What Is Customer Experience Management?

Celia Cerdeira at Talkdesk discusses customer experience management strategy and software, how CXM differs from customer relationship management, and how it helps companies succeed.

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.

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.

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:

• Be transparent – Customers don’t want to support unethical companies, which is why brands must own up to any mistakes or bad reviews.
• 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.
• 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.
• Analyze customer motivation – Companies should also analyze collected data to help them make meaningful and lasting improvements.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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:

• 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.
• Acquisition – As customers move into the acquisition phase, CXM provides further insights and personalized responses to more specific questions.
• 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.
• 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.

Reviewed by: Jo Robinson