Creating a business that’s built to last and succeed is about so much more than just having the most advanced products or the trendiest services. It’s not about being first to market or having the most affordable prices either. All those trends and top-notch products won’t make a difference if you’re not providing a great experience for your customers every day.
Just think about the last time you had a truly great experience as a customer, whether it was with a small local business or a big national chain. Those excellent experiences really stay with you and encourage you to return to that business over and over again. You might even have told your friends and family about this wonderful moment and encouraged them to visit the business themselves. That’s the power of customer loyalty.
So how can your business create these moments for your customers regularly, instead of just hoping they happen on their own? That’s where customer experience management comes in. It helps you optimize and manage your relationship with your customers so they stay loyal and spread the word about how great your business is.
What is Customer Experience Management?
Customer experience management is also known as CXM. And what does CXM mean? The most basic customer experience management definition is a system that businesses use to track, oversee, and respond to all customer interactions. This system helps companies to exceed their customers’ expectations so they can increase customer loyalty, satisfaction, and advocacy.
Each customer goes through multiple touchpoints on their customer journey with your business. These can include finding an online review of your company and hearing about you for the first time, making their first purchase after careful research, or seeking help from your customer assistance team. Every one of these touchpoints—no matter how small they may seem—impacts the customer’s awareness of your business, understanding of your offerings, and their relationship with your brand.
Customer experience management helps your business ensure that all of these customer-company interactions are exceeding your customers’ expectations, every step of the way.
Customer insights
Creating an exceptional customer experience starts with knowing your customers deeply. You need to know more than just who they are—you need insight into what they want, what they dislike, what they value, and what they can’t live without.
CXM tools can help you gain deeper insight into your customers so you can serve them better by meeting their exact needs proactively. When customers feel understood, they’re more likely to be loyal. CXM tools like customer surveys can help you gain those valuable customer insights so you can build a better customer experience.
Customer retention
Retaining customers is vital to the long-term success of your business. That’s because customer churn, or customers purchasing from you and then going to a competitor for their next buy, is quite costly. Acquiring a customer in the first place has significant costs in marketing dollars and time to value as well, so retaining your current customers can make your business much more profitable.
CXM can help you increase customer retention by helping you understand what makes your customers stick with your company over other competitors, and what makes them choose another option after they’ve already made a purchase from you. Identifying and correcting any issues and leaning into your strengths can help you retain more customers and build your bottom line too.
Customer loyalty
Having lots of loyal customers who will purchase from you again and again, even when a more advanced or cheaper option exists, is incredibly powerful for your business. Think of Apple - they may not always have the most advanced products on the market, but their customer experience is so seamless and their brand so strong that millions of people will only buy their products, even at their high prices.
CXM can help you identify what makes your customers loyal—why they become committed to the brand relationship with your business, and why they become advocates for your business as well. What is going exceptionally well in your customer experience? That can create loyalty. And if you know what’s driving loyalty towards your business, you can expand on that to create even more loyal customers.
Why is Customer Experience Management important?
Customer experience determines whether your organization succeeds or fails. Also, with customers’ behaviors and preferences changing rapidly, companies must be able to keep up with changes and quickly act to optimize customer satisfaction and loyalty. This can't be done without a good CXM program in place. Below are more reasons.
How we buy and sell has changed
Buying almost anything, from simple products to complex services, is easier than ever, thanks to the power of the internet. And the internet also allows customers to do their own research on your business and your products—they don’t need to rely on your marketing anymore.
Increasingly, customers also expect to make purchases on their terms. They want to buy online in many cases, without ever talking to a salesperson. And that means you’ve lost on another chance to sell to them your way.
Plus, there’s just more competition out there in almost every industry. It’s harder than ever to differentiate yourself from your competitors, whether on price, products, or most other things. And the marketing world is becoming just as crowded, so telling new prospects how great your business has also become a big challenge.
That’s why the customer experience is everything
But what has become even more important in this new world of buying preferences? The customer experience. That’s because it allows your business to stand out in a crowded field of competitors with something that really matters to your customers. Since it’s easier than ever to find any kind of product these days, customers are really looking to do business with a company that makes their experience easy, effortless, and delightful.
And in a world crowded with marketing noise, the value of word-of-mouth recommendations has risen significantly. Consumers rarely trust marketing anymore, but they do strongly trust recommendations from people they know, like their friends, colleagues, and family members.
If you’re creating a top-notch customer experience, your customers are likely telling lots of people they know about how great your business is—and that is the best way to bring in new customers. It’s less expensive and more effective than traditional or digital marketing.
Consistently creating excellent customer experiences
But how can you make the customer experience magic happen on a regular basis? It might seem like delighting your customers is something that can only happen organically—it’s not something you can control.
The good news—you can actually control and manage the customer experience to ensure you’re regularly exceeding your customers’ expectations. This is where customer experience management comes in.
By investing in nurturing the customer experience, you’ll gain more great word-of-mouth and highly loyal (and lucrative) customers, because you’re consistently providing what you know to be exactly what your customers want. You’re not leaving anything to chance—you’re creating a replicable, actionable plan to delight your customers every time they interact with you.
How to improve customer experience using CXM tools
Whether you know you need to make significant improvements to your customer experience, or you’re just looking to go from great to best-in-class, there are plenty of CXM tools that can help you.
Customer surveys
Of course, the best way to create a customer experience that people love and rave about to their friends is to ask them directly. You can ask them what they want, what they need, what they think of your business and your products, and so much more.
That’s why customer surveys are your most powerful CXM tool. Instead of assuming you know what’s important to customers and prospects, you can go right to the source and check in with them.
There are several kinds of surveys you can use to manage the customer experience:
Customer satisfaction (CSAT) surveys allow you to measure customer satisfaction with your company overall, with your products and/or services, or after a specific customer-company interaction.
Net Promoter Score® (NPS®) surveys are an excellent way to measure customer loyalty—how many brand advocates are you creating with your current customer experience, and what’s driving (or driving down) your customer loyalty?
Customer Effort Score (CES) surveys are used to measure the level of effort that a customer experiences when they interact with your brand. CES is a transactional, short-term metric for customer experience.
User experience surveys can help you gauge how your user experience on your website is delighting, or disappointing, your customers when they’re looking for a product to purchase or help from your customer service team.
Product satisfaction surveys ensure that you know how customers really feel about your products. Customers who find your products adequate but not great are more likely to churn than ones who love what you offer. And improving your products according to customer needs can significantly increase customer satisfaction.
Marketing surveys can help your team discover customer preferences and insights so your marketing is more targeted to your ideal customers. Focusing on finding the customers most likely to become promoters and advocates can help your business grow.
GetFeedback offers all of these survey types and more as part of a complete CX platform, helping you understand and manage your customer experience.
Customer profiles
Creating detailed customer profiles can also help you improve your customer experience by producing deeper insight into what your customers really want. A customer profile helps you understand your customer demographics, pain points, interests, and buying patterns.
But simply knowing all this information isn’t enough—you need a tool that helps you collect, analyze, and act on that data too.
Collect: watching for trends and real-time actions as they occur is essential for keeping on top of issues. This is especially important when you receive negative feedback, since getting on top of issues quickly can help stop them from creating much larger problems.
Analyze: noticing trends in real-time is great, but understanding what they mean over the long term is important too. The right CXM tool will give you access to sophisticated analytics that provide a deep understanding of the pain points and excellent parts of your overall customer journey.
Take action: a good CXM tool doesn’t just tell you what’s happening—it helps you take action to improve your customer experience too. This could be through identifying coaching opportunities for customer service reps, agent training help, or making it easy to close the loop with unhappy customers right away.
Integrate your tech stack
Your customer insights and survey responses aren’t the only data you have—you also probably use other systems across different departments to keep track of various metrics and data that impact or reflect the customer experience.
Good CXM also means using a tool that integrates with everything else you use in your tech stack so there are no silos. After all, pretty much every department in your company touches the customer experience, so you need to share data with plenty of other systems.
Want to learn more about building a complete customer experience tech stack? We’ve got your guide right here. It will help you make sure you’re creating a tech stack where everything works together to improve your customer experience.
What is Customer Experience Management strategy?
Reacting to customer feedback in the moment is important, but it’s not enough to significantly improve your customer experience by itself. Having a thoughtful customer experience management strategy in place is essential to getting the most out of any CXM tool you decide to use.
A CXM strategy defines:
how your customer journey works and how you map it.
how you identify pain points and which teams are responsible for fixing them.
how your teams react to customer interactions to exceed their expectations.
And it should also be adaptable to the latest trends and best practices in the customer experience space.
Sound like a lot? It can be! But it’s critical to have a well-thought-out strategy in place to make sure you’re getting the most out of your CXM tool. Customer experience is a complex matter—there are so many pieces that go into satisfying your customers, keeping them loyal, and turning them into advocates for your business. A strong strategy helps you keep all these pieces in the right place so you can delight every customer, every time.
Looking for a great example of a customer experience management strategy in the real world? Check out a case study from Mylo about how they used GetFeedback’s CXM platform to create a well-rounded CXM strategy that resulted in continuous improvements in their customer experience.
Customer experience solutions
If you’re looking for a powerful customer experience management tool that will help you take your customer experience from good to best-in-class, look no further.
GetFeedback offers a complete CX platform that can help you manage your customer experience so you’re improving every day. It can also help you turn the feedback you receive into actionable insights, so you know exactly what you need to do to create a better customer journey.
The GetFeedback CX platform helps your business:
Measure service quality. Starting on the path to a better customer experience begins with looking at the current level of service you’re offering to your customers. Are your customer service reps pleasant to deal with? Do they make solving problems easy and fast?
Find out by asking your customer directly about their service experiences through our array of customer experience surveys, like CSAT and Customer Effort Score (CES). Measuring your service quality is easy with our sophisticated analytics and easily digestible data.
Monitor customer health. How happy and loyal are your customers? You might have plenty of people who purchase from your business regularly, but it’s quite possible that some—or many—of them aren’t actually all that happy. And that means they’re likely to switch to a competitor if a better offer comes along.
Monitoring customer health helps you keep an eye on factors affecting loyalty and satisfaction. This includes digital health as well—are your customers happy with your online user experience, or just putting up with it until something better comes along? Net Promoter Score surveys are a great way to regularly gauge customer health.
Connect with buyers. The connections your brand builds with your buyers is vital to growing your business sustainably. That means more than just providing them with a good experience too—it also means addressing issues quickly and effectively when they come up. Connecting with an unhappy customer right away can turn a bad experience into a positive one, when it’s addressed the right way.
GetFeedback’s CX platform helps you surface negative issues right away so you can attend to them immediately. That builds a connection and more trust with your customers—they know if something goes wrong, you’ll be there to make it right.
Collect feedback. And of course, collecting feedback from your customers on a regular basis is a critical part of any CXM tool. GetFeedback offers you a wide range of survey tools that help you gather customer insights on your brand, your products, your customer satisfaction and loyalty, and much more. The right surveys can help you map out and make improvements to every single step of your customer journey.
Key takeaways
Managing your customer experience with the right tool can help you make customer magic happen every day, creating loyal and satisfied customers for your brand. And that’s what really helps your business grow and thrive through the power of word-of-mouth.
Looking for the perfect CXM tool to help you create a meaningful, delightful customer experience? GetFeedback offers a wide range of CX survey tools and plenty of resources to help you improve your customer experience as well.