What is customer experience management and why it matters

Delivering positive omnichannel customer experience has always been a top concern for organizations looking to solidify their share of the market. However, only in recent years have they had access to the tools needed to consistently improve the customer experience at scale.

Whitepaper

Understanding Omnichannel CX: Analyzing Every Customer Touchpoint

Learn how to connect the dots of your customer interactions across channels

Customer experience management (CXM) software solutions abound, and many can give your business the edge it needs to stand out in a sea of competitors. Among these software solutions are options like customer experience management tools and suites, as well as conversation analytics solutions and conversation intelligence software.

Understanding precisely what these are and why you should bother with them in the first place could be critical for championing customers new and old as well as building a better reputation for your business.

What is customer experience management?

Customer experience management comes down conducting customer interactions in a deliberate manner. In other words, customer experience management makes actively developing the customer experience a priority and takes aim at shaping interactions between customers and organizations proactively. The idea is to build an overwhelming sense of satisfaction and loyalty among customers by exceeding their expectations. This generally entails a far greater degree of customization that extends beyond customer relationship management techniques.

Customer experience management is erroneously associated with specific tools and software, but these are only meant to facilitate CXM — they are not the process itself. To condense the multifaceted reality of customer experience management, it helps to think of it as the process of improving the overall influence customers walk away with after interacting with a given brand. This is done by building super detailed customer profiles across all interactions between them and an organization, then conveying key information to the right people at the right time and empowering them to better serve each customer.

Understanding your customers and customer experience journey mapping brings about better results for both them and your business. Building customer profiles and ferrying information from one touchpoint to another in real time is where the many tools designed with CXM in mind come into play. However, it is at the point that choosing a toolset becomes necessary that companies may stumble.

CRM vs. CXM

Choosing between CXM and customer relationship management (CRM) solutions can be confusing without a clear understanding of the differences between the two categories. In short, the differences are as follows:

CRM tooling helps companies learn more about their customers and paint a clearer picture of the customer journey.

CXM solutions support a strategic approach that permeates your entire organization. They often leverage information captured by CRM tools to describe a unified and distinctly experiential side of customer interactions.

Think of CRM as a way to capture data and measure the customer experience, whereas CXM provides a means of describing what it is the customer is actually experiencing at every stage of their journey. CXM is all about the customer's true perspective in their interactions with a given brand. By employing CXM techniques and tools, you are tapping into your customers' points of view and actively endeavoring to make their experience with your business better through real-time tailoring.

Why is customer experience management important?

Customer experience management matters as much as the omnichannel customer experience itself. After all, that is precisely what it is meant to improve—the raw impressions individual customers have of their interactions with your business. CXM as a process (and a category of tools designed to support such a process) facilitates creating the kind of customer experience that keeps your clientele coming back to your business for more.

Improved customer experience creates more and better customer relationships for your business. CX improvements drive stronger customer retention results while lowering the costs associated with these results simultaneously.

Benefits of CXM

The benefits of customer experience management extend beyond the short term, allowing companies to reach growth projections and milestones with confidence. Growth is supported by such positive and long-lasting effects as:

• Greater preparedness for crises - When customers come to trust in a brand they have positively interacted with for some time, they may be more accepting of short-term mistakes and setbacks that brand endures. This makes it much easier for businesses to weather the storm when they face difficulties.
• Lower marketing costs - Marketing costs are a necessary expenditure across all organizations, but they can be dramatically reduced by companies taking a proactive approach to their use of customer data to enrich their marketing decisions.
• Higher customer lifetime value - This metric represents the overall amount of revenue you can expect to derive from a single customer over the duration of the relationship between them and your organization. Generally, the higher this figure is for your business, the better. CXM assists in building lasting loyalty among customers. This, in turn, leads to greater returns over time as happier customers contribute more to your business's bottom line.

Customer experience management brings powerful and lasting benefits to companies that take the concept and tooling seriously.