To keep customers happy, brands must focus on creating personalized customer experiences. But how do you accomplish that when so many other customer-related priorities require attention? Lengthy holding and onboarding times, first contact resolution rates, and inconsistent knowledge across channels can lead to customer satisfaction and loyalty erosion.
In light of these and other customer experience challenges, the importance of a customer experience management strategy becomes clear. Such a strategy ensures every interaction with your brand delivers the experience your customers expect and demand.
What is Customer Experience Management?
Customer experience management (CXM) is a system of marketing strategies and technologies an organization uses to improve customer engagement, satisfaction, and experience. Customer experience management software helps businesses boost customer experience and increase productivity by up to 150 percent, reduce customer interaction time by 15 percent, and improve support ticket response accuracy by up to 70 percent.
Unlike customer relationship management (CRM), which focuses on conversions, CXM strives to improve the customer experience throughout the customer journey, ensuring each engagement is a positive one.
Why Customer Experience Management is Important
It’s well known that it costs up to five times more to attract a new customer than to retain an existing one. Managing the customer experience offers tangible benefits that include:
- A higher customer lifetime value.
- Reduced customer churn.
- Increased brand equity.
- Higher customer retention.
- Improved crisis management.
- Reduced cost of service and marketing.
- Better customer engagement.
By understanding who your customers are and creating a clear customer vision, you can make an emotional connection with them that helps you outperform your competitors.
The Key Elements of Digital Customer Experience Management (DCXM)
The number of global digital buyers is now estimated at 2.65 billion, or one-third of the world’s population. Adopting a digital approach to customer experience management optimizes the interactions and experiences customers have with your brand through digital platforms. To thrive in this new online reality, businesses must embrace innovative tools and strategies that enhance customer satisfaction, foster loyalty, and support growth.
Key elements of successful DCXM include:
- A user-friendly interface that’s easy to navigate, responsive, and tailored to each user’s personal needs.
- Personalization based on collected data that allows you to tailor recommendations, greetings, and content to individual customers.
- Omnichannel consistency so customers experience uniform delivery of support and information across mobile apps, desktop sites, and self-service options.
- Speed and reliability that help mitigate customer frustration and reduce bounce and exit rates.
- Feedback mechanisms that help organizations better understand customer pain points and continually refine the digital experience.
Incorporating these elements ensures that customers have a seamless, enjoyable experience, which in turn can boost loyalty and sales.
The Role of AI and Machine Learning in CXM Software
A customer experience management platform powered by AI tools and technologies automates and augments various customer service takes via chatbots, predictive analytics, natural language processing (NLP), and more. It streamlines the support process, can reduce costs, and is a powerful way to enhance customer satisfaction.
Chatbots and virtual assistants can improve average handling times and other customer service metrics in a substantial way. AI-driven agent assistance tools allow customer service reps to quickly share useful information and automate workflows, leading to enhanced customer satisfaction and retention.
AI also makes it possible to process enormous volumes of customer data with minimal human errors. By centralizing customer information drawn from multiple touchpoints, it helps organizations offer a more personalized customer experience across various channels.
Strategies for Effective Customer Experience Management
Ensuring your organization is delivering exceptional customer experiences requires crafting a goal-oriented customer experience strategy that includes elements such as a shared vision and a digital roadmap to get you from where you are to where you’re going. Tips for building a successful customer experience management strategy include:
Promote customer retention.
Businesses focused on growth must create a churn reduction strategy to retain the customers they’ve worked so hard to acquire. You can solve high churn rates among new customers by simple steps like upgrading the speed of your customer support. Reducing churn rates in customers who’ve been loyal for years requires a more complex approach that focuses on customer interactions and incentives to keep them in the fold.
Consider the customer’s perspective.
Organizations can sometimes lose sight of the fact that customers define the customer experience, not the C-suite. But once you’re able to learn about your customers via objective data and analytics, your customer experience strategy becomes clearer. Consulting with various departments to map out the customer journey provides valuable insight into customer needs, obstacles, emotions, and perspectives so you can better empathize with and serve them on an individualized level.
Internal team alignment
Customer experience in the digital era involves apps, websites, social media platforms, and more. While marketing departments still take the lead in customer experience, it’s essential for other departments and teams to weigh in, including your IT team. Involving the entire company in improving the customer experience ensures customers feel valued based on multiple touchpoints.
Consistency and reliability.
Information reliability has become increasingly critical as businesses adopt AI and automation to offer support. Unlike live agents, chatbots and virtual assistants cannot establish an emotional connection with customers. At best, it can learn to “speak” in a way that customers respond to. But they also need to know that if they want to speak to a live agent, the hand-off will be seamless and efficient.
Provide the right resources.
If agents are to provide customers with quick, efficient, and accurate information, they need the right tools to do it. A well-maintained knowledge base is a good start, as is continuous training when new features and resources are added. Keeping the knowledge base fresh also helps team members feel fully supported.
Employee decision-making
Empowering agents to contribute ideas, knowledge, and wisdom can spark positive change in the customer experience. After all, no one repeatedly sees the same issues as service reps do. By creating processes that make it easy for customer-facing team members to solve problems and develop solutions, you keep them engaged, which leads to higher customer satisfaction.
