What is experience management?
Experience management is a process of monitoring, measuring, analyzing, and improving interactions that various stakeholders have with the business. These stakeholders can be individuals who are employees, customers, suppliers, vendors, etc.
Experience is the opinion and sentiment that customers have about a business as a result of their interactions with it. Utilizing analytics tools and questionnaires, the experience can be measured in both quantitative and qualitative ways. Through the use of experience management tools, businesses may better understand and enhance the overall customer experience within their organization.
What is customer experience management?
The term “customer experience” refers to how customers feel about a brand as a result of all of their conscious and unconscious experiences with it throughout their customer journey.
Customer experience management (CXM) is a field of study that focuses on comprehending customer needs and implementing strategic plans to support cross-functional initiatives and a customer-centric culture to increase contentment, trust, and support.
CXM can be termed as a set of procedures a business employs to monitor, control, and arrange each interaction a customer has with the company throughout the customer lifecycle.
Benefits of experience management
Customer experience management (CEM) has become essential to organizations’ success as they struggle to stay alive in today’s hyper-competitive and connected world. In fact, because of the advantages of CEM, which are listed below, it is extremely beneficial for businesses of almost any size:
- Enhance brand loyalty through unique experiences
- Gain additional sales from current clients and word-of-mouth referrals to boost revenue.
- Through meaningful and lasting encounters with customers, increase customer loyalty and cultivate brand supporters.
- Lower customer attrition leads to reduced costs
- Customer sentiment analysis provides insight into rivals as customers tend to compare brands to reach a decision.
- Customer feedback stimulates improvement: A roadmap for enhancing customer experiences and retaining consumers is provided by data collected through web surveys, mobile app reviews, phone and chat discussions, and other sources.
- Understanding the customers’ needs helps retain customers which turns out to be less expensive than acquiring new customers.
Steps to get customer experience management right
The below infographic gives a brief overview of the steps of a successful customer experience management strategy:
Step 1: Assess and segment customer needs
The first step is to understand the demands of the client, their motivations and problems, and what they require from the products and solutions of providers. Additionally, consumer segmentation allows businesses to better understand and cater to each set of customers. Segmentation can be done based on customers’ demographics, buying behaviour, or needs.
Step 2: Customer journey mapping
This entails creating a thorough customer journey map for each of the consumer categories. The customer journey map shows all of the interactions that a customer has with the supplier, from initial awareness to use and, if necessary, termination of use.
Step 3: Identify and design desired experience
At this point, the ideal customer experience is designed with the help of the customer journey map. The business may analyze existing procedures and optimize them with the help of customer journey mapping, resulting in a more functional, efficient, and delightful experience for customers—one that they will want to revisit and share with others.
Step 4: Structure and deliver the experience
Here, the numerous customer touchpoints are organized to make sure that the necessary procedures are in place to provide the consumer with an experience that elicits the intended brand emotions and fosters longer-term loyalty. This touchpoint analysis step examines ownership throughout the business for the various touchpoints and makes sure that the experience is smooth and the brand value is given across and between all of the touchpoints.
Step 5: Measure and improve
Measurement of performance completes the loop. The measurement of the return on investment in monetary terms is just one of the methods used to gauge the customer experience. Frequently, different kinds of customer satisfaction surveys are utilized to gain feedback.
This information is used tactically and strategically to create changes that are beneficial to specific customers, groups of customers, or all customers to enhance their overall experience.
Furthermore, this data can be shared to create sync between various departments and teams of the organization.
Challenges of customer experience management
Creating a good CEM strategy can, of course, be challenging. To effectively manage the customer experience, businesses must understand and comprehend their customers. Some of the challenges that are faced in doing so are:
- Creating a consistent multi-channel brand experience: Customers connect with businesses in a variety of ways, including online, through customer support, in person, and more. It is crucial to make sure that the brand is consistent at every point of contact.
- Single view consolidation of customer data: Companies obtain client data from a variety of sources, and the trick is to combine all of that data into a single picture to obtain a 360-degree view of the consumer. If the data is kept in silos, this becomes extremely challenging.
- Personalization: Customers now expect personalization from firms in every engagement because they are so well-informed. Businesses that add context to their customer focus and deliver what the consumer wants when the customer wants it will succeed at personalizing.
Experience management software solutions
Managing the customer experience is not something that businesses have to undertake on their own. Utilizing experience management software enables companies to analyze customer input in conjunction with business data to quantify client impressions through feedback.
The best customer experience management solutions link data sources in real-time, giving businesses the tools they need to engage customers through personalized experiences and increase customer lifetime value.
Some examples of experience management solutions are:
Few platforms offer end-to-end management solutions focussing on the components – CRM, marketing automation, eCommerce, and customer service:
- Salesforce
- Microsoft
- Oracle
- SAP
Some other platforms offer only integrated services for experience management, such as:
- Adobe – marketing, customer analytics, eCommerce
- Pegasystems – process management, customer service
- Episerver
- Acquia
Other important tools include:
- Personalization tools
- Automation tools
- Contact server software
- Voice of customer tools
- Emotional analytics
- Knowledge management tools
No matter what services you offer, how many personnel you have, or how big your business is, all of these factors do not influence the customer experience. The success of your customer relations depends on how customers are treated, how they deal with your staff, and how they perceive your firm. Customer experience management lets you take care of all these aspects.
