Contact Center Trends
What is customer experience management (CXM)?
By Celia Cerdeira
0 min read
The customer experience is at the heart of a successful sales funnel. In fact, 64% of customers value customer experience over price, and 89% are more likely to make another purchase after a positive customer service experience.
To succeed in today’s fiercely competitive marketplace, companies must deliver an exceptional customer experience. They need a strategic approach to ensure positive interactions at every step of the customer’s journey, from their initial interaction to post-purchase engagement.
Customer experience management (CXM) ensures each customer touchpoint is seamless, effective, and in tune with the customer’s expectations and needs. The goal is to build strong customer relationships, drive customer loyalty, and increase brand advocacy.
In this article, we’ll discuss customer experience management strategy and software, how CXM differs from customer relationship management, and how it helps companies succeed.
What is customer experience management?
CXM encompasses all the activities a company uses to handle, manage, and maintain the interactions between a customer and a brand throughout their relationship. It’s more than just managing interactions: high-quality CXM caters to customers across every major communication channel in ways that connect to every department.
Gone are the days when every customer reached out via phone call. Now, companies need to field incoming calls, texts, messages, emails, and more. Plus, they need to ensure that all departments, from sales to customer support, are seamlessly connected and have access to all customer information. This enables them to ensure that every touchpoint is consistent and personalized, allowing them to give customers a truly satisfying experience.
CXM strategies enlist marketing, sales, and customer support to increase brand loyalty for increased and repeat business. Companies also focus on “voice of the customer” programs, which gather and analyze customer feedback to understand their experiences with the brand. This feedback is crucial for course-correcting any elements that may have a negative perception or don’t resonate with customers.
What makes customer experience management different from customer relationship management?
Customer experience management and customer relationship management (CRM) both center around the customer, but they have slightly different purposes and take different approaches to achieving their goals.
Customer relationship management focuses on customer service. It involves collecting, analyzing, and managing customer data, as well as looking into customer communications and troubleshooting processes. As part of CRM, businesses will closely track interactions, transactions, and communication history to better understand customer relationships and ultimately improve customer retention and satisfaction. Good customer relationship management can also impact sales and marketing and improve the bottom line.
In contrast, customer experience management goes a few steps further and encompasses the entire customer journey. Instead of solely paying attention to the customer service side of interactions with customers, CXM is concerned with how customers perceive and interact with a brand at every touchpoint, across all channels, and throughout the entire customer lifecycle. It’s more comprehensive than CRM and prioritizes understanding and managing the customer experience from start to finish to ensure that every interaction is positive and consistent.
CRM tools and data can help inform CXM strategies, but CXM takes that information and uses it to improve not only customer service but the entire customer experience. Thanks to CXM, customers can enjoy seamless, engaging, and meaningful experiences, which can translate into increased customer loyalty and long-term business success down the line.
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What does customer experience management help companies accomplish?
Customer experience management isn’t just a philosophy–it’s a roadmap that can help companies effectively and efficiently engage with their customers. At its core, CXM is designed to elevate three critical contributors to an exceptional customer experience:
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Products or services. Businesses need to consider customer needs and tailor their products or services accordingly. CXM allows businesses to gather customer feedback and gain insights into how customers feel about their products and services, enabling them to make informed decisions to improve their offerings.
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Employees. CXM can also help employees thrive and consistently provide customers with the experiences that they deserve. Customers don’t want to interact with unapproachable or uninformed employees. Instead, they want engaged, friendly, knowledgeable employees who understand them and can anticipate their needs. A strong CXM strategy enables companies to empower their employees with the tools, training, and insights they need to deliver this exceptional service.
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Internal processes. Without a strong CXM strategy, it’s all too easy for processes to become slow and bloated. On the other hand, CXM allows organizations to streamline everything from the start of the customer’s journey to their post-sale experience. With CXM, companies can take a more holistic approach to customer service, easily optimize workflows, eliminate inefficiencies, and ensure that every department delivers a seamless, cohesive customer experience.
But that’s not all CXM can do—especially with the right customer experience management software in place. Companies can also better understand customer data, improve customer satisfaction, and collect feedback to make future customer interactions even more helpful.
CXM provides deep insight into the most important data.
Companies gather vast amounts of data, but customer data is the most crucial. This information helps to create high-quality and even personalized experiences that foster loyalty and drive repeat business.
However, properly analyzing and understanding customer data isn’t always easy. The sheer amount of data can quickly become overwhelming, which is why the world’s best companies use customer experience management software that allows their agents to act on that data.
Collected data must be both accessible and actionable. Customer performance dashboards give companies an easy way to gain real-time insights and track the most important KPIs for contact centers. With this information at their fingertips, managers can quickly identify trends, address potential issues, and continuously improve the customer experience.
CXM helps more people help themselves.
Proper CXM software also plays a pivotal role in empowering customers to address their issues independently. Implementing chatbots is one of the most effective ways to allow people to help themselves. Driven by generative AI, these chatbots can understand and respond to a wide range of customer inquiries 24/7. They can provide a human-like self-service experience, delivering not only answers and solutions in a timely manner but also a personalized interaction tailored to each customer’s specific needs.
However, chatbots can’t solve every single problem on their own. When a customer’s concern is more complex or requires expertise beyond what the chatbot can offer, CXM ensures that these customers are seamlessly transitioned to the next level of support. This is achieved through intelligent routing, which analyzes the nature of the inquiry and the customer’s history to direct them to the agent with the right skills and knowledge to effectively resolve their issue.
CXM fosters customer satisfaction through feedback.
Customer experience management also means using current interactions with customers to inform future interactions.
One way to make future customer engagement even more effective is through customer feedback surveys. By capturing, analyzing, and acting on customer feedback, companies can make informed internal decisions that lead to happier, more satisfied customers.
Explore CXM best practices to engage buyers.
Managing the customer experience isn’t a single-step process. In fact, it’s not even a process with a clear start and end. Customer experience management is a cycle.
Customers might begin their customer journey with interest in a company and make a purchase. They might continue their journey by engaging with customer support to troubleshoot a product or inquire about a second service. Customers can enter and re-enter the customer lifecycle at virtually any stage, which means companies must adopt evergreen CXM strategies that give customers whatever they need, whenever they need it—whether they need to visit a product page or speak to an actual human about a real problem.
To create an effective CXM strategy, companies should:
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Be transparent. Customers don’t want to support unethical companies, which is why brands must own up to any mistakes or bad reviews.
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Review data. Organizations must regularly review “voice of the customer” data collected throughout the customer journey to gain insights into what’s working and where there is room for improvement.
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Show customer appreciation. Customer loyalty programs can go a long way in showing customers that they are valued, which can lead to increased loyalty and opportunities for upselling.
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Analyze customer motivation. Companies should also analyze collected data to help them make meaningful and lasting improvements.
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Provide omnichannel support. Businesses should be able to respond to customer inquiries from many platforms, including social media, web chat, phone, email, and mobile app to provide efficient, consistent, and personalized experiences.
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Train agents on an ongoing basis. Customer service agents can have a major impact on the customer experience, so customer service agent training shouldn’t be a one-and-done thing.
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Map the customer journey. Organizations can pinpoint inefficiencies, pain points, and other improvement opportunities by mapping out each touchpoint throughout the omnichannel customer journey, from the initial interaction to post-purchase engagement.
Implementing these CXM best practices allows companies to cater to customers at every stage of the customer journey, providing seamless and personalized interactions.
How does CXM improve the customer lifecycle?
All companies want to extend the customer lifecycle—and effective CXM can help businesses offer efficient, personalized, and consistent interactions at each stage. Whether it’s guiding potential buyers through their decision-making process, providing seamless support after purchase, or encouraging repeat business through loyalty programs, effective CXM allows companies to ensure every interaction is meaningful, boost customer satisfaction across the entire customer lifecycle, and even increase customer loyalty.
CXM can improve every aspect of the customer lifecycle, including:
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Outreach. During the outreach phase, CXM helps support customers as they first become familiar with a company’s products or services. Here, customers can find answers to their initial questions about features, pricing, and availability.
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Acquisition. As customers move into the acquisition phase, CXM provides further insights and personalized responses to more specific questions.
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Conversion. In the conversion stage, CXM ensures that the process is smooth and straightforward. This is especially true for products or technology that may require ongoing support.
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Retention. CXM continues to play a vital role in the retention phase by offering long-term support, such as answering customer questions, and addressing any issues as products age, malfunction, or become legacy solutions.
Improve customer experience management with Talkdesk.
In addition to low prices and great products, companies must also offer incredible customer experiences. After all, satisfied customers are more likely to return, and studies have found that slight increases in customer retention can boost sales by up to 25%.
Managing customer experience effectively requires a strategic approach that includes transparency, regular feedback, customer rewards, understanding customer motivation, omnichannel support, agent training, and customer journey mapping. It’s an involved, never-ending process, but it’s the best way forward to ensure exceptional customer experiences.
The Talkdesk CX Cloud platform offers businesses the advanced tools and technologies they need to take their CXM efforts to the next level. This customer experience management software offers AI-driven automation and supports omnichannel engagement, employee collaboration, self-service experiences, and more.
Ready to completely transform customer experience management? See Talkdesk in action by submitting a demo request today!
