Before making a purchase, a customer goes through a long process that starts with a visit to your website or reading an email. Don’t you wish you could talk to them the same way at every stop?
Customer experience management (CXM), on the other hand, makes it possible.
With the right CXM tools and methods, you can keep the customer experience simple to keep leads interested and increase the likelihood of a conversion. Most interactions with clients happen through a number of different channels. This makes CXM more complicated.
In this post, we’ll talk about the main ideas of customer experience management (CXM), its benefits, common strategies, and how to choose the best tools to get started.
What Does Customer Experience Mean?
The total of a customer’s interactions with your business is their customer experience. This includes things like using your website, signing up for your marketing emails, making a purchase, and other things.
There’s a lot to talk about. But most of the things that make up the customer experience can be put into three main categories.
How involved are your customers with your business? Opening a marketing email, making a connection on social media, or making a purchase are all ways that engagement can show itself. Even customers who only buy from a company once interact with it in different ways. We’ll see that one of CMX’s main goals is to encourage and track customers’ participation well.
Satisfaction: Did your customers have a good time or not? Even if a customer works with you or buys something, they might not be happy with it, and if they aren’t, they probably won’t come back. CXM’s main goal is to keep and measure customer happiness, which isn’t always easy (we’ll talk more about this later).
Experience: Tell me about your whole experience. The experience itself is what makes people happy and keeps them interested. Even if it seems obvious, it’s easy to lose sight of the bigger picture when you’re focused on writing the perfect email or making your online business better.
Customer experience is usually made up of engagement, happiness, and experience, but this mix can vary a lot between businesses, markets, and customers. Every interaction with a client is different, and each one may need a different plan and way of handling it.
CXM stands for Customer Experience Management.
Even though it might seem confusing, there’s a good reason for it: CXM is a big subject. In the next sections, we’ll talk about the basics of customer experience, how to manage it, why it’s important, and how it’s different from customer relationship management.
Taking care of how customers feel
Controlling how customers feel is important. But how do we deal with it?
Present CXM. Using different strategies and software, companies can now keep track of leads and customers at every stage of the customer journey. By doing this, businesses can give each customer a unique experience, which makes customers happier and boosts sales.
Even though more sales and happy customers are great results of implementing CXM, they are not the only reason why it is important.
Why is it important to manage the customer experience?
Investing in the customer experience is important for a number of reasons.
CXM may help you make changes to your business based on the needs and values it helps you find. This is in addition to helping you increase sales and build a good reputation. If your clients and employees are happy, the rest of your business will do well.
- Helps You Learn More About Your Clients: By following them through their customer journey, you may be able to learn more about their habits, needs, and likely categories based on their age, demographics, and other factors.
- It’s Easier To Keep Customers Coming Back: You can improve customer retention and return on investment (ROI) by using CXM to give each customer a unique experience.
- Gives Clients Helpful Feedback: Even if you ask your customers what they like and don’t like, it might be hard to know for sure. You can get “covert” customer feedback by watching how your customers act while CXM records their entire experience.
- Makes It Possible To Improve Goods And Services: If you understand your customers’ needs and habits better, you can also improve your products and services based on what is already working well.
- Helps Figure Out How Well Things Are Going: CXM lets you keep an eye on how customers act, so you can see for yourself how well marketing campaigns and other activities are doing.
- Customers who are happy with your business are more likely to tell others about it: When customers have a good experience, they are happy. Because of this, happy customers are more likely to tell their friends about you, which is one of the best ways to get new customers.
- Continues To Be Ahead Of The Competition: If you use a simple CXM approach, you’re already ahead of the competition. Over time, you’ll get a bigger advantage as you make your customers happier and keep them around longer.
Customer Management vs. Customer Experience (CXM vs. CRM)
You may also know about CRM, which stands for customer relationship management. Even the words “CXM” and “it” have sometimes been used the same way.
But what makes them different?
Both CXM and CRM try to improve connections with clients, but they do so in different ways. In contrast to CRM, which only looks at the numbers behind how customers interact (like click-through rates), CXM uses these numbers to create a more complete, qualitative approach that is spread across different channels.
Here are some common ways this difference shows up.
- CXM focuses on how valuable the business is to the customer, while CRM looks at how valuable the customer is to the business.
- CXM looks at how customers feel in general, while CRM looks at how they feel in specific situations.
- CXM focuses on interactions with clients and other outside parties, while CRM is mostly about improving internal processes.
- CXM uses CRM data to predict what clients will want and respond right away.
Good traits of CXM
You need to know what makes a great client experience before you can create and run one.
Even though “great” is a subjective term, there are some things that all great customer experiences have in common. Some of them are obvious, but they are overlooked more often than you might think.
Do these qualities describe your current client experience?
Meets client requirements
In the customer experience, the needs of the customer should come first. Your main goal should always be to meet important customer needs, like making certain sites easy to get to or telling customers when their favorite things are on sale.
But how can you tell what your clients want? Even though CRM and CXM technologies may help, most of the time it comes down to trial and error or a little bit of intuition. Depending on how things are usually done in your business, you can often come up with new ideas.
In the end, satisfying consumer needs means giving customers meaningful experiences. We’ll see in a bit that to do this, you need to know your customer and the steps they go through as a customer.
dependable and easy to get to
Consistency is very important, especially when it comes to how the customer feels. It’s important to keep the experience consistent over time, since many buyers may visit your website or marketing materials many times before they buy something.
Consistency and being available are very important for keeping clients. When a customer is happy enough to buy something, it’s not hard to get them to come back and buy something else. They might decide not to buy if they come back and find a different (or no) customer experience.
Sets up trust and credibility
More than ever, customers want to know that they can trust a business. Because of this, these traits have to be a part of how you treat your clients.
It’s very easy to lose a customer’s trust, and it’s almost always impossible to get it back. Customers’ trust can be easily lost by having a bad landing page, sneaking in hidden costs, sending out marketing materials that aren’t clear, or giving poor results. Companies should do more than what customers expect, even if that means being completely honest.
prefers making money over making customers happy
Along with putting a good experience ahead of making money, it’s important to encourage trust and sincerity. For example, when looking at a company’s website, many people don’t like the constant stream of pop-up ads and annoying page navigation.
Even if giving up some less-than-honest “tricks” for increasing conversions causes a small drop in income in the short term, the long-term benefits to customer happiness will make you more successful in the long run.
Think about the person
In spite of what your CRM software might say, your clients are more than just a list of information. They are unique people with their own wants, needs, interests, and goals. With a strong CXM strategy, you can find these problems and start giving customers personalized or, dare we say, humanized experiences.
Strategies for CXM
Now that you know what Customer Experience Management is, let’s look at the best ways to use it:
Even though every plan for management is different, taking the steps below will put you on the right path. Your approach to each phase may change depending on who your customers are, but if you try to give them unique, real experiences, you’ll always get great results.
Find out who you want to reach.
A solid understanding of your customers’ needs and habits is the foundation of any good CXM strategy. The right experiences will depend on how well you can figure out what matters to them.
CX and CRM data are helpful for this phase. You can make client profiles with the right information and divide customers into groups based on age, hobbies, spending habits, etc.
Make a map of the customer’s path.
After you know your customer, the next step is to make a customer experience map.
The goal of this map, which is often called a “customer journey” or “lifecycle,” is to find important customer touchpoints and predict how customers will act based on their (assumed) needs. Keep in mind that a customer journey map is not set in stone and that not every customer will take the same path. In any case, as you get feedback from customers over time, you’ll be able to make the whole customer experience better.
Most customer journeys are made up of the following steps:
- Research: A potential customer finds out about a business through ads, search engines, etc.
- The potential customer compares the business to others that offer similar goods or services. Cost, user reviews, and the reputation of the brand could all be used to compare two things.
- Purchase: The customer-to-be becomes a customer. When a customer buys something, a long-term relationship with that customer begins.
- Support: The customer can get help with their purchase by getting in touch with support staff. Poor customer service tools can make it easy to lose even the most loyal clients.
Take into account the emotional ties
Emotional connections are what make customer experiences strong and long-lasting. By recognizing how your clients feel, you can start to change your brand to appeal to those feelings.
For example, the Happy Pup Dog Treats in the last example may appeal to their customers’ love for their pets. Happy Pup may talk to their customers about how good their ingredients are and how much they love dogs, since people who feel this way are likely to want to give their dogs the best treats.
Get feedback from customers, then change.
One of the most important benefits of CXM is getting feedback from customers and making changes based on that. By doing this, you’ll keep getting better at helping customers and giving them even better results.
But feedback can be harder to figure out. Use customer feedback from your CRM and CX data to figure out what’s working and what’s not.
How to choose a platform for managing the customer experience
You might be able to install CXM with the tools you already have, but specialized CXM software makes the process much easier. There are so many tools to choose from that it might be hard to decide which one to use. What works for one company might not work for another.
Think about the following questions as you choose your new customer experience management platform.
Does it work with the tools and methods you’re already using?
If you’re thinking about using CXM solutions, you probably already use CX, CRM, or other technologies for marketing. Even though most CXM tools don’t work with everything, the one you choose should at least work with your most important apps to make installation easier.
Are customer journeys that involve more than one channel possible?
Customer journeys span multiple platforms and channels, and your CXM solutions should be able to keep up. As an extension of integration, make sure the tool you choose can help you plan and change every part of your customer experience, from email marketing to support resources.
Conclusion
Today, the customer experience is a key way to set yourself apart. Customers want better customer service, better items, and a better customer experience. A better customer experience makes customers more loyal, brings in more customers, and helps a business grow.