Customer Experience Management, abbreviated as CEM or CXM, describes the processes used by companies to follow and organize interactions with clients. It describes all interactions that occur throughout the customer lifecycle. The aim of applying CEM is to optimize customer experience and build customer loyalty.
Customer satisfaction is worthless. Customer loyalty is priceless.Jeffrey Gitomer
Why Customer Experience Management … Matters
Turning prospects into customers requires a lot of effort, but just getting a new customer isn’t a guarantee that you’re going to keep that customer. From a client perspective, being treated as a valued individual is what makes service stand out. Chances are, there are other companies that do what you do, but if you can differentiate yourself through excellent, personalized service, you can achieve the “holy grail” of customer loyalty.
We also need to bear in mind that regular marketing efforts are treated with skepticism by today’s consumers. But if they receive a recommendation from a friend, that’s worth a thousand marketing messages that can easily be ignored. A good customer experience management system will turn clients into brand ambassadors.
In addition, you can use CXM to build brand image, get repeat sales and lower costs associated with customer churn.
What’s the Problem?
The problem is that your company has many customers at different stages of the customer lifecycle. To give customers a personalized experience, your sales force needs to know that client, what he or she has experienced already, what that customer needs and wants, and what the next interaction is meant to be. A dropped ball could mean a lost customer or an indifferent customer who can easily be lured by your competitors.
Customer experience management without the help of appropriate software is next-to-impossible for many businesses. There is simply too much going on at once and too much data to process, but your customer still expects to be treated as an individual. In practice, this means having fast access to client history data from which insights into what the next interaction should be can be extracted.
What You Need for Effective Customer Experience Management
Clearly, the first step towards CXM is to have detailed and up to date customer profiles. This should reflect every single contact experience across all channels. With this information at your disposal, you can gain an understanding of what is relevant, and you can personalize the next contact to build the relationship. No client should need to tell you how they’ve dealt with your business before and what they want. You should have that information.
But you need more than specific transactional histories and broad demographics. Nowadays, factors such as social media interaction, behavioral analysis, and propensity scores also come into the picture. Your sales team needs to understand the client, not only as a customer but in a personal context. What does this person want, when and how does he or she want it, and how can your business provide it? This insight allows you to gain relevance from your customers’ perspective.
Identifying the Right Touch Points
Customer experience management doesn’t just deal with the “what” question when it comes to customer wants. It also looks at the who, the when, and the how. Thus, your CXM system covers your customers’ experience throughout the following phases:
- Initial product or service awareness.
- Active evaluation of what you are offering.
- Purchasing.
- Post-purchase experience.
Every single step in the Customer Lifecycle provides an opportunity for your company to differentiate itself in the eyes of its clients. On the flipside, it also offers opportunities to mess up the relationship and differentiate yourself for all the wrong reasons. But customer experience management isn’t just about avoiding embarrassing boo-boos; it’s about achieving excellence.
That means careful analysis of how customers experience your business every step of the way from the moment they enter your store or send you an email right up to following up to check on satisfaction after purchase. Each transaction offers a learning experience that can help you to improve the customer experience still further.
Getting CXM Right in Practice
Your customer experience management strategy is based on data which indicates workflows. Thus, you need to gather data, analyze it, and convert it into a process that managers can use to allocate and track workflows. Because this creates multiple client-oriented workflows, tracking can be a mammoth task. Seamless workflows that make your company efficient and responsive to client needs are fundamental to CXM. This requires:
- Automatic content updates. Manual updates take time and leave room for errors and oversights to creep in.
- Easy collaboration. Who wants to be copied on a million emails? How does that translate into efficiency? For customer experience management to work, everyone, from suppliers to sales to dispatch needs to be quite literally on the same page. With all the information centralized, it is easier to react in a timely way – and timeliness is key to good CXM.
- Continuous monitoring and revision: CXM is a learning opportunity. How is your system working? Are the customers getting what they want and more? The only way to find out is to go back and analyze the data. Real-time monitoring also provides an opportunity to gain insights. How is each client experiencing the process of doing business with you? Have your finger on the pulse.
How to Improve your Customer Experience Management System
When it comes to CXM, improving customer experience continuously is a key concept. What are the factors you should consider when improving your customer experience management process?
- Understand your target audience: Why do they choose your company? Are their needs changing? Do you get repeat business, and if not, why not?
- Track behavior, look for patterns, investigate shifts: For example, if your online clients are losing interest at a specific point, you have something to investigate and improve without delay.
- How does your company nurture leads and communicate with target audiences? How and when do you market to old customers and new prospects? Are you using the right messages and channels? What are the critical touch points in the customer experience journey, and are you using them effectively?
- Is your information system customer-centric? Are you capturing, analyzing and presenting data that will help your staff to address the things that matter to your clients?
- Are your workflows running smoothly? Your client isn’t interested in workflow bottlenecks within your company. All he or she wants is the service you promised. If you deliver more, you’ve made an impression. If you deliver less, you may have lost a client.
- Map the customer experience journey. What happens to your customer during every phase of the sales cycle? What do they want to experience and how can you deliver that or surpass it?
Using Tallyfy as Part of your Customer Experience Management System
Tallyfy is a workflow engine – and more. This adaptable tool can be used to achieve a variety of goals. If improving your CXM system to differentiate yourself from competitors is among your goals, we’ll show you just how Tallyfy can make your job easier.
Yes, you can use Tallyfy to capture and institute specific procedures that worked, but you can also use Tallyfy to look for problem areas without having to do a lot of legwork. As a minimum requirement, your customers expect a degree of efficiency. If they experience ultimate efficiency, that’s even better. With Tallyfy, following complex workflows becomes simple, and analyzing the results becomes even easier.
Would you like to know more? A no-obligation conversation is yours for the taking. So why not just take it?
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