What is Customer Experience Management

            The key to business profitability depends largely on the customer experience of the product, thus making business organizations take the task of customer experience management (CEM) seriously. CEM simply can be understood as the ways by which a company gains control over its interaction with the customer. It includes a set of processes which the company deploys in order to track, oversee and manage company’s interaction with the client solely with the purpose of optimizing the customer’s experience and procure permanent customers for the company. A look at Gartner’s definition would give a wholesome idea of the concept, “the practice of designing and reacting to customer interactions to meet or exceed customer expectations and, thus, increase customer satisfaction, loyalty, and advocacy.”

             The customer experiences today are a case of an exponential number of interactions ranging from the website, live chat, phone calls, social media, etc. providing large-scale data to analyze customer interactions and find the best way in optimizing their experience. With Big Data solutions, advanced analytics and cloud computation on the forefront, the task of storing, processing and generating valuable insights from the data has become a feasible task. These technologies have the capability to integrate data and provide valuable insights have revolutionized the process of CEM.    

The Importance of Customer Experience Management:

• Helps in cost reduction as it harnesses the best way for interacting with the customer
• Plays an important role in building a permanent customer base by trying to encase a lasting impression on the customer
• Is a key factor in generating revenue through strong holding the old customers and tapping new customers by the word of the existing ones
• Contributes to the process of building brand preferences

Ways to orchestrate a strong customer experience management:

• Building complete customer profiles: As we witness cut-throat competition between business organizations, the margin of error is very meagre. No business can afford to be on the back foot, thus requiring businesses to orchestrate complete profiles comprising detailed information of their customers. This helps in enhancing customers experience at touch points, predicting customer behavior and make swift decisions.

• Personalizing customer interactions: globalization in the economic front has resulted in the global competition of businesses, making customers empowered with an infinite number of choices. In order to be the best choice of the customer, it is important to personalize the customer’s interaction offering him/her the most insightful, relevant, timely, and desiring message.

• Right – message- time- place: just providing insights on various platforms is no longer going to work to tap customers, it is pivotal to send the right message at the right place and at the right time. It is only then will CEM maximize the customer experiences and make business profitable.

The procedures and methodologies a company employs to control its interaction with the customers is termed as the Customer experience management (CEM). The objective of CEM is to improve interactions from the customer’s standpoint and encourage customer dependability. In order to deal with customer experience, an organization needs to develop an approach that covers every aspect of customer interactions.

CEM allows enterprises with a holistic view of its clients, with a complete, advanced data on their accounts. Customer experience encompasses interactions over conventional mediums like telephone calls, websites, chat windows and also through social platforms, text messages and other upcoming communication channels. Upcoming communication channels and touch interfaces usher a lot of complexities. More channels means more data to be processed and it also need to be incorporated with the already existing customer information. The capability to blend the data of customer relationship management (CRM) system with finance processes, ERP, and inventory management or data from other sources can be challenging.  

CRM platforms like Salesforce, Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP take a shot on linking the gaps between communication media and facilitate easy database incorporation. These vendors work towards incorporating sales and marketing data to pull out the customer data from data silos. 

In order to deliver a better customer experience, organizations are leveraging business intelligence and customer data analytics. Businesses also employ latest technologies like emotional analytics to determine the benefits the customers reap from the interactions with the organizations. 

For a better customer experience, companies also utilize tools like Knowledge management systems. Business professionals employ these tools to check the product information and customer experience with the products before. At times, business professionals also amalgamate this information with customer’s information and provide clients with data on their account, product learning, and inventory.

      To conclude, customer experience management has come to occupy a significant place in the working of the businesses; digital world is a world of exponential customer interactions, to neglect or ignore might become the factor for a company’s fall.