Why Customer Experience Management Matters- and How to go about it?
“You may hate gravity, but gravity does not care.” For businesses today, CEM is like gravity.
If you know how it works, you’ll be able to soar to the heights of success. Otherwise, you’ll keep getting pulled down no matter how hard you try to go up.
CEM or customer experience management is the art of managing how a customer engages with your brand, to meet or exceed customer expectations and boost customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Before jumping into influencing the customer’s choice and voice, you need to think for a minute- Do you really know your customers? What led them to buy from you? Were they happy with the product or disappointed with the service?
What is Customer Experience Management?
Customer experience is the way your customers feel after interacting with you on any channel.
That’s simple, isn’t it? If your product or service is great, that obviously means your customers are happy, right?
Wrong. Your product or service is a small part of the entire customer journey.
Each step of the journey contributes to customer experience- from helping them reach you easily, to triggering a purchase and hooking them in after the purchase by building loyalty.
Simply put, good customer experience management boils down to life made easier for your customers by your brand.
Understanding Customer Journey and CEM Strategy
In initial interaction with the business/brand, CX includes engaging with the target audience via live chat, demo, events, etc. When done right, it ideally leads to more purchases and higher sales.
But what about after?
Frankly, one transaction doesn’t guarantee a repeat visit.
The key lies in simple gestures. A thank you message right after the first purchase, feedback request the day after, and even personalized SMS promotions in the future can ensure your presence in the post-purchase ongoing exposure phase.
Neglect the customer’s experience and you’re well on your way to shut your business.
Now, there are businesses which take this seriously. They have various divisions to look into various phases of the customer journey- marketing, sales, customer service, operations, and so on. But they don’t see a significant change in customer engagement. Why?
It’s because they can’t amalgamate these divisions into creating a consistent, smooth customer experience.
How to tackle this?
Customer Experience Management Strategy
Customer experience management (CEM) is the perfect combination of technology, strategy and resources for increased customer engagement.
Acquiring a new customer, for any business, costs around twenty times more than retaining an existing one. Moreover, returning customers generally, spend 67% more than a new customer.
With a great CEM strategy, you can understand your customers so well that you can create and deliver personalized experiences and customer services. This does turn would improve customer experience, build loyalty and possibly further recommendations.
How to go about it?
1. Know your customers better than he knows himself
2. Recognize pain points and eliminate them
3. Strive for omnichannel customer experience instead of multichannel
4. Remove interaction silos and turn to one view CRM
5. Collect feedback
6. Respond to the customer feedback
7. Reward your engaging customers
8. Continue engaging with personalized messages and relevant incentives
CEM does not mean focusing only on your best customers. Instead, it’s about optimizing your processes and business functions around the customer’s behaviour. CRM solutions and customer engagement software can help you define a clear customer experience management strategy and reap its benefits.
