Introduction

In recent years, you’ve likely heard a lot about customer experience management (CXM). But what exactly is CX management, and why is it important for your business?

Today, managing a customer’s experience with your business is vital to your success.  Every company, small or large, is forced to support customer demand, or they won’t survive. How businesses evolve their approach to maintain a positive experience at every touchpoint determines their ongoing success. This is where customer experience management comes in.

What is customer experience management?

Customer experience management (CXM) is the discipline of understanding customers and deploying strategies to influence customer perceptions about a business. CXM done right results in improved customer satisfaction, loyalty, and advocacy. CXM includes processes like customer communication management (CCM), archiving, and customer journey management (CJM) designed to enhance the customer experience.

CXM is sometimes confused with Customer Relationship Management (CRM), but there are clear differences. The primary difference is one of perspective. CRM is about what a customer looks like to the business. While CXM is about how the company looks to a customer. Another difference is that CRMs gather data through manual or batch entry. Whereas CXM requires the real-time flow of data.

Why is customer experience management important?

Today customers universally expect better experiences with the brands they choose to do business with. The cost of not delivering is high. Eighty-five percent of customers are willing to pay significantly more for a competitor’s experience that meets their expectations.

Creating a connected, personalised, transparent experience how and when customers desire is key to acquiring and, most importantly, retaining your customers. The potential return on investment (ROI) is significant, with customer experience leaders outperforming in value. According to Forbes, businesses that have invested in customer experience realise revenue increases of 80 percent. It’s no surprise that influencing customers’ feelings about their interactions with brands has become a primary focus for businesses.

Though CX strategies and initiatives are constantly evolving, some areas remain unchanged. All departments within an organisation need to be aligned to deliver a superior customer experience. A negative interaction at one touchpoint could potentially negate the good experiences across all other touchpoints.

Businesses must develop and maintain a single, unified, holistic, 360-degree view of each customer. It’s important to understand that the purchase phase is just one step in a complex customer journey. A brand must deliver a solid post-purchase experience to retain customers.

Businesses need to delight customers in every interaction, whether a marketing campaign or a call to your service desk. Every department needs to play its part in a coordinated manner, and technology is the glue that binds it together.

  • Two-thirds of companies compete on customer experience, up from 36% in 2010. (Gartner)
  • 76% of executives say improving CX is a high or critical priority. (Forrester)
  • 87% of business leaders tag CX as their top growth engine – the highest of any other growth area. (North Highland)
Top customer engagement priorities

 

What are the benefits of CXM?

Delivering a great customer experience management strategy has several benefits, including greater customer satisfaction, loyalty, advocacy, and increased revenue.

Let’s dig into 3 of the top benefits of CXM to a business:

1. Increased Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)

Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) represents the total amount of money a customer will spend with a company during their lifetime. An increase in CLV drives customer retention, increases the revenue generated per customer, and reduces the cost spent attracting new customers.

2. Improved loyalty and customer retention

Customer retention rate measures whether a business retains customers during a specific period. High customer retention reflects customer loyalty to a brand and results in more sales and higher customer lifetime value. Companies that quickly resolve issues, reward loyalty, and appreciate their customers can strengthen their brand perception.

3. Reduced customer churn

The churn rate measures the rate at which customers stop doing business with a brand or company. It’s essential to address your churn rate since it’s less expensive to retain customers than acquire them. Businesses that invest in their cu

How to improve Customer Experience Management?

Following the COVID-19 pandemic, a new human-centric era has emerged. After months spent isolated from family and friends in lockdown, the value of interpersonal connections has increased. Today, customers want to do business with organisations that cultivate relationships with them. Customers expect authentic, meaningful engagement that embeds emotion and brand personality into every touch.

As you endeavour to meet customer experience expectations, here are insights to help you make the right CX investments.

Five investments for human-centric CX

Employee Experience

As organisations focus on enhancing the customer experience, it’s crucial to assess where the experience starts – with employees. Employee experience (EX) is the sum of all interactions an employee has with an organisation. Research overwhelmingly supports that enhancing employee experience directly improves customer experience. Companies with highly engaged employees outperform by up to 147 percent, and they experience lower employee turnover, absenteeism, and safety accidents.

“If your employee’s experience is disconnected and poor, your customers’ experience will be as well. By building personalised, omnichannel customer experiences, you do the same for your employees; and everyone wins.”

– Scott Draeger, VP, Customer Transformation, Quadient

Delivering an outstanding customer experience requires putting the customer at the heart of your business. The best way to achieve this is cultural transformation. If your culture does not center upon the humans within it — your employees, you cannot execute a customer-first strategy externally.

If you want to deliver good CX consistently, you’ll need to invest heavily in your employee experience.

Advanced IT Technologies

Organisations are increasingly adopting advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and data analytics into their technology stacks for all business areas.

AI technologies enable machines to sense, comprehend, act, and learn with human-like intelligence. AI-powered solutions are nimble and self-optimising as business needs evolve. These technologies empower enterprises to do more with less accurately and to leverage data to personalise customer experiences.

The amount of data being generated has rapidly increased in recent years. This rapid increase in data requires companies to build capabilities to analyse and process their growing amounts of data. This is an area where AI can shine.

AI technology can give your employees data to make decisions, freeing their time to focus on deeply personalised human touch. AI-based template migration, data management, and integration will accelerate your digital transformation projects, letting you implement months, even years, sooner. And their powers, benefits, and potential ROI continues to grow with gusto—getting better each year.

Customer Journey Management

Gone are the days when one-size-fits-all customer journeys drive value. CX-obsessed companies have raised the standard. Every interaction a customer has with your organisation is an opportunity to delight or disappoint.

Your customers add complexity to your processes as their collection of devices, accounts, and channels grow. This increases the likelihood of a disjointed, frustrating experience. But today, a single point of friction in the customer experience can end a customer relationship.

  • 1 in 3 customers will walk away after one poor experience
  • 92% of customers are willing to leave a brand after 2-5 poor experiences
  • 63% say they’d share more data with a company offering a great experience (PwC)

To drive and retain value, enterprises must deliver empathetic, personalised, omnichannel experiences within the context of every individual’s unique journey. This takes more than customer journey mapping—it takes customer journey management.

Sophisticated journey management solutions go far beyond mapping. Modern journey management solutions leverage AI and data analysis to identify and implement enhanced personalisation and omnichannel orchestration opportunities. At-scale.

Having a view into the customers’ journey makes the impact of every interaction clear to employees and enables transformation. If creating a customer-first culture is your priority, you need to consider solutions integrating journey management with customer communications management.

There is enormous value in understanding and visualising essential journeys.

Omnichannel Solutions

Customers expect interactions that are relevant to their current stage of the buying journey, regardless of the channel used. They expect choice of channel and consistency across every channel available from competitors. They do not reward a fragmented journey or extend patience for the hurdles this expectation presents for internal operations.

Visualising your customers’ journey helps you truly understand their needs, but how far does that take you? Every communication your organisation sends has a specific business purpose. But today, customers engage on multiple channels — typically choosing between two to four on which to engage at any given moment. The challenge is creating a way for customers to determine how they want to interact with you and meet them there.

You need to predict your customer’s demands and ensure every communication can be designed and delivered. To do this, you need omnichannel design and delivery technology.

Omnichannel CCM capabilities, coupled with customer journey management, enable you to anticipate customer needs and interact on any channel.

For example, a customer may start an interaction on the phone but finish it online or via SMS. Journey management lets you predict the channel switch. Omnichannel design enables any department to quickly design and personalise content that is optimised for that channel. If delivery fails on one channel, failover orchestration ensures the communication is automatically generated and delivered on an alternate channel. 

Omnichannel integrations do this without separating channels, saving you money and time while increasing customer engagement.

Digital Transformation

COVID-19 forced digital transformation laggards to pivot overnight. In response, many organisations hastily adopted a hodgepodge of digital capabilities and got by. As new customer demands arise, businesses need to overhaul and execute their digital CX strategy.

Having digital channels for customers barely meets the standard expectation. Existing and prospective customers expect their virtual experiences to improve continually. Since customers continue to embrace digital interactions, it’s paramount for businesses to provide a digital-first, customer-first experience.

Businesses must now invest in empathetic technologies, services, and strategies to drive customer engagement and experience in an increasingly digital world. According to the IDC, global spending on digital transformation is estimated to exceed $10 trillion in the next five years. With investments accelerating in 2022.

Customer Communications Management (CCM) is the backbone of CX.

Customer communications management solutions are critical to digital transformation. Solutions that worked five, six, or seven years ago might not position you for success today or in the future. When evaluating CCM platforms consider whether they can integrate with advanced technologies. It’s also essential to ensure that they are flexible enough to evolve with your business needs.

A ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach for enterprise CCM deployments is not pragmatic. Every organisation has unique needs and is at a different stage of digital transformation. CCM is even more powerful when combined with CX tools like customer journey management and omnichannel orchestration.

To achieve a customer-first digital transformation, you need to invest in a CCM platform that integrates seamlessly with these tools. The priority in 2022 is future-fitting your organisation with human-centric transformations built strategically for a demanding digital world.

Want to learn more? Download our eBook: Critical Customer Experience Investments in 2022

How to create a CXM strategy in 5 steps

Here are the top 5 tips and tricks to overcome common challenges and fast-track your CX transformation.

1. Create a customer-focused culture

Your customers aren’t only interacting with your strongest performers. Ensuring that your weakest CX performers are more customer-focused is the fastest path to driving an impactful customer journey. Every aspect of your culture - from the top-down needs to be focused on the customer.

2. CX starts with engaged employees

The cornerstone of a successful customer experience strategy is customer engagement. It will sustain your brand, build acceptance of products and programs, and increase profitability. Customer engagement is the only way to create the emotional bonds that propel long-term profitability and customer loyalty.

You need to ensure that your employees are engaged and mobilised around the customer to drive customer engagement. Every employee impacts the customer experience. So, it’s imperative to build a culture that fosters positive connections between colleagues, between employees, and the organisation.

Here are some proven tips for fostering both internal employee engagement and external customer engagement:

  • Cultivate a collaborative culture
  • Encourage employees to identify minor improvements in any area. Thanks to small, internal changes to processes and procedures, many companies have pulled ahead of their industry peers.
  • Assess current engagement status: actively engaged, actively disengaged, or simply not engaged. Employees that are not engaged are at risk of leaving for a slight pay increase. Employees that are actively disengaged put both customer and employee engagement at risk.

3. Customer journey mapping must be part of CX strategy

Customer journey mapping (CJM) provides a visual representation of a customer’s end-to-end journey with your products and services. Journey maps provide a comprehensive view of what the customer is doing, what they’re experiencing, and how they’re feeling.

Once mapped, your business can use each journey to prioritise actions that directly and positively boost customer satisfaction and engagement.

Here are some CJM best practices to keep in mind:

  • Start small and grow
  • Include customer emotions
  • Make the maps shareable so stakeholders can collaborate.
  • Remember CJM is an ongoing exercise with long-term CXM benefits.

4. Embrace the new wave of personalisation

Today’s consumers expect every interaction they have with you to be personalised, representing their unique context and preference. A communications hub that integrates with your core systems and leverages customer data enables you to create personalised communications for all channels.

5. Understand customer communications management (CCM) and what it can do

Advanced CCM enables the communication design and delivery to standardise and personalise communications for automated delivery across channels—without duplicating efforts. Benefits include increased efficiency, reduced manual processes, optimised and agile communication designs, fewer mistakes, and an enhanced customer experience.

Conclusion

Consumers today have more choice in their purchasing decisions than ever before. They have easy access to online reviews and informal public opinion on social media. As such, building a better customer experience is critical to sustaining a competitive advantage.

When it comes to the CX strategy, customer communications are often one of the most
overlooked—yet critical—components of the customer journey. By unifying their customer communications portfolio, organisations can significantly improve the CX, build loyalty, and increase retention by providing personalised, interactive, and seamless experiences across all channels.

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