What is Customer Experience Management (CXM)?

There are many metrics used to evaluate success in business, but nearly all of them come down to the single, all-encompassing success metric that drives everything else: revenue.

Customer experience management is no different. As previously mentioned, modern customers want to take a more active role; they’re well informed and technologically experienced and they have the tools at their disposal to make their needs known. Businesses that ignore these vocal, invested customer elements do so at their own peril — the state of their customer experience directly impacts the revenue they generate.  This is because the customer experience is built on the relationships between buyers and sellers. CXM technology supports a digital transformation in which smart technologies enhance customer service, engagement and satisfaction. Every customer touchpoint can be personalised to meet the needs of every individual buyer in real time, regardless of scale or channel. In other words, CXM makes the success of each individual buyer the top priority of the business. This allows organisations to accomplish the following: 

There are few things more valuable to a business than a loyal, excited customer. Customer loyalty breeds brand evangelists who not only continue to increase in terms of lifetime value, but also spread their enthusiasm to their friends and associates. The personalised experiences presented through effective customer experience management create a seamless and highly satisfying customer journey further enhanced by customer service software, customer lifecycle management, customer relationship management (CRM) solutions, automation and other related technologies.

By providing intelligent, personal support, product recommendations, simplified feedback options and more, CXM helps guide leads and new customers towards a future built on consistently positive experiences and repeat business.

Customer retention inspired by customer loyalty is a primary goal of CXM. Customer retention is inversely proportional to customer churn, a metric which describes the percentage of customers that stop doing business (and the potential future revenue amounts they take with them when they leave). CXM helps minimise customer churn by helping businesses identify what kinds of customers are falling away and why so that they can take steps to better address possible issues before they can become real problems.

Knowing how to provide an exceptional customer experience depends heavily on knowing the customer. CXM solutions are extremely effective at capturing customer data from customer behaviours across every touchpoint. This makes it possible for businesses to improve their analytical capabilities and develop a more complete picture of who their buyers are and what they want. On a more personal level, it also allows organisations to create highly detailed customer segments that dial in on the success of customers as individuals.

Going hand in hand with capturing and analysing customer data, CXM empowers companies with the capability to further gather and interpret vast quantities of operational information. This has the potential to improve every aspect of a business, but is particularly important for measuring the success of customer-facing initiatives. With CXM analytics, businesses can evaluate their engagement efforts in real time and make course corrections without having to wait for quarterly reports.

Customer experience management is a holistic process that extends from the very beginning of the buying journey to long after a customer has interacted with an organisation’s brand or products. When designing a CXM strategy, it’s important to focus on the four areas of customer experience management.

Although different businesses may take different approaches to CXM, they each share these four essential pillars in providing a personalised experience for their buyers:

Probably the most influential variable in customer experience management, having the right team on hand will help ensure that initiatives come together properly and that everyone is working to meet their designated goals. Without a fully customer-focused team, the other pillars of CXM are unlikely to hold up.

Tools make it possible to turn the elevated ideals of customer-centricity into reality. CXM relies heavily on automation, AI and other digital advancements to extend the reach and capabilities of customer-service and support agents.

No business starts with a complete idea of what they need to do to find success with customer experience management. In-depth planning, mapping, playbook creation and other related tasks are essential to developing the right customer-experience processes. Just as important is ongoing documentation — keeping a detailed record of what worked, what didn’t, and any other important learnings makes it possible for businesses to ‘reload’ earlier stages when their initiatives fail and replicate positive outcomes when the initiatives succeed.

Finally, opening up channels to solicit customer feedback is one of the major factors that makes CXM so powerful. Customer experience management allows for more direct interaction with buyers, so companies can continue to refine their products, services and approaches to better meet the needs of the people who keep them in business.

CXM software exists to support all other aspects of CXM strategy. As such, the benefits and advantages it brings to the table closely mirror many of those listed above. More specifically, CXM software helps businesses improve their customer-facing performance in the following ways: 

Effective CXM software is a platform for customer feedback, allowing businesses to easily gather and analyse insights directly from their buyers. And while this feedback is invaluable in creating a data foundation for informed decision-making, it carries with it another benefit. When customers know that a business is dedicated to hearing and acting upon customer feedback, they’re more willing to share that positive experience with others and come back to do business again and again.

At the core of CXM are AI and ML capabilities that allow the system to process copious amounts of interconnected data to create an intelligent, personalised experience for each individual customer at scale. These technologies make it possible for the systems to understand customer intent and preferences, without the need for a human agent to interpret the data for them.

When customer interactions depend entirely on customer-service agents, the level of service can fluctuate wildly from touchpoint to touchpoint. This is an ineffective way to interact with customers and can result in lost sales and costly reputational damage. CXM places a single software solution at the heart of these interactions so that businesses won’t have to worry about inconsistent customer service negatively impacting the customer experience.

A major goal of modern customer service is omnichannel experience. Omnichannel allows customers to move freely between channels as they interact with a business, without losing the thread of the conversation. CXM software supports omnichannel engagement, maintaining essential customer and purchase data in a centralised location for easy retrieval by service agents.

Perhaps the most important benefit of CXM software is its ability to personalise the customer experience. Simply put, CXM tools offer the insight organisations need to tailor every customer journey to the specific needs of each individual buyer. With fully personalised interactions, organisations have the resources they need to make positive, customised customer experiences the rule, rather than the exception.