A growth-oriented business always keeps its customers at the heart of the business. How? They are always in tune with the customers’ needs by listening to their feedback and suggestions. Listening to the customers’ voices helps businesses to find how customers perceived products and services. In addition, feedback responses also give you a fair idea of your customers’ preferences, behavior, and expectations from your business.

Subsequently, this makes your customers loyal to your business. This approach of customer-centricity is known as Customer Experience Management (CXM).

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What is Customer Experience Management?

According to Bernd Schmitt, a renowned marketing thinker, Customer Experience Management is “the process of strategically managing a customer’s entire experience with a product or company. It represents the discipline, methodology or process used to comprehensively manage a customer’s cross-channel exposure, interaction, and transaction with a company, product, brand or service.”

While planning your CXM (Customer Experience Management) strategies, there are few important things to be considered to assure yourself that your strategy works. In addition, these pointers give you a clear picture of how customers perceive:

1. Organizational commitment to the customers

2. Efforts to deliver great customer experiences

3. Ways to inspire staff to deliver great experiences

4. Ways to fulfill customers’ needs and goals

5. Measuring customer experience across touchpoints

6. Gauging the impact of loyalty

How does Customer Experience Management (CXM) works?

The efforts to enhance the customer experience starts with a commitment to listen to the voice of customer and embed their feedback and suggestions into the marketing strategy. In an organization, different departments have various customer touchpoints. Considering that, you require a cross-functional CXM environment and brand alignment to ensure a better experience for your customers.

A typical approach for managing Customer Experience involves the three stages (see Figure).

1. Create and maintain customer profiles

Creating and measuring customer profiles enables you to track customers’ journeys at every touchpoint easily. It further helps you understand their requirements, issues, pain points, and tailored products or services accordingly. You can maintain essential customer data like demographic details, transactional data, and emerging data like geolocation, social media, and more.

For example, you can deploy customer data like contact, response, and transactional history throughout the customer journey to effectively understand their requirements and deliver relevant offers. Subsequently, it simplifies the behavioral analysis and improves propensity scores and customer value.

Thus, maintaining customer data helps you to:

• Track and improve the customer experience at specific touchpoints

• Understand customers’ expectations

• Make better business decisions

2. Personalize customer interaction

After understanding your customers, their behavior, and their requirements, the second stage is interaction. In a customer journey, there are different touchpoints where you can interact with your customers. Always focus on the context in which you interact with your customers and make your interaction personalized. Personalization in interaction builds strong customer relationships and creates better experiences. 

To create a positive business impression on your customers and drive customer loyalty, treat them personally, provide them relevant, timely, and insightful conversation. Address their issues or painpoints personally via calls or emails. It further delights your customers and improves their experience.

You can send them personalized messages on occasions like birthdays, anniversaries, and other occasions. Even if customers don’t interact with you, but this sweet gesture will enhance the customer experience and create a long-lasting impact in their minds.

3. Collect information from the right place at the right time

It is important to analyze each phase of the customer lifecycle, from consideration to evaluation to the post-purchase experience. You can strategize and plan the content, time, and place to interact with your customers based on this analysis. Delivering the right message to the right place at the right time can help you to gather accurate and insightful data. It makes it easy to incorporate the acquired data into your marketing processes and operationalize your business operations accordingly.

Customer Experience Management (CXM) vs Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

In the global marketplace, there is a misconception that Customer Experience Management (CXM) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) are the same things. There is a huge difference between the perspective of CXM and CRM. CXM means how customers perceive the company, and CRM means what customers look like to the company.

In CXM strategy, the customer is a game-changer and remains at the center of marketing, sales, and customer support. An improved CXM enables you to drive brand loyalty and repeat business in turn. In contrast, CRM strategy focuses on sales to customers from the company's perspective of capturing more revenue.

CXM relies on the customer’s voice that is customer feedback. It quantifies customer reviews and their experiences with a company. It may generate negative feedback but simultaneously allows you to correct the negative perceptions and improve the experience.

How to do Customer Experience Management?

CXM is mainly about how companies view their customers. CXM enables companies to have a 360-degree view of customers through customer data. There are four critical steps to do Customer Experience Management effectively.

1. Customer Strategy

The first step is to understand customers’ needs and requirements. For this, you need to build customer strategies and maintain customer profiles. In addition, it helps you to strategize how to market to target customers.

2. Customer Journey Map

To enhance the overall customer experience, you should create a Customer Journey Map. It enables you to study and analyze your customer touchpoints in detail and understand how customers interact with your brand.

3. Emotional Bond

Emotion is a great element that connects your customers from your brand personally. Thus, creating a strong brand personality enables you to establish a long-lasting customer relationship.  Market your business in a way that your customers get connected with you emotionally. 

4. Customer Feedback

You can effectively gauge customer satisfaction and experience in real-time through customer feedback. 

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Conclusion

Customer Experience has now become a critical differentiator. Customers not only want quality-grade products but also expect better customer experience and customer service. A better customer experience improves customer retention and drives new customers, and ultimately ensures better business growth.