering the qualitative data from survey free-text fields is another story. This kind of data can provide greater insight into customer experience problems that cannot be discerned from numerical ratings alone. Additionally, such information can be used to generate fresh suggestions for bettering the overall experience.

Another obstacle is not enough omnichannel and multichannel support. When your brand is unable to communicate with or assist your customers in the mediums they are utilizing, such as email, social media, online chat, mobile applications, and voice-activated devices, it can prevent customers from expressing their wants and needs. This can result in customers turning to your competitor if they feel their needs are not being met.

Last but not least, problems with internal communication. If you want to create better customer experiences, you have to analyse the customer journey, establish voice of the customer programs, and collect customer data. However, this won’t be effective unless it is conveyed in a comprehensible way to your teams in Sales, Marketing, Customer Service, and Executive Management.

Fortunately, these obstacles can be overcome with a reliable customer experience software that supports your CXM strategy.

5 key features to look for in a CXM platform

1. Data Collection

Customer experience management platform bring together all the data – behavioural, transactional, financial, and operational – into one real-time customer profile. A good CXM system draws in and unifies data access from across disparate locations and lets you capture all those data points in real time. If your customer profiles are unified, real-time, and connected, you can derive deeper and more actionable insights.

2. Data Analytics

Use it to utilize your loyalty management system to gather data on your customers from all of your marketing and sales channels. Use that data to assemble promotions and offers that your customers will appreciate, and to create an entire loyalty program. After launching the program, investigate your member data by using the analytics models integrated into the system, recognize patterns in their behaviour, and give them the accurate message, when and where it matters most.

3. Omnichannel Communication and Customer Journeys Orchestration 

CXM platform facilitates streamlining your customer experience, permitting you to create, link, provide, and oversee experiences on various platforms – from call centres, physical stores, email, social media, websites, and mobile applications, to all the numerous ways customers come in contact with your brand.

4. Personalization

An effective way to improve customer experience is to use personalization engines, which are automated systems that communicate with customers on a one-to-one basis. New technologies such as mobile marketing and location-based services make it easier for you to identify customers' locations, enabling them to provide more tailored information and offers.

5. Marketing Automation 

Customer experience management solutions offers a range of advantages to marketing teams, such as eliminating mundane, repetitive tasks and allowing for greater efficiency. Automation tools within the platform can include features like lead management, customer segmentation and campaign management.

Key takeaways

Using the right tool to manage your customer experience can help you create moments of magic every time customers interact with your brand. This can be a huge aid to your business by boosting its growth and success through the word-of-mouth. If you are in search of the ideal customer experience management tool to construct a pleasing, significant and personalized customer experience, ask for a demo of our Comarch Loyalty Management Software and see how all of the above can be done with just one tool.