How to manage the customers’ experience
For a company or a brand to be successful, it must know how to manage the customers’ experience.
There is not one single definition for the customer experience management, so below you will see some short definitions of this concept, in order to better understand it.
Customer experience management (CEM or CXM) represents:
- the company’s strategy in order to control the customers’ perceptions;
- a collection of processes that a company uses in order to organise and track every interaction between the customers and the company;
- a discipline that helps understanding customers and implementing strategic plans;
- a practice of creating and reacting to customer interactions in order to meet or exceed the customers’ expectations, which have to lead to greater satisfaction and loyalty from the customers.
As “customer experience” looks similar with “customer service”, customer experience management (CEM) may look similar with customer relationship management (CRM), but there are also some differences between the last two.
In order to manage customer experience, a company or a brand should have a 360-degree view of customers and also up-to-date and integrated data on customer accounts. Moreover, it is important to create a customer experience strategy which has to be successful through following the four critical steps below:
Understand your customers – first step in building a customer experience strategy is understanding the needs and behaviors of the customers. The company can develop customer profiles and implement customer segmentation based on age, interests and other important factors.
Create a customer journey map – this helps the company to identify customer touchpoints, but also anticipate the customers’ interactions with the products and the services.
Develop an emotional connection – creating a brand personality which evokes emotions leads to a strong relationship between the customers and the company.
Capture customer feedback – customer feedback is important for the company because it helps tracking customer perceptions but also measuring the success of the customer experience strategy. Moreover, it is important to measure the satisfaction of the customers in real time.
In order to manage customer experience along the entire customer journey, a company has to apply the following techniques and strategies:
- generating content;
- evaluating customer sentiment;
- creating customer personas and marketing segments;
- investing in customer loyalty programms;
- evaluating customer touchpoints;
- analysing customer data.
“Anything that the customer can interact with is part of the customer experience. You need to be managing that experience so that all of your teams are working together to provide a seamless, pleasant experience.”
(Dave Dyson, Senior Customer Service Evangelist, Zendesk)
