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It bears repeating: the customer is always right (at least in matters of taste). More recently, 87% of customers say they expect a personalized and consistent experience across all channels. They’re right once again, but only about 50% of companies go out of their way to provide this experience.
Your customer service team must take a proactive approach to improving customer satisfaction and retention. If not, they’ll simply go elsewhere.
Luckily, customer experience management (CXM) is easier to build and implement now than ever before. It’s all thanks to advancements in CX technology.
CXM is all about creating a comprehensive map of every step of your buyers’ journey, from that first call-to-action to the final survey. At the core of CXM is both an in-depth strategy for excellent customer service and advanced CX technology that can gather customers and optimize their experience.
Your customers interact with many different touchpoints across every branch of your organization. If your organization was a building, it would have many entrances, many rooms visitors would need to access, and a multitude of hallways and staircases leading between them. 
Following this analogy, think of CXM like the people watching these entrances or signs pointing visitors to where they need to go. It’s not enough to have them. They must be deployed in a way that’s helpful for visitors and tenants alike.
Why do all this? Well, according to a 2023 study from Zendesk, 70% of consumers spend more with companies that offer great customer experiences.
A CXM strategy with state-of-art CX technology helps your customers by improving personalization and decreasing churn. It also helps your customer service team by streamlining their experience and improving operational efficiency.
Before we go on to the next category, let’s quickly address an issue that may cause confusion. CXM and CRM are off by only one letter. Since the two relate to the same topic, it would be perfectly understandable to mix them up.
Where CXM stands for customer experience management, CRM stands for customer relationship management. A CRM platform collects and stores data from customer interactions. This data is integral for developing strong customer relationships, but the platform itself doesn’t do much beyond that for customers.
Conversely, a CXM platform will take CRM data and use it at every touchpoint to improve the customer experience. It enabled proactive engagement with customers and can more directly assist customer service agents during interactions rather than afterwards.
To put it simply, CRM software improves internal processes while CXM software enhances the customer-facing aspects of those processes. One is transactional, the other is relational.
Both, however, are important parts of your overall CXM strategy.
Now to get down to the nitty gritty. Here’s a list of features to look for when choosing your CXM software.
We won’t need to go into too much detail given the last section, but it’s still worth pointing out. CRM platforms like HubSpot and Salesforce integrate with CXM software. This lets you unify customer data in one place, which is vital to improving the overall experience.
If you've been using these CRM platforms already, this integration makes it easy to migrate years and years worth of data to new CXM software.
For fans of inbound marketing, this is nothing new. A customer interaction isn’t a one-and-done transaction. It’s often a journey with many steps along the way. Knowing that, who goes on the journey of 1000 steps without a map?
Advanced CXM software can generate maps of your customers’ journeys across different milestones.
Here’s an example of what that may look like. A prospective customer comes to your landing page. Intrigued, the customer chats with an agent (or perhaps a bot) on your website and signs up for your newsletter. Upon reading your newsletter several days later, the customer books a demo and later makes a purchase.
This is about as simple as a customer's journey gets. Realistically, there may be many more steps, much more time between that first visit and the final purchase, and hiccups and snafus along the way.
Once CXM software has mapped the customer’s journey, it can observe interactions that happen at each milestone. It can then predict customer behavior and act accordingly.
Some of your customers want to call you. Others want to send you an email or an embedded message on your website. Others still will try to contact you on social media.
The best CXM software includes omnichannel engagement, allowing you to create a consistent experience on your website, mobile app, and social media accounts. It provides consistent messaging, omnichannel staff training, and proactive support across all channels.
Customer loyalty and brand recognition will improve as their journey remains seamless between each milestone. Even if their journey stops in the middle, they’ll be able to pick up right where they left off.
Large organizations need to go beyond your ordinary data collection. Enterprise analytics use advanced features such as AI to take existing data and forecast customer behavior. This allows you to create more sophisticated customer personas and accurately predict their decisions.
A restaurant franchise, for example, could use enterprise analytics to create tailored menus and efficient supply chains based on regional ordering trends. A healthcare organization can predict outcomes and develop personalized treatments based on a patient’s history.
Whatever the business at hand may be, the outcome remains the same: customer needs are met proactively.
Voice calls are still one of the most important ways agents interact with customers, as they have been for many years. Call pop injects a bit of modernization into the oldest channel.
Whenever a customer calls, important information is instantly revealed to the agent such as contact information, payment details, customer history, and customer sentiment. This makes it easier for agents to answer every customer call. It also reduces average handle call time, making everyone happier.
Along with saving time, this information helps build customer trust and allows agents to create relevant sales offers in real-time. Naturally, this improves sales conversion rates. Once again, everyone is happy.
Advanced CXM software is a great first step in taking your customer experience to the next level. The features this technology provides will help make life easier for your agents, which will in turn make them better equipped to support your customers.
The value of strong customer service can’t be overstated. That’s true for us at Continuant as well. We’ve been helping organizations all over the world stay connected with employees and customers alike for more than 28 years. We offer round-the-clock support to our customers so that they can do the same for others.
We’ll help you deploy the tools you need to elevate your customer service, including CXM software, CX platforms, and omnichannel contact centers like Genesys Cloud and the Continuant Connect Contact Center (aka C4). In fact, we were recently named Genesys partner of the year.
Schedule a call with us to get started today.
