What is Customer Experience Management (CEM)
The A-Z guide to customer experience
management your
business needs to know
Customer Experience Management (CEM) is enjoying undivided attention and has become an integral element, hardwired in the business domain. Every business that cares about its customers is busy working its way to create and perfect their Customer Experience Management strategy. However, what exactly is Customer Experience Management and why has it gained so much momentum?
Customer Experience Management, CEM or CXM comprises of a collection of activities which a company undertakes to provide a personalized, smooth experience to customers. It’s about knowing your customer thoroughly and ensuring they are happy and satisfied at every point of interaction with your company, right from the start of the customer journey. Simply put, customer experience management is all about fulfilling customer expectations and establishing a positive perception of your brand in their minds.
Defining Customer Experience Management (CEM)
Before you understand what CEM is, it is essential to know what customer experience is all about.
“ Customer Experience (CX) is defined as the impression your customers have about your brand. It could be a personal experience or hearsay. It could be an opinion that got formed at their first interaction with you or could have developed over the various stages of the customer life cycle.”
Now, let’s extend this definition to CEM. Customer experience management comprises of any and every effort which an organization takes to ensure a smooth customer journey. Consequently, it results in a positive perception of the brand.
Gartner defines customer experience management (CEM) as “The practice of designing and reacting to customer interactions to meet or exceed customer expectations and thus increase customer satisfaction, loyalty, and advocacy.”
Why is Customer Experience Management important?
It wouldn’t be wrong to say that customer experience management is an important differentiator that decides the champion of brand wars. In this ultra-competitive, technology-driven market, customers don’t settle for anything less than ‘crème de la crème’ or the best. Simply put, customers can choose you. If you fail to impress them, they’ll choose your competitors. A small mistake you make is an enormous opportunity for your competitor to sweep-in. However, with customer experience management, you can avoid such mishaps from happening.
CEM is the finest way to ensure your customers are happy & satisfied with your brand and they give it a thumbs-up through and through. Therefore, customer experience management helps organizations to build and retain long-lasting client relationships. CEM motivates an organization to see each customer uniquely. They aren’t merely the source of income and revenue. Instead, they are the true patrons who can help your brand climb up the ladder of success and make it to the top.
Customer loyalty is a natural outcome of good Customer Experience Management. Happy customers are great for an organization. However, loyal customers take things to an entirely new level. With positive word-of-mouth and spirited referrals, loyal customers bring in new customers in a natural way. Therefore, an organization can turn customers into brand evangelists using customer experience management. Thus, CEM helps a product become a ‘brand’- loved by all, preferred by all. Not to mention the steady and increasing revenue that follows. Thus customer experience management is, without doubt, necessary for any organization to improve sales and shape their brand persona.
Customer Experience Management Vs. Customer Relationship Management
Business leaders and product managers have often confused Customer Experience Management with Customer Relationship Management and used them interchangeably. However, this isn’t the case. Let’s explore what makes CRM different from CEM.
The goal of CRM includes customer relationships and optimizing the overall revenue and growth of the company. CEM, on the other hand, focuses on the interaction and the experience customers have with a company. Therefore, CRM captures how a company perceives a customer. CEM is all about what a customer thinks about the company.
CRM or customer relationship management, mines data and analyzes it to track customer behavior and purchase patterns.
How did a customer hear about the product?
What prompted thexm to purchase it?
How often do they make a purchase?
How do they interact with the brand?
These are some questions which any company might have in mind. CRM brings answers to all these questions. Therefore, we can say that customer relationship management focuses on nurturing customer relationships and making it last longer. CEM, on the other hand, shifts attention towards driving customer loyalty, brand advocacy by creating a positive persona about the company in the minds of customers.
CRM comes into play when there’s a customer interaction happening- like sales-talk, support query, or assistance of any kind. On the contrary, CEM is monitored and measured at every customer touchpoint. CEM is measured with research data, online surveys, observational studies, and the likes.
CRM comes handy to customer-facing teams like sales, support and marketing in order to self-evaluate and improve the services extended. In contrast, CEM is used by business leaders and analysts to identify the various flaws and strengths in the business structure and better the business process.
How to measure your Customer Experience Management System?
There are various metrics to assess the efficiency and success of a company’s customer experience management system. These metrics throw light on the various aspects that make up customer experience management. The various metrics include Customer Satisfaction Score(CSAT), Net Promoter Score (NPS), Customer Churn Rate, Customer Effort Score (CES), Average Resolution Time, Conversion Rate, Customer Acquisition Rate, and Social Media Presence. Thus, organizations can understand the quality and efficiency of their CEM system.
CEM Metrics
01
CSAT Score
CSAT measures how satisfied customers are with the product/service of a company. Higher the CSAT score, the better is the CEM.
02
Average Resolution Time
It is the time taken to resolve a customer distress/query. Quicker resolution means better customer experience management.
03
Net Promoter Score (NPS®)
NPS uncovers the loyalty customers have towards a brand. A high net promoter score means your CEM is doing the job perfectly.
04
Customer Acquisition Rate
It is the ease of procuring new customers. Better customer acquisition rates mean excellent customer experience management.
05
Customer Effort Score (CES)
CES is the ease with which customers can execute a task using your product/service. Lower the CES score; better is the experience.
06
Customer Churn Rates
Churn rates give the percentage of customers who opt out of recurring purchases. Lower the rates, better is the customer experience management.
07
Social Media Presence
Great social media presence and customer monitoring imply sound customer experience management.
08
Conversion Rate
Conversion rates give the percentage of prospects who turn into customers. Higher rates imply a great CEM.
How to improve your Customer Experience Management system?
Picture customers giving feedback about their experience with your company as ‘Promised a lot, delivered so little.’ And this is the story of many companies who don’t include customer experience management in their core strategies. To improve customer experience, you must connect with customers first. Think from their angle and by doing this, you get to realize the customer pain-points with ease.
When you value customers, they value your brand more. Therefore, be sure to glance through these six surefire ways that help your organization turn your customer experience management system from average to top-notch. Consequently, win back even a customer who has vowed to disavow your brand. Let’s have a look at well-planned strategies to improve your customer experience management system.
Identify customers
Don’t take the leap of faith without doing your groundwork. Understand your target customers before launching your product.
Map customer journey
Identify every single customer interaction point and know where your customers interact with or come across your brand.
Assemble customer feedback
Collect, improve, and repeat. Station feedback collection units at all touch-points
Equip your team
Make your employees customer-centric and feedback-focussed to make each customer interaction rich and fruitful.
Act on the feedback
Collecting feedback and sitting simply is as good as not doing anything. Take proper measures to act on the feedback, without delays.
Measure CX and improve
Measure overall customer experience with various metrics we have listed above and work every day to better it.
Benefits of CEM
In this section, we elucidate the umpteen benefits a top-notch customer experience management system offers your business.
Better Customer Engagement
With great customer experience management, you can strike the right chord with your customers from the start. Since CEM takes into account every little detail for the entire customer journey, the approach is clearly customer-oriented. Consequently, it translates into improved customer engagement and customer relations.
Enhanced Customer Loyalty
‘Customer-first’ approach is the road to getting loyal customers on board. Loyal customers spread positive word about your product and help to recruit new customers in the process. They stick to your brand and are more forgiving by nature if there’s a lapse from your end.
Increased Customer Conversions
Studies show that customers are willing to pay more if they are guaranteed a better experience. From this, one can conclude how much customers value a smooth experience while interacting with a brand. No one, including you and me, would like to wait for hours just to get in touch with a customer support assistant or face umpteen hassle while making a simple purchase.
Prominent Brand Presence
Standing apart from the host of products in the market and creating a niche for your brand requires smart efforts from the company’s end. One such smart and established strategy is customer experience management. Customers definitely notice even the smallest gestures that show how much a company values them and their opinions. Take any acclaimed company with a powerful brand image- you would definitely find a strong CEM system toiling behind it.
Reduced Expenditure
An eye-opening bit of information shared by Harvard Business Review reveals that it is 20x times more expensive to recruit new customers than retain existing ones. Therefore having a strong CEM system reduces the overhead expenses of recruiting new customers and marketing the product for the same. An organization needn’t splurge on marketing and advertisements when the brand speaks for itself.
Accelerated Revenue & Growth
The ultimate achievement that any business dreams about is hitting revenue milestones and growing exponentially. All the efforts a company puts in is for the same. Customer experience focuses on all those facets that help an organization to self-analyze and align with the perfect growth trajectory. The direct impact of a customer-first line of thought is better revenue that comes due to higher customer conversion rates, reduced churn rates, stronger brand presence, and removal of redundant overhead expenses.
Better Customer Engagement
With great customer experience management, you can strike the right chord with your customers from the start. Since CEM takes into account every little detail for the entire customer journey, the approach is clearly customer-oriented. Consequently, it translates into improved customer engagement and customer relations.
Enhanced Customer Loyalty
‘Customer-first’ approach is the road to getting loyal customers on board. Loyal customers spread positive word about your product and help to recruit new customers in the process. They stick to your brand and are more forgiving by nature if there’s a lapse from your end.
Increased Customer Conversions
Studies show that customers are willing to pay more if they are guaranteed a better experience. From this, one can conclude how much customers value a smooth experience while interacting with a brand. No one, including you and me, would like to wait for hours just to get in touch with a customer support assistant or face umpteen hassle while making a simple purchase.
Prominent Brand Presence
Standing apart from the host of products in the market and creating a niche for your brand requires smart efforts from the company’s end. One such smart and established strategy is customer experience management. Customers definitely notice even the smallest gestures that show how much a company values them and their opinions. Take any acclaimed company with a powerful brand image- you would definitely find a strong CEM system toiling behind it.
Reduced Expenditure
An eye-opening bit of information shared by Harvard Business Review reveals that it is 20x times more expensive to recruit new customers than retain existing ones. Therefore having a strong CEM system reduces the overhead expenses of recruiting new customers and marketing the product for the same. An organization needn’t splurge on marketing and advertisements when the brand speaks for itself.
Accelerated Revenue & Growth
The ultimate achievement that any business dreams about is hitting revenue milestones and growing exponentially. All the efforts a company puts in is for the same. Customer experience focuses on all those facets that help an organization to self-analyze and align with the perfect growth trajectory. The direct impact of a customer-first line of thought is better revenue that comes due to higher customer conversion rates, reduced churn rates, stronger brand presence, and removal of redundant overhead expenses.
Customer Experience Management: Best Practices
Companies race enthusiastically to set-up and implement customer experience management system for their business. However, counted few do it right and ultimately get it right. Very often, companies fail to understand the very factors that’s been staring at them in the face. Even more often, it is simply because of a lack of proper planning and amateur execution before doing the proper homework. To ensure the same doesn’t happen with your organization, we bring you some of the best practices that’ll help to set up an impeccable customer experience management system.
Customer experience journey mapping gives you an all-encompassing view of all interactions a customer has or can have with your brand. Identifying these channels is important to uncover critical customer pain points and the key factors that drive customer happiness. Therefore, CX map the journey so that you can prioritize the requirements of customers, ensure you meet their expectations, and deliver a memorable experience altogether. Monitor all interactions closely.
Knowing your customers inside-out is key to deliver a worthwhile experience to each one of your customers. Maintaining detailed profiles about your customers help tremendously to deliver results that match their expectations and thereby drive loyalty and satisfaction. Apart from demographic data, social media is yet another data silo to know your customers better.
Collect feedback from your customers at every crucial touchpoint. It can be laser-focused on a particular event, like sales interaction, or the overall journey a customer has with you. Consequently, you can make use of CSAT, NPS, or CES surveys. Act on the feedback you get and improve the shortcomings for an overall enhanced experience.
To get customer experience management right, the one-fit-for-all approach falls short. Thus, personalizing any and every engagement you have with them is important. For instance, share personalized emails if a customer rates you a score below 7 or thank them and offer incentives for a perfect score.
Challenges to Customer Interaction Management
The options and choices are umpteen for today’s customers. Anything is just a tap away in today’s digital era. Gone are the days when a customer puts up with a poorly performing product. To catch up with competition and to reside in the best books of customers, brands have a couple of challenges to overcome. Let’s see what they are:
Lack of omnichannel experience platform
There’s no dearth of customer experience platforms in the market today. However, most of them fall behind when it comes to delivering a consistent experience across different channels. Email, phone, social media, website widget, be it any medium that a consumer chooses, your support must be adept at handling it all. It can be quite a daunting task for handling all the queries, feedback, and data from multiple channels. This is where an omnichannel customer experience platform like SurveySparrow can help you out.
All customer-data at once place
Scattered information about your customers will do little to no good. This is where a customer experience platform that can unify all the data and feedback into a module will come handy. You can view all the interactions a customer has had with you and in the process trace a trajectory of their journey. Has it been getting better each time, or are they slowly turning from a promoter to a detractor? Find out.
Choosing a CEM Platform
The objective is identified, journey mapped, and strategies devised. The next step is taking actions for the same. For that, a great customer experience management platform will help you out from the start till the finish line. It combines technology, resources, and strategies to station a faultless system for providing an exceptional experience to each client. With a CEM platform, you can fill the potholes in the customer journey and ensure a smooth ride for all your customers.
Simple-to-use
The CEM platform you pick must be easy to use and intuitive in nature. If the platform requires you to scan through one tutorial after the other, it is not a wise investment any day, in any way.
Reasonable Pricing
If owning a CEM platform empties your wallet, you must reconsider the purchase. Since customer experience must be monitored continually, a CEM platform becomes an integral part of the business. Thus, it is wise to invest in a platform that meets your requirements and is affordable at the same time.
Round-the-clock Support
The CEM platform you pick must have a support team who are readily available to respond to your queries and resolve issues, if any. This will help you to use the tool smoothly, have great experience yourself, and provide a better one to your customers.
- What is CEM
- Definition of CEM
- Why is CEM Important
- CEM Vs CRM
- How to measure CEM System
- How to improve CEM system
- Benefits of CEM
- CEM: Best Practices
- Challenges to Customer Interaction Management
- Choosing a CEM Platform
- Key Features of CEM Platform
- Role of CXM in Industries
- Getting Started with a CEM Platform
- Customer Experience Management FAQs
Key Features of CEM Platform
Here are the important features which any CEM platform must offer that helps companies to elevate the experience they can provide to each patron.
Gather & unify feedback
The CEM platform must be adept at triggering feedback surveys at every crucial customer touch-point to assess satisfaction. It can be an in-app satisfaction survey, an email survey to find out the experience he/she had, or even an online review on any social media. Irrespective of the sources, the CEM platform must unify all the feedback at one database and lay out the data suitably for quick perusal.
Analyze with reporting module
Once the software collects customer feedback and data, the next duty of the CEM platform is to analyze it thoroughly and give rich insights. For this, the software must come with a strong reporting and analysis module that empowers companies to quickly identify business blindspots and the vital metrics that drive business growth. In this manner, organizations can incorporate customer feedback into their products and services and improve continually.
Take Action, Close the Loop
Closing the loop is essentially one of the most important aspects of improving customer experience. When an unhappy customer is created, the CEM platform must have an alert management system that notifies the entire team and puts them at work to reach out to the customer and resolve the issue at once. Consequently, you can achieve successful ROI on your CEM action plan. Drive meaningful changes with your CEM platform.
Role of CXM in Industries
Small businesses
Get real-time customer data, analyze trends, and reduce customer churn rates.
Agency
Organize, manage, and optimize sales processes with accurate insights.
Hospitality & Travel
Deliver a memorable experience to each client and stand apart from your competitors.
Healthcare
Care for your patients’ real needs and provide world-class healthcare service.
Education
Understand student satisfaction, staff engagement, and enrich the learning experience.
Retail
Battle competition, spike customer conversion rates, and get the big customer-picture.
Government Agencies & Contractors
Know the pulse of the public and set up a fully-functional political system and active administration.
Social Media
Understand customer behavior, engage with them, and create a strong brand presence.
Financial Services
Identify customer pain points, enhance the quality of customer service, nurture client relationships.
Politics
Step into the grass-root level and understand the needs of the public and voter behavior.
Getting Started with a CEM Platform
Looking for a CEM platform for your business? Begin your customer experience journey with SurveySparrow, an easy-to-use platform that’ll help you collect feedback, analyze the data, and close the loop. With survey automation, conversational surveys, audience management, rich dashboard, advanced reporting filters, integration features, and more, you are just a tap away from creating a sturdy customer experience management system.
Built to cater to businesses of all sizes, you can choose from our flexible pricing plans to get the best for your company. If you require a quick help or assistance of any kind, our customer success team is available round-the-clock. We want you to have the best experience too!
