Customer Experience Management
What it is and why it matters
Customer experience is defined as your customers’ perceptions and feelings about your brand based upon every interaction they have with your company throughout the entire customer journey.
Customer experience management is the foundation for delivering an exceptional customer experience. According to Gartner, “Customer experience management (CXM) is the discipline of understanding customers and deploying strategic plans that enable cross-functional efforts and customer-centric culture to improve satisfaction, loyalty and advocacy.”
CXM goes well beyond knowing where customers shop (e.g., online or in person) and what brands they buy. It's about knowing your customers so completely that you can create and deliver personalized experiences that will entice them to not only remain loyal to you, but also serve as brand ambassadors – and that’s the most valuable form of advertising there is.
Collecting and making sense of customer information is key to understanding what people want and how they feel about your business. By looking closely at data from every interaction – whether it’s an online chat, an in-store purchase or feedback on social media – you can spot patterns, solve problems and find new ways to improve their experience. This deeper knowledge helps you build stronger relationships with your customers and keeps them coming back.
Why is customer experience management important?
Delivering superior customer experience has become a critical differentiator in a world where consumers have more options than ever before – and are quick to try another option if they don’t have a satisfying experience. There's tangible business value in effective customer experience management. Good customer experience management can:
- Strengthen brand preference through differentiated experiences.
- Boost revenue with incremental sales from existing customers and new sales from word of mouth.
- Improve customer loyalty (and create advocates) through valued and memorable customer interactions.
- Lower costs by reducing customer churn.
Building a real-time happiness engine for 11 million members
Watch this short video to see how Ding Ding Integrated Marketing Services partnered with SAS to create a platform where AI-powered personalization meets operational agility.
What challenges do marketers face when implementing customer experience management?
- Creating consistent brand experiences across channels. While customers may be willing to accept different service levels from different channels, they expect your brand value proposition to remain consistent. But channel proliferation makes it difficult to ensure such consistency across all channels.
- Integrating channel and brand experiences. An integrated channel experience is highly desirable, but hard to achieve. Technology, legacy processes and organizational territorialism can all be barriers.
- Consolidating data into a single view of the customer. Having a single view of the customer across interactions, channels, products and time facilitates creating unified, coordinated customer communications. Departmental silos, fragmented data and inconsistent processes make this challenge seem insurmountable.
SAS Customer Intelligence 360 gave us the speed to act and the power to personalize. Now we can focus on what truly matters - making every day a little happier for our members. Bruce Huang Chief Data Officer Ding Ding Integrated Marketing Services Ltd.
Three steps to getting customer experience management right
Since many factors can affect the customer experience, it's challenging to know where to begin. Here are three steps that can help you develop a successful customer experience management strategy:
- Create and maintain complete customer profiles.
- Personalize all customer interactions.
- Get the right information to the right place at the right time – every time.
Create and maintain complete customer profiles
To deliver a stellar customer experience, you must know your customers better than ever before. That means creating and maintaining complete customer profiles that help you understand and measure your customers' journeys at every touch point across multiple channels. The more you know your customers, the more effective you’ll be at delivering relevant offers to them. The more relevant your offers are, the closer the relationship between your business and your customers becomes – driving metrics like loyalty and retention.
Historically, companies have used structured data – such as demographic, transactional and log data – to construct customer profiles. Today, you must include emerging types of data – social media, video, RFID, sensor, geolocation, etc. – tied together with cross-channel coordination. Additionally, incorporate contact, response and transactional history data throughout the customer journey, along with customer value, profitability, behavioral analysis and propensity scores. And all this data must be collected in a secure, trustworthy manner that builds customer trust.
By analyzing traditional, structured data in conjunction with newer types of data, you can:
- Improve the customer experience at specific touch points.
- Understand what your customers want and expect you to do for them.
- Make better decisions faster.
Personalize all customer interactions
Once you have a thorough understanding of the customer, you can use that knowledge to personalize every interaction. Remember to not only focus on the customer, but also on the context in which the customer operates. Your data can help you maintain that focus, particularly if you continue to enrich existing (core) data with new sources. By adding context to your customer focus, you can deliver relevant, insightful offers, recommendations, advice and service actions when a customer is most receptive.
Remember that customers have more presence, power and choice than ever before. If you don’t provide a personal, relevant, timely and insightful message, you will alienate them immediately. But if you do, you will drive brand loyalty.
Get the right information to the right place at the right time – every time
To deliver the most value at each customer touch point – and improve the customer experience – you need to map customer analytics to specific stages in the customer journey so you can deliver the right message to the right place at the right time. Each stage in the customer journey is important – from initial consideration, to active evaluation, to the moment of purchase and even to the post-purchase experience. Each stage is an opportunity to improve the customer experience. And each stage is an opportunity to gain more insight that you can feed back into your marketing analytics processes to draw from the next time.
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