Customer Experience Management Platforms – All you need to know
Customer Experience Management (CEM or CXM) is a developing trend. Organizations are now adopting a customer-centric approach, and this means that customer experience and satisfaction are becoming their central aim.
However, due to the suddenness of the shift, organizations are unprepared to change their focus, regroup and manage data in this transformed way. Their customer information is scattered, diluted and often incomplete.
The siloed approach that organizations traditionally adopted means that information collected by one department is not available to another. With the various departments only having partial view of customer information, coming up with customer-centric strategies is challenging or impossible.
CX and CEM – What are they?
Customer Experience (CX) is a summation of everything that happens to the customer – the steps they take, the communication that occurs and the impression that is created in a customer’s mind right from the moment they first become aware of the brand to the point where purchase and service is complete. Since businesses want to retain customers, ideally the customer’s relation with the organization should never end. This means that the evaluation of customer experience is a continuous, long, winding process.
Customer Experience Management typically refers to an organizations’ endeavor to tweak interactions made with a customer in pursuit of complete, continuous customer satisfaction. CEM revolves around the need for organizations to improve marketing, sales, and content strategy and in turn, increase brand loyalty.
There are four major elements that affect the overall experience of a customer.
- Customer Relationship Management
- Marketing, Content and Sales Strategies
- Web Design and Interactive Interfaces
- Customer Communication and Service
Digital Solutions to make CEM a possibility – CEM Platforms
Customer Experience Management Platforms tie the functioning of the aforementioned elements into one tool. They unify and prioritize customer information – collect it from disparate sources and put together all the information an organization may need in one place – and all of this is done digitally.
“Customer Experience Management Platforms are a collection of systems, tools and processes that record and segregate customer information, interactions and sentiments. They consist of a suite of abilities that range from information collection and analysis to content delivery, strategy recommendation and contextual experience customization.”
So, what do customer experience management platforms do?
The functionality of CEM platforms allows them to –
- Enable seamless flow of information for inter-departmental resource sharing
- Record and analyze customer interactions as well as feedback
- Track customer behavior, find patterns and highlight problem areas
- Predict outcomes based on customer information
- Create customer journey maps
- Recommend improvements in personalization and brand image and influence market insight
- Drive loyalty by improving customer relationship management
- Help in planning and execution of strategy
While some CEM platforms have these capabilities inbuilt, others have integration capabilities. Customer experience management platforms that do not have these abilities can integrate with other tools to perform the same actions. They integrate with automation tools, personalization engines, customer data platforms, customer journey mapping tools, customer relationship management tools, knowledge management software and VoC platforms to create a comprehensive customer experience management system.
As technology advances, Customer experience management platforms also evolve to tie in more capabilities. These include advertising management, location mapping, social listening, media analytics, sentiment analysis, content testing, data protection and marketing automation abilities. Many customer experience management platforms also have survey deployment engines and data synchronizing tools that make them versatile CEM tools.
The evolution of customer experience management
Before the emergence of customer experience management platforms, CEM was never a business’ priority because it was time and labor intensive. Organizations had neither the means to collect enough data nor big data computing capabilities. It was also challenging to supply sufficient and proper channels of communication and respond to the feedback received promptly. Even when customer information was collected, analyzing it, and using it to bring about procedural reformation was beyond the reach of manual workforces. To top this off, departments that obtained data from customers often did not share it with other departments leading to data dilution. The same data would have to be fetched repeatedly, stored separately, and analyzed with different goals in mind.
The shift in customer expectation and organizational competition has made it exceedingly important for organizations to adopt CEM and CEM platforms allow ease of conducting effective CEM strategy.
