What Is Customer Experience Management
Customer experience management (CXM) is designing your customers’ journeys to meet (or exceed) their expectations of increasing their satisfaction and loyalty.
Customer relationship management is more than serving your business customers. It knows your customers so well that you deliver personalized experiences that make them love your brand and become your best marketers as brand advocates.
Customer experience management includes tracking analytics and getting feedback from all customer touchpoints and channels used across your entire organization. The customer data you receive from your research allows you to create the experience your customers want and need to be completely satisfied.
Importance of Customer Experience Management
If you don’t manage your customer journey map, how would you be sure what you’re delivering satisfies your customers to the best of your ability? If you truly want to grow your revenue, you must pay attention to your entire customer journey. A happy customer who feels connected, appreciated, and gets real value from purchasing from your brand is likely to return to purchase time and time again.
Keep in mind; it takes more time, money, and effort to attract and sell a new customer than it does to retain an existing one. And a repeat customer spends on average 67% more with you than a new one. For those reasons, customer experience is crucial to success and growth long-term.
The competition is extremely high for many businesses, and the product features are limited, making the customer experience the biggest differentiator that separates one brand from the next. Nowadays, sharp business leaders are making the customer experience management system a big deal within their organization, and it’s paying off big time in the form of increased revenue from better customer interactions and customer service.
Customer Experience Management Helps You To:
Understand Your Customers
Tracking and analyzing customer behaviors helps you to understand their preferences, likes, and dislikes. Knowing your customers allows you to provide a more personalized experience that consumers today expect and demand.
Improve Processes
Keeping a close eye on customer experience brings to light areas that need improvement that are causing customer upset or frustration. Understanding your customer’s likes and dislikes allows you to customize your processes to be more in line with what your customers want.
Increase Retention
Creating personalized experiences helps foster closer relationships with your customers, which increases brand loyalty. Using the data you receive from your customer analysis, you can personalize product recommendations and offer loyalty incentives at the right times.
Maintain Competitive Advantage
Being one step ahead of your customer’s wants and needs helps improve their experience with your brand, which consumers appreciate making them less likely to leave for competitive offerings. A positive customer experience gets around with word of mouth and online reviews, which will help your brand stand out from your competition.
Customer Experience Management Strategy
Gaining the in-depth knowledge needed to provide the best customer experience takes rolling up your sleeves and spending some time on it.
This is not a one-time project. Your customer experience management is an ongoing project. Your strategy may need to be tweaked at times to fit your organization's processes, the latest trends, and best practices.
Your customer experience strategy should outline:
- Every step of your customer’s journey with your brand, starting from the first time they see your ad or hear about your brand, the buying process, and ease of customer support
- What a positive customer experience looks like for your organization
- How you will obtain customer feedback after every interaction
- How you will identify issues and the process, you will take to solve them
- How your team will be trained, encouraged, and rewarded for providing excellent service to exceed customer expectations
- How you will track and evaluate your progress
It’s critical to do a little digging into your competitors to get an idea of your customers. How user-friendly is their website? How much do they charge for similar products or services? The more you know, the more you can strategize to ensure your customers won’t turn to them.
The first step is to decide which customer experience management platforms you will use to get the feedback and insights needed from your organization’s touchpoints and channels. There are four main objectives your customer experience management tool should do for you – all are super important.
The tool should allow you to:
- Connect with your customers
- Gain valuable feedback
- Monitor customer health
- Measure quality of customer engagement
Customer surveys are the most successful customer experience management tools out there. Going right to the source to gain this valuable data gives you the most accurate insights into your organization’s performance.
What you do with the data is totally up to you, but the power is in your hands once you collect it.
Top Surveys for Customer Experience Management
There are several surveys successfully used by businesses to collect customer feedback. You could use one or a combination of a few depending on your organization's processes and the type of data that would be most beneficial for you.
Customer Satisfaction Surveys (CSAT)
CSAT is a survey that you send to your customers, asking them a simple question. There’s not a standard question that you ask, but here’s an example of what to ask: How would you rate your overall satisfaction with the product or service you received?”
You will provide your customers the following 1 to 5 scale to use for rating:
- Very unsatisfied
- Unsatisfied
- Neutral
- Satisfied
- Very satisfied
To dig deeper and get a better understanding of where you may be falling short, ask them to rate you on a score of 1-5 on:
- Level of knowledge
- Effective communication
- Professionalism
- Responsiveness
- Understanding of the issue
- Timely resolution
- Effectiveness of the resolution
To calculate your CSAT score, you take the number of four and five-star ratings (your satisfied customers) and divide the number of survey responses x 100. The solution is your percentage of satisfied customers. Typically, the two highest values on the customer feedback surveys are used as a predictor of customer retention. You only include “satisfied” responses and “very satisfied” in the calculation.
This score shows your customer’s level of engagement and satisfaction with a particular product, service, or interaction with your company — whichever the survey is measuring at the time.
How do you know if your CSAT score is good or bad? The answer is, you should always aim for improvement from the previous time you calculate it. There’s not a standard good or bad CSAT number. The best solution: Always ensure a great customer experience.
Net Promoter Score (NPS)
Net Promoter Score is a great tool to measure customer experience, but it’s also a great indicator if your customer is a promoter or likely to churn. With NPS surveys, you ask a simple question, using a scale from 0-10, “How likely is it that you would recommend [your company name] to a friend or colleague?”
- Promoters (score 9-10) - Satisfied, happy customers that are likely loyal to your brand and will refer others.
- Passives (score 7-8) - Customer is not overly satisfied, not super loyal, and could easily be pursued to buy from a competitor.
- Detractors (score 0-6) - Unhappy customer that is not likely to return and possibly damage your brands’ image with negative word of mouth and online reviews
To calculate your NPS score, subtract your percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters. The goal would be 100, meaning every responder is a promoter.
Customer Effort Score (CES)
Customer Effort Score surveys help you to see how much effort your customers need to put into buying from your company. If a customer has to put a lot of effort into making a purchase or has issues, they are less likely to return. On the other hand, if you make it a super easy process for your customers, they are likely to become loyal and buy from you time and time again.
You generate your Customer Effort Score by asking your customers if they agree or disagree with the statement “[your company name] made it easy for me to handle my issue.” You give your customers a range to choose from “strongly disagree” to “strongly agree.”
You find your CES score, take the sum of all responders, and divide it by the total number of respondents. If you find your customers need to put in a lot of effort, you will probably find you also have a high churn rate. You will want to dig deep to make the necessary changes for an easier process for your customers.
Here are some easy ways to get your CSAT survey requests to your customers:
Survey Sending Channels
There are several ways you could send surveys to your customers. It really depends on how your business commonly interacts with its customers. For example, if you have an online chat interaction with a customer, the survey gets sent following the completion of the chat. Here are the most used channels for sending surveys:
Sending an email after a purchase is a simple way to get feedback from your customers. Most people check their emails daily, so the interaction should still be fresh in their minds.
In App or Website
This is an excellent way to get the highest responses since the survey could be sent immediately after an online interaction making it super simple for the customer.
Completed Service
These surveys get sent after any completed service through any channel including, social media, online chat, email, phone, or SMS. It works best when sent via the same channel as the provided service.
Improving Customer Experience
Managing your customer experience means the power of exceeding your customer’s expectations is in your hands. Tracking, surveying, analyzing, strategizing, and implementing may seem like a lot of work.
But it’s worth the effort and comes with great rewards. All the effort makes your customer’s experience with your brand a positive one, and your business organically grows in revenue.
The strategy to improve your customers' experience is unique to your business. Here are some effective strategies to help improve your customer experience:
Invest in Your Employees
This is a big one. Employees are the backbone of an organization. They are the face of your organization in the eyes of your customers, as your staff will be the only ones interacting with them.
When your employees feel valued, appreciated, and compensated competitively, they are more likely to be committed to the organization’s success. A happy, dedicated employee will provide excellent personalized service to add to your customer’s positive experience with your brand.
Identify and Fix Pain Points
As you review surveys, you will come across issues. It’s imperative to resolve problems quickly to make sure they don’t continue to happen. Handing the issues will not only save upset from other customers in the future, but it also shows the customer that brought it to your attention that you care.
A customer who feels heard (asking for their opinion on the surveys) means that the organization genuinely cares about providing exceptional products and services. Then, when you acknowledge their issues and do what you can to fix them, it expresses to your customers that you value and appreciate them.
This is how you win over even upset customers and turn them into loyal followers.
Personalize, Personalize, Personalize
Consumers today expect personalized service. Providing personalized services brings a sense of closeness between your customers and brand. It also keeps your customers from feeling like they are “just another number.”
Personalizing their service is also an excellent way to learn about their likes and dislikes so you can provide the best experience for THEM. When you know more about your customers, you could also customize the offerings to entice them to purchase more often.
Create and Promote Customer Loyalty Program
A customer loyalty program has proven time and time again to increase customer retention. Consumers love to get additional savings and perks when making a purchase. An attractive and well-promoted loyalty program will increase repeat orders and upsells, making it a win-win for the customer and your business.
Simply Processes
Dig deep into your processes. What could you do to make the process easier for your customers? Many consumers buy from companies because of the simplicity of service. Make it fun and easy.
Are there parts of your process you could automate? Whatever you could to require less effort from your customers will for sure add to a more positive experience. You may need to go through your entire process as if you were a customer to really get an idea of what you could do to simplify your process and locate any areas that may require too much effort.
Stay up-to-Date With Technology
In today’s tech-savvy world, there are high expectations for consumers. It’s critical to stay in the know with the latest tech trends and invest in the latest software to ensure you’re meeting your customer’s expectations.
Conclusion
Gaining the depth of knowledge about your customers' experience with your brand isn't something that just happens. Customer experience management takes time and effort but is definitely worth it. When your customer’s experience is positive, you can be sure to gain a following of loyal customers that are brand advocates doing a lot of marketing for your brand.
Surveying your customers gives you the valuable feedback you need to understand how your brand is delivering. Remember, customer experience management is a continuous activity. You may need to tweak your metrics from time to time.
Crafting a strategy, implementing it, and tracking the results to ensure it’s improving your customer’s experience is vital. Keep in mind, all the effort and the right strategies are investing in the success of your business long-term.
Are you ready to wow your customers with an awesome experience? If so, contact Awesome CX today, and we’ll show you our way!
Sources:
Don't Spend 5 Times More Attracting New Customers, Nurture The Existing Ones | Forbes