Thumb rule for a successful business: Customer experience management
Customer experience has emerged as the key differentiator in today’s globally connected and competitive business environment. Customer experience management (CEM) as defined by Gartner is “the practice of designing and reacting to customer interactions to meet or exceed customer expectations and, thus, increase customer satisfaction, loyalty and advocacy. In short, CEM is the sum total of processes a company uses for tracking, overseeing and organizing the interactions with its customers throughout the customer lifecycle for increasing customer retention and adding new customer with word of mouth advertising.
The Goal of CEM
The root goal of Customer experience management is to optimize customer interactions in order to foster customer loyalty reducing churn. It enables them to gain a thorough understanding of their target customer in order to be able to design and deliver a unique and personalized experience that not only keeps them motivated to remain loyal customer but also act as advocates of one’s brand to the other.
How to make Customer experience management effective?
Customer experiences have got new inclusions. Not only they include interactions through the traditional channels such as buying, service requests along with call center communications but also through Mobile self-care apps and social CRM channels like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Thus, the companies need outlining a strategy encompassing all customer touch points.
Why is Customer experience management (CEM) important?
Digital marketers are totally aware of the fact that the managed experience delivered to a customer while buying a product or service is as important as the product or service itself. Differentiating one’s customer experience from competitors can provide the organization with substantial business value which is why they have started investing substantial time and resources in delivering a highly personalized superior experience to increase customer loyalty.
A great customer experience can achieve the following benefits for business:
- Enhance consumer loyalty through interesting and personalized user interactions
- Boost sales and revenue through repeat orders from existing customers and addition of new customers through word of mouth advertising
- Build a superior brand image through differentiated consumer experiences
- Reduce costs associated with losing customers to competitors due to non-differentiated value perception in the eyes of the customer.
The CEM process
Delivering this kind of personalized customer experience increases loyalty but requires a depth of consumer understanding that requires accessing and analyzing in depth data gathered from all customer interaction touch points and communication channels throughout the organization.
The first step in designing a personalized and differentiated customer experience is to understanding the customer. This entails creating customer profiles using both first hand structured data in conjunction with third party data. By creating detailed customer profiles digital marketers can:
- Build an understanding of consumer needs and expectations
- Make informed decisions in real time to improve experience
- Gain insight on how consumer experience can be enhanced at specific points of interaction.
Once the socio-economic as well as emotional motivations driving buying behavior for one’s key target segments is identified, CEM then involves personalizing the buying experience to an extent that the customer feels special and valued.
As a process CEM is driven by the give and take of information. Marketers use the information available to analyze consumer profiles to design superior experience and then pass on the information about consumer preferences to consumer facing personnel to ensure they are able to deliver differentiated service to consumers, who in turn pass on the data related to their interaction to marketers. This two way flow of information drives customer experience management and enables organizations to differentiate their brand from competitors to turn one time customers into brand loyalists.
