Definition: What is behind customer experience management?
What experiences customers have with a company and its brands, products or services at various touchpoints is shaped by the so-called Customer experience. Just a few decades ago, there were perhaps one or two points of contact — visits to the shop and possibly the customer hotline — the number of channels where customers and companies get in touch has now increased exponentially. Brands must be convincing in stores, online shops, on social media, in their mailings and on various support channels such as chat, email and telephone.
And not only that — the customer experience should be seamless and consistent across all channels. Sound like a pretty difficult task? There is also the Customer experience management.
Customer experience management (CXM or CEM for short) comprises various strategies, measures and tools that Encourage customer loyalty and satisfaction should. The central factor is to put their needs and wishes at the center of all processes and activities in the company. With CXM, companies can design and personalize their entire customer experience. Appropriate systems track and influence experiences across channels and in real time.
Summarized are the Characteristics of customer experience management:
- It focuses all activities in the company on the customer.
- It provides precise insights into customers and their experiences at all touchpoints.
- It gives companies the opportunity to respond directly to customer needs through uniform data and AI.
What are the goals of customer experience management?
Customer experience management has various goals:
- To convince customers, you need a consistently high quality customer service across all channels.
- The company should meet all expectations and Meet and exceed customer needs.
- By optimizing customer experiences, they should become more closely tied to the brand.
- It should long-term relationships with customers arise.
Why is customer experience management important?
Customer is consistency important. For example, no one wants to have to explain the same problem over and over again on different channels or to different service employees. Instead, you want the service employee to also be aware of the problem that you described earlier to the chatbot on the phone, for example. Achieving this consistency requires company-wide coordination through customer experience management. If this is implemented correctly, it has advantages for both the company and the customers:
How companies can stand out through customer experience management
The KPMG study”Customer Experience Management Excellence 2021“shows some areas in which companies can score points with customers through CXM:
- personalization: By responding individually to customers and providing them with tailored advice based on their customer history, they can establish an emotional connection.
- Time and effort: Through smooth, digitized processes, companies can reduce costs for customers and save them a lot of time. That drives the customer satisfaction upwards.
- Expectations: Customer expectations have risen, particularly in the areas of communication, convenience, experience and in-store product range. This means not only meeting the requirements in terms of selection and quality, but also exceeding them.
- Integrity: If you want to retain customers over the long term, you should be reliable (e.g. when it comes to appointments) and with integrity when problems arise. That creates trust.
- Problem solving skills: Things can't always run smoothly. In such cases, it means being accommodating, easily accessible and competent. In this way, a negative experience can still be converted into a few good ones.
- Empathy: “I understand you” — this should express both the appearance of the employees and the company's general communication so that a strong emotional connection develops.
These study results show that there is still room for improvement for many companies. Anyone who takes customer experience management seriously and aligns decisions and activities in the company with the customer can gain some advantages over the competition. It is therefore not too late to address the issue.
Customer Experience Management Tools & Software
It should be clear that a functioning CXM cannot be implemented using various Excel tables to the various channels. One “single source of truth” With regard to customer data, this is essential. If all departments in the company are expected to provide an exceptional customer experience, everyone must be prepared accordingly. And that means they have access to the same Data and tools have, regardless of which channel customers use to contact them. Only if this results in a company-wide data flow When created, the benefits of customer experience management can unfold.
Of course, a should customer-oriented way of thinking be the basis for all CXM activities. But so that customer needs can really be recorded and analyzed, actions derived and personalized content provided in real time on the various channels, it is necessary smart tools.
CXM software measures interactions between companies and their customers and delivers a accurate picture of the customer journey. It therefore supports companies in developing their Understanding customers better, and provides tailored insights on how they can further improve the customer experience. They also provide companies with concrete tools with which they can put these findings into practice.
These analyses are carried out with intelligent CXM tools automates and KI-supported. This means that the processes in customer experience management smarter, more efficient and less expensive become.
In the area of personalization, by the way, chatbots Take customer experiences to a new level. The better they get to know their respective customers, the better they can offer and respond to tailored, personalized experiences. Chatbots in the CXM tool landscape therefore offer a lot of potential to scale the topic of personalization.
Which tools CXM champions use
Companies that are leaders in the use of CXM tools consistently use analytics and artificial intelligence across the entire customer journey. In particular, they will use the following applications in the near future:
- 86 percent will use personalization technology
- 85 percent rely on Live Chats
- 84 percent will aim to collect data in real time
- 81 percent want to use AI-based chatbots
- 72 percent aim for a connected omnichannel experience
(Source: study by MIT Sloan Management Review Connections & SAS)
Conclusion: Exceed customer expectations with good CXM
A holistic view of customers and their experiences with the company is the key to successful customer experience management. It puts customers at the center of the company and makes it possible not only to meet, but to exceed, buyers' expectations. With CXM, brands get to know and understand their customers — in real time. CXM thus enables personalized customer experiences that are essential for long-term, emotional commitment to the brand. Anyone who succeeds in offering their customers an outstanding customer experience will gain long-term competitive advantages. Because the product or service alone will no longer convince customers in the future. Positive brand experiences are already influencing whether customers decide for or against a company. So no company that wants to remain successful can avoid professional customer experience management.
American Express has successfully optimized its customer experience management by integrating moinAI's chatbot and reported on all insights in a webinar. To get Amex tips and practical insights on chatbots in customer experience management, you can simply watch the webinar free of charge. 👇
