Customer experience management: What is it & why it matters

The customer experience (CX) is at the heart of your business. Around 91% of customers will recommend your business after a positive experience. Alongside word-of-mouth marketing, happier customers are more likely to repeat purchases and improve your bottom line.

Customer experience management (CEM), also commonly referred to as CXM, directly influences how customers perceive your brand. Beyond just streamlining your offerings, it can help you identify and address pain points in the customer journey.

Yet, many businesses need help to launch a CEM program. Some encounter budgetary limitations, while others don’t have the necessary support from executives. 

Let’s explore how we can get more from customer experience management and detail how CEM can improve the overall customer experience.

Customer experience management (CEM) is a system companies use to track, oversee, and respond accordingly to all customer and business interactions. CEM accounts for a company’s awareness and understanding of customer interactions at every touchpoint across the customer journey.

From the first review a customer sees of your business to messaging your customer support team after a purchase, everything falls into CEM. For modern businesses, positive customer interactions are vital. With a streamlined CEM program, you can ensure that every touchpoint is supportive, helpful, and beneficial to the customer.

A positive customer experience plays a pivotal role in the success of your business. Satisfied customers are significantly more likely to show brand loyalty, helping your company reduce churn and improve profits. 

CEM programs streamline your journey toward always delivering a winning customer experience. 

Customer experience management software is an umbrella term that references all the tools, systems, and technologies that allow you to monitor your customer experience.

Beyond just capturing data, leading CEM software produces analytical insights. Using these points of analysis, you can take action to improve your touchpoints and create a streamlined customer experience. Some CEM platforms also offer integration with other marketing tools, like customer relationship management platforms (CRMs), for further accessibility.

A customer relationship management (CRM) platform provides businesses with an easy way to contract customers and build relationships with them. It holds customer contact information and data on the customer’s history with a company and their interactions. CRM platforms streamline customer communication, which factors into creating a positive user experience.

On the other hand, a customer experience management platform helps you get the customer insights you need to manage the customer experience at every customer touchpoint.

Both CRM and CEM software are customer-facing, placing your audience at the center of their tools. With an overlapping focus, there are numerous similarities between the tools:

While CRM and CEM platforms are similar, they do not serve the same purpose within an organization. Here are some important differences between CRM vs. CEM:

Understanding the differences between CRM and CEM will help businesses get more use out of all its connected platforms.

When your company invests in nurturing and managing the customer experience, it benefits your business externally and internally. Of course, your external benefits come in the form of positive word-of-mouth that generates customer loyalty (and profits). 

As your CX strategy spans every department and team in your organization, using a customer experience management platform encourages companywide alignment on business objectives and provides your organization with standard metrics you can use to benchmark your progress.

When your customer experience team uses a CEM platform well, it can lead to:

An investment in your customer experience offers positive returns in every aspect of your business.

Customer experience management can refine every touchpoint across the customer journey. Let’s explore the benefits of different parts of CEM strategy and touch on how they positively impact the customer experience.

Data is at the heart of any effective business change. CEM platforms provide a centralized location to collect, process, analyze, and draw insight from customer data.

Related reading: Your guide to running a customer feedback program

SurveyMonkey research demonstrates that 72% of consumers say personalization is important. CEM strategy allows us to offer a higher degree of personalization when interacting with customers. 

No two customers are the same. That said, all customers will follow a similar journey throughout the course of your business. CEM platforms measure experiences across the customer journey and help you improve it.

A great brand experience is cohesive across all of its customer touchpoints. As software that actively monitors and shapes all touchpoints, CEM solutions help bring consistency to your brand.

An integral part of keeping your customers happy is planning for the future. Customer experience management strategy uses data-driven insights to predict future customer desires more effectively.

While several CEM solutions are on the market, not all are equal. Keep an eye out for the following factors when partnering with CEM software.

If you don’t already use CEM software, making the change doesn’t have to be a total overhaul. Your business should be able to integrate CEM platforms with your existing CRM, marketing software, and reporting and analytics tools to streamline onboarding. 

Unifying all of the software in your toolbox will help produce a single source of truth for customer insights. With a constant stream of reliable customer data, you can take action to improve your CX, deliver personalized customer support, and obtain a 360-degree view of your customers. 

While collecting customer experience data is useful, analyzing it can offer a new story. Your CEM platform should turn the data you gather into actionable insights where possible. Depending on which touchpoints you pull data from, you can create personalized plans to improve CX across your business. 

When integrated with your other marketing tools, your company can rapidly bring these changes into effect. 

Surveys are a powerful method of getting information directly from your customers. But, for many businesses, the sheer number of surveys can become overwhelming. Make each survey detailed and specific to best serve your customers. 

Search for a CEM platform that offers a high degree of customizability. SurveyMonkey provides hundreds of customizable templates, as well as advanced branding tools so that you can create tailored experiences for survey takers and ensure a consistent brand experience. And, using SurveyMonkey Genius®, you can build an entire survey from a single prompt to ask the right questions while saving time on survey design. 

The best CEM platforms help businesses manage and improve customer interactions across various touchpoints and channels. Some common use cases of CEM platforms are:

There are lots of moving parts involved when it comes to customer experience management. But with customer experience management software, you can focus on optimizing the customer experience instead of worrying about how to standardize the customer relationship management process.

Learn how you can improve your customer experience with SurveyMonkey.

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