Customer Experience Management (CXM): Meaning,Benefits & Tools

You may already be familiar with the term customer experience and its impact on the business you run. With a positive experience felt by consumers, the opportunity to win the competition in the business market will be even greater.

In simple terms, the higher the positive experience felt by consumers, the greater the positive impact that can be felt on the development of your business.

Apart from focusing on customer experience, you must be familiar with the term Customer Experience Management. In the business world, customer experience management is very important as part of your grand business strategy.

Definition of customer experience management

Customer Experience Management (CXM) is a suite of enterprise strategy systems focused on customer engagement, satisfaction and experience.

Customer experience here is defined as your customer's perception of your brand resulting from all their interactions in the customer cycle. Therefore, the process of building CXM is more often referred to as the CRM (Customer Relationship Management) stage.

A regular CRM step-by-step process can help businesses understand customer wants and needs. Where at the CRM stage, a strategy is needed to make every interaction with customers more personal and meaningful.

According to Microsoft Dynamics, customer experience management is a system of marketing strategy and technology focused on customer engagement, satisfaction, and experience. Customer experience management is an approach to building relationships with customers that is more than just a marketing tool but truly places the customer at the center of the business.

The mindset used in customer experience management is to prioritize and personalize the entire customer experience on an end-to-end basis and help find solutions on a large scale through any channel in real time. In this case, time and satisfaction are the essence of customer experience management.

There are at least two main objectives of this Customer Experience Management, namely:

• Build loyal consumers with the brand, product or service offered.
• Get positive word of mouth, as well as to reduce consumer churn and prevent dissatisfied consumers from speaking negatively about your business.

Because it is so important, Gartner.Inc calls Customer Experience Management one of the top three marketing investment areas, with the ultimate goal of converting the consumer experience into supporting the brand or product to be marketed.

Benefits of Customer Experience Management

From the explanation above, it can actually be concluded that the orientation of Customer Experience Management is to know consumer experience, manage it, and use this data for the benefit of developing a product.

But in particular, Customer Experience Management is useful for:

• Make it easy for consumers to get access to information related to the products offered, promotional programs, sales, and others.
• Increase customer satisfaction scores because your company or institution is equipped with information systems that consumers need.
• Cutting operational costs, especially in the field of information and services because everything has been covered by Customer Experience Management.
• Calculations are more accurate because the data presented continues to be updated regularly, according to consumer developments.
• Knowing the problems experienced by consumers, so that you will find it easier to prepare new programs or products according to their needs.
• Offers indicators of the performance of a product or service by measuring the level of customer satisfaction at all points of interaction.
• For the record, no matter how good Customer Experience Management you have, the main goal lies in the execution you take.

Customer Experience Management to Build Customer Experience

Customer experience management refers to the experience created from a website or through a mobile application for your business. As more companies shift their business into the digital world, it becomes more and more important to build relationships through these channels. Businesses without physical locations need to rethink touch points in the customer journey to build brand loyalty.

If your business is website or app based, here are some important factors to consider about the customer experience.

1. Mobile Experience

If you are online, you can connect via smartphone, which means customers can find your company anywhere as long as they are using a smartphone. This customer experience should be on par with users using desktop devices.

Also, your site must be responsive and easy to use across devices. Nothing is more disappointing than a company that has a great website on desktop, but is offline and/or unresponsive on mobile.

Your mobile app or website needs to be just as effective as your desktop version. You should be able to complete the same number of tasks using your mobile or traditional device. Don't sacrifice features for the convenience of your team. Instead, put in the extra effort and resources - customers will really appreciate a multi-channel experience.

2. Usability

It doesn't matter how effective your service or product is if your customers can't navigate it. Websites and apps should be intuitive, showing users the steps they need to take to achieve their goals.

Your team can create user-friendly designs by running usability tests on your website or app. Usability testing assesses how easy it is to operate your service or product. By running these pre-production tests, you can create a user-friendly website design and ensure that each customer achieves their goal.

3. User Onboarding

Not all businesses have a website or application that is easy for customers to use, a separate tutorial is needed. Not everyone is tech savvy and many SaaS companies guide new users with their service or product.

Onboarding is sequential guidance for teaching new customers how to use your product or service. The role of customer support in the company is to ensure users that they understand the value and purpose of their purchase. This way, customers don't have to go through a time-consuming learning curve and can get instant value from your business.

4. Omnichannel Platforms

As discussed earlier, the mobile experience is important to ensure touchpoints with customers occur across multiple platforms. However, it cannot be denied that being available on many platforms and interacting with customers - especially social media, is something that is not easy. 

You can achieve this by using the omnichannel platform.

Recommended customer experience management tools

In the process, customer experience analysis can also be assisted by certain software applications. Following are some applications or software that can be recommended to companies for customer experience analysis according to Bartosz Mozyrko from USAbilitygeek:

• Zendesk: with this tool companies can create self-help centers for customers and solve problems faster with the ticketing system. There are various integrations, customization options, and reporting to make customer service easier.
• IBM Tealeaf: is at the forefront of software among others because customers and sellers can interact with websites and mobile applications. IBM Tealeaf also allows you to monitor large volumes of traffic without impacting the performance of the service site.
• Satmetrix: helps companies to understand the relationship between customer behavior and business or product results. Companies can also directly provide positive feedback received from clients via social media. Satmetrix also provides surveys such as location, industry and product segmentation to customers.
• Adobe Experience Manager: this tool was formerly known as Adobe CQ and has now become a CMS (Content Management System) application that enables companies to manage content and build assets for networking and social media channels. This application can also analyze the web and open relationships with customers online.

Bottom line

As explained earlier, customer experience management is very important for business. With CXM, you can provide better service to customers and build a good customer experience management too.