Customer Experience Management (CEM) is a business strategy focusing on making every customer interaction positive, memorable, and rewarding. The customer experience (CX) is every customer interaction with your company; This includes speaking with customer service representatives and receiving your product or service. A fine-tuned CX program leads to increased loyalty and retention, ultimately driving revenue. Let’s take an in-depth look at CX, how to improve it, and the best tools to streamline the process.
What Is Customer Experience Management?
Customer experience management is the collection of processes a company uses to track, oversee and organize every interaction between a customer and the organization throughout the customer lifecycle. It encompasses all aspects of an organization’s efforts to engage with and provide value to customers, including:
- Customer service processes and systems
- Communications with customers (phone calls, emails, social media)
- Engagement with customers through surveys or other forms of feedback
Why Is CX Important?
Customer experience management is the sum of all touchpoints that a customer has with your brand, from their first interaction to their last.
The most apparent reason why CX is important is that it drives sales and profits. Research shows that happy customers are more likely to buy from you again than unhappy ones. They also spend more money — up to 140% more — so improving the quality of their experience is good for your bottom line.
CX also helps you retain customers, who are more loyal when their needs are met consistently over time. This lowers costs associated with churn, such as marketing spending and hiring new employees, which means better financial performance overall.
How Do You Improve CX?
There are many ways to improve your CX efforts, including:
- Use customer feedback to improve your CX
- Organizing your CX efforts around the customer journey
- Monitoring the competition’s efforts
- Using technology to streamline processes
The Importance Of Listening
Listening is one of the most critical aspects of customer experience management. It’s a continuous process that requires you to keep an open mind and be receptive to new ideas.
Listening doesn’t just apply to what customers say but also includes listening to your employees and making sure they have an opportunity to offer feedback. Listening means taking action on what you hear, whether implementing something that works or discarding something that didn’t work out for the best.
The goal of listening is finding out what needs improvement and leveraging the information gathered to improve customer engagement across the board for your company and its customers.
The Customer Journey
The customer journey is a framework that describes the steps that a customer takes from first awareness of a brand to purchase. It’s also known as the buyer’s journey or buyer’s path and refers to all of the touchpoints with your brand, product/service, and industry that influence how people make decisions about what they buy.
Customer journey mapping is a technique for mapping the customer’s path when making their decisions. In doing so, you can identify opportunities for improvement in your business and pinpoint where customers drop out of your sales funnel at each stage of their buying process.
The customer journey isn’t linear; it’s constantly changing as we learn more about our customers’ needs through data-driven insights that can be used to improve existing products while developing new ones based on those insights.
A Watchful Eye
Monitoring your competition can help you improve your customer experience and keep yourself one step ahead of the game.
If you want to provide a better customer experience than your competitor, keeping tabs on what they’re doing is essential.
What do they offer? And what can you learn from them to help you stay ahead of the curve?
Technology To The Rescue
Customer experience is about more than just making customers happy. It’s about creating an emotional connection with them that will lead to repeat purchases and referrals.
The best way to do this is by enhancing your customer’s experience with technology. Technology helps you create personalized interactions for each customer and supports the customer journey. For example, QR codes let businesses connect with customers at every step of their journey. British retailer Tesco put QR codes on public transport so people could use them to order products on their way to work.
How FCX Can Help Enhance Customer Experience
You can’t improve your CX without the right tools. Fuel Cycle Exchange (FCX) is an app store for market research tools. It allows you to connect all your market research tools and centralizes data in one comprehensive dashboard. Now you can analyze every insight with full context.
Market researchers use dozens of tools daily, but centralizing data at one source is a significant challenge. FCX gives you the tools you need to build a customized insights suite.
Research can be time-consuming as you sift through an increasingly crowded field. Tools are constantly changing as exciting developments in emerging fields change the market. Thankfully, we’ve done the vetting for you, so FCX features the best-in-class research integrations available from a growing list of partners.
Bottom Line
Customer experience management is the collection of processes a company uses to track, oversee and organize every interaction between a customer and the organization throughout the customer lifecycle. CX is not just about your website or even your customer journey; it’s about understanding all interactions with customers, from their first contact with your brand to their last interaction with you, and managing any issues that may arise.
The customer experience is the most crucial element of a company’s marketing strategy. Customers are the lifeblood of your business, and if you can provide them with an experience that makes them want to stay loyal to your brand, you will see more sales over time. The best way to ensure that your customers are happy is by listening to what they say, monitoring your competition, utilizing technology, and enhancing the customer journey with tools like FCX.
Take a tour of FCX today.
