As a business grows, it’s vital to have tools to manage your interactions. Whether you’re recording calls into your support line, gathering purchasing history, or investigating their other purchases, your goal should be to improve their experience at every touchpoint.
Did a customer call into your customer service team? Listen to your business voicemail greeting and leave a message? Make an impression on a FB ad? Add one of your products or services to a cart, but then abandon it? Make a year-long subscription?
Each point of customer contact can and should inform marketing, sales, customer service, and even your engineering teams to increase overall customer lifetime value.
If your team has yet to incorporate a CXM into your practices, follow our guide to what you need to and the tools that can help you get there.
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- What is Customer Experience Management
- Customer Experience Management Hurdles
- Benefits of Unified Customer Experience Management
- 5 Customer Experience Management Advantages
- Customer Experience Requires Digital Transformation
- How Does Customer Experience Management Lead to Growth
- Top 5 Customer Experience Management Software Solutions
- CXM Software Comparison Table
- Customer Experience Management Software Drives Workflow
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What is Customer Experience Management?
Popularly known as both CEM or CXM, Customer Experience Management is the management of every customer interaction, both digital and physical. CXM goes beyond customer relationship management (CRM) software to increase both engagement and conversion rates.
More than 96% of marketers consider CXM “important or critical.” Because it is an omnichannel approach to service, customer experience management requires process change as well as new technological tools.
Customer Experience Management Hurdles
There are real downsides to not getting CXM right. As the customer interacts with your company, they aren’t concerned with how things work internally. Customers want two things: excellent value and service.
Instead, loyal customers of a decade or more often end up with their time abused and treated as first-timer. There is an easy explanation for this if your CXM is siloed: your phone center team may be well-acquainted with the customer, but someone on the email help desk has never even heard of them.
All of this manifests when a company silos CXM. Calls take longer and email exchanges grow into the double digits. The customer feels as if they’re forced to jump through endless hoops to get a single answer. In the end, customers come away with the sense that their history with your company is undervalued.
Benefits of Unified Customer Experience Management
When customer experience management is done right, however, customers enjoy the same experience every time they contact your company: the warm reception due a valued, returning customer
Whether your preferred customer likes to call into your hotline or exchange emails, a unified platform provided by experience management software will pull up the same details. Their entire customer journey will be on display for the agent, ideally with an updated summary of their experience.
For the customer, it’s clear that this is preferable to having to explain during every single call which service package they are already a customer on.
For your company, sparing the customer the task of detailing all of the painful problems they have had with your product or service translates into improved customer satisfaction, conversions, and retention, allowing you to increase revenue. Creating customer satisfaction surveys helps to document this data.
5 Customer Experience Management Advantages
1. Understand Your Customers
For maybe the first time, the customer’s point of contact can fully understand what their customer’s perception of the company is outside of their operational sphere. Sure, an employee may only interface with employees through email, but they’ll also have access to call notes, data related to ad impressions, billing history, and more.
2. More Information Means More Happiness
If your phone or email agents have more information at hand, they will be prepared to assist your customers. Choosing the right management solution for customer data results in less friction for both customers and employees as you meet each one of your customer’s needs individually.
3. Unified Platform Means Lower Costs
Rather than wrangle several different platforms, your employees only need to learn how to use one system. This saves the budget on training new hires and transfers, as well as tenured staff.
4. Increases Data Reliability
Your sales, digital marketing, customer service, and engineering teams will finally all speak the same language! Once your entire company is on board the same CXM platform, your teams will no longer need to translate different metric terminology into each other’s dialects.
5. Omniscient Management
A unified CXM platform enables the management team to compare and contrast team performance, as well as their impact on customer experience.
The benefits of implementing customer experience software are numerous and varied.
Customer Experience Requires Digital Transformation
Just because it’s important, doesn’t make managing customer experience easy. To pull off unified CXM, your team will need to consider a complete digital transformation.
Consolidate All Data
To create a single view of your customer’s journey across every channel (from television to phone to internet to brick and mortar, and beyond), you’ll need to unify data from every single department in your company.
Streamline Brand Experience
With that data in hand, it’s time to create a brand experience that remains consistent throughout the customer’s journey. They should feel equally at home on the phone and over email, receive personalized ads on social media, and stop receiving cold snail mail flyers if they are already a customer!
How Does Customer Experience Management Lead to Growth?
There are a lot of growth opportunities to take advantage of with the help of customer experience management software. Your CXM software solution should store and present information about your customers that helps you to serve them better and to show C-level executives your roadmap. The aim should be to provide great customer experience meeting customer needs and building brand loyalty while collecting customer data that ensures growth.
Customer Analytics
Your sales and marketing teams need data analytics to understand your customer better. Without the proper tools on hand, they’re shooting blindly. Leveraging customer analytics provides insights into customer habits which will inform their marketing and sales tactics, resulting in higher conversion rates and deeper retention. By collecting information about how your customer experience strategy is performing, you get insight you can use to reduce customer churn and streamline your journey mapping.
Mobile Marketing
Obtaining the data and analysis is made more complicated by the fact that marketing today takes place across many different channels and devices. One statistic attributes 60% of digital media users’ time to mobile use. Customers interact with your brand via email, social media, apps, SMS and MMS, and more, using devices ranging from a tablet to a smartwatch. User experience is key to customer retention, so make sure your mobile marketing is providing good customer experiences at every customer touchpoint.
Mobile marketing is the new word of mouth and needs to be a vital part of your customer experience management strategy.
Location-based Services
Because mobile is increasingly the name of the game, your sales, marketing, and customer service teams should take into account each device’s geographical location. Responding call center agents, limited time offers and other promotions, and even suggested articles should all correspond to a device’s location.
Customer expectations have changed and their comfort around targeted experiences is growing. Using localized approaches can be a major differentiator between you and your competitors as you work to provide the most customer-centric experience.
Emotional Analytics
To connect with your audience, you’ll need to go beyond broad, surface-level buckets of “positive, negative, or neutral.” With sophisticated tools, emotional analytics could help your company dive into more nuanced emotional responses to provide more meaningful solutions that take into account your customer’s perspective.
Personalization helped EasyJet’s 20th-anniversary email campaign skyrocket to 100%+ gains over previous open rates. The most popular customer responses to their email campaign? “Love it.”
CXM software allows your audience to benefit from an improved UX. We are already seeing sales teams tap into wearable technology to inform shopping experiences, such as when eBay found that its pop-up shop was stressing shoppers out. Personalized experiences throughout the entire customer lifecycle to increase overall customer engagement.
Artificial Intelligence (AI)
While mass implementation of wearable tech to inform customer experience may be years away, Forbes predicts that by 2025, 95% of all customer interactions will be supported by artificial intelligence. Two ways your brand could leverage AI:
Chatbots are one of the best ways to leverage AI. Not only are chatbots well-poised to personalize customer interactions, but they can also accelerate resolution. From inquiries regarding a particular product to customer support, chatbots can either provide a direct answer or help direct a query to the correct recipient.
While it might not work for every brand, even facial recognition technology can be employed via CXM software. KFC made headlines for partnering with Chinese search engine giant Baidu to recognize customer faces, then use data and predictive analytics to recall their favorites and suggest potential order items. Privacy concerns may trump this potential use in some countries, but others are already warm to the idea.
As many challenges as there are to CXM, customer experience software provides more features than ever to help overcome them.
Top 5 Customer Experience Management Software Solutions
While some of the above approaches may seem far-fetched or inapplicable today, below are five different CXM software you can use today to improve conversions and engagement at each point in the customer journey:
1. Medallia Experience Cloud
Medallia leverages data gleaned through direct and indirect customer feedback, as well as that hidden within your operations. Its analytics engines process both statistics and language, then apply AI and predictive analytics to predict and model customer behavior.
Going beyond customer insights, Medallia also monitors employee performance to identify opportunities to increase customer satisfaction and other areas for improvement. Customer feedback is once again tied into informing ways in which the company can innovate and better serve its customer base, shoring up its brand reputation and increasing customer loyalty.
Medallia’s Enterprise-Grade platform, with customers such as Paypal, adds many useful features to the platform:
- Real-time data processing
- Multi-language capability
- Custom feedback mapped to each user’s role in your organization
- Advanced integrations
- And more
2. Intouch Insight
Intouch Insight aims to merge all of your operational and customer experience data into a single platform. Insight pulls data from surveys, call centers, texts, emails, webpages, and more. As a user, you can create unlimited, customizable dashboards to leverage that data.
The platform is designed to help your team achieve four main goals:
- Collect data related to customer experience from any channel
- Single out which areas of the customer journey need the most improvement
- Take and assess action in terms of maximum ROI
- Track performance across every location
Insight guarantees they will have you up and running in 30 days or less and will give unsatisfied customers a feel refund on any part of the service not used during that time.
3. Zendesk
Used by household names such as Uber and Disney, Zendesk prides itself on its ability to merge customer experiences across every channel into a single, easy to interpret platform.
From social media to email, phone calls to messenger chats, your customer service team will be fully integrated. Beyond reactive customer service, Zendesk also supports a knowledge base where the proactive customer can seek out answers without ever involving your team.
Whether your team is small or enterprise in scale, Zendesk is designed to grow with you. That growth is enabled by Zendesk’s analytics which accompanies the platform, providing your teams with benchmarked data, customer intelligence, and more.
4. Qualtrics Customer Experience
Qualtrics Customer Experience was designed with one goal in mind: to create a platform so agile that your team will find it easier than ever before to “monitor, respond, and improve every touchpoint along the customer journey.” Microsoft, Coca-Cola, and many other enterprise-scale corporations and organizations rely on Qualtrics to measure customer experiences across every touchpoint, then use analytics to “predict key experience drivers” and take decisive action.
Priding themselves on a visually simple, fully customizable, drag and drop dashboard, the results of leveraging Qualtrics’ data and analytics are anything but underwhelming. Tapping into email triggers, embedded data, randomization, more than 100 question types, and other invaluable sources informing your team about customer experience, Qualtrics delivers on three main fronts:
- Baseline: By measuring your customers’ experiences across the entire customer journey, Qualtrics establishes fixed points to compare future performance against.
- Predictive analytics: Qualtrics helps you predict customers’ future needs by highlighting key experience drivers.
- Tracking and optimization: Through automated, complex consumer research spread across a wide range of segments, your team can test ads and products at a far lower cost than outsourcing to vendors.
5. Zoho CRM Plus
Zoho CRM Plus offers interactive dashboards that display data drawn from customer support, sales, and marketing. The entire customer’s journey is contained within a single thread, so that each team can jump in and extract the information it needs, without having to assess and understand another team’s systems.
For times when manual touch is required, the CXM’s mobile app, ASAP, connects support agents directly with the customer at a moment’s notice. Moving beyond manual customer experience management, the CXM’s Blueprint feature automates processes between teams.
With all of the integration and automation reducing the need for teams to message back and forth if anyone on your team feels isolated and lonely, they can always enable Zia, Zoho CRM Plus’ AI-based voice assistant. In addition to a little company, Zia provides team members with suggestions on optimal email times, business trend predictions, and more.
CXM Software Comparison Table
The goal with these CXM platforms is the ability to manage across an omnichannel customer experience. That complex mission makes it difficult to ascertain what is customer experience software providing you at times, so we’ve laid them out side by side in a simple table below:
| CXM Features | Medallia Experience Cloud | Intouch Insight’s LiaCX | The Zendesk Suite | Qualtrics Customer Experience | Zoho CRM Plus |
| Action Management | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Analytics | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Customer Segmentation | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Knowledge Management | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Multi-Channel Collection | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Sentiment Analysis | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Survey Management | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Trend Analysis | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
Customer Experience Management Software Drives Workflow
Choosing which piece of software suits the needs of your business and your customers means considering which software could drive the workflow. For example, if you are thinking of starting with help desk software but have a limited budget, check out these free help desk software providers.
While the initial choice requires careful reflection, the premise behind CXM software is that it will cut down on the amount of communication and time spent by your team. At the same time, after implementing an effective CXM, your company will create a better customer experience. This results in a higher quality experience not only for the customer but for your employees as well.
CXMs reduce friction across the entire organization by integrating and streamlining systems, leveraging automation and predictive analytics to eliminate redundancies and shore up gaps, and identifying critical areas worth exploring to ensure future growth.
If you need an extra push to convince C-level executives why you need to prioritize your CXM, check out our research on ROI for customer experience.
