Customer Experience Management Program: 9 Capabilities To Improve Business Performance

8 min

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Darshan Shah

October 20, 2022

While just 74% of consumers are at least somewhat likely to make a purchase based solely on experiences, 86% of customers would stop using a brand after two bad experiences. Making an effort to comprehend the big picture is necessary to develop an effective customer experience management program (CXM).

The goal of a good CXM program is to provide a personalized experience that boosts brand loyalty, customer retention, customer acquisition, revenue, and a greater bottom line. It includes several customer touchpoints at or before the time of purchasing products as well as aftersales services, such as returns and customer enquiries.

According to Deloitte, over half of all customers believe good experiences matter the most in their buying decisions. Hence, if your organization is devoid of a CXM program, managing customer perceptions and brand loyalty can get tough.

Many businesses squander time, money, and customer loyalty because they refuse to modify the outdated program designs they have been forced to live with. However, a strong CX program can serve as a guide for better organizational alignment and customer experience.

9 Functionalities of a Great CXM Program

"I would say that the organization must embrace the idea that customer experience management is a continuous improvement program, not a one-and-done silver bullet project. Leaders must be ruthlessly honest within their organization about how front-and-center customers are in every decision, operation, role, and customer interaction. The old chestnut statistic from a 2005 Bain study revealed a "delivery gap" where 80% of companies believe they provide superior propositions, but only 8% of those companies have customers who agree. That delivery gap exists in your organization and the hard work of rooting it out over years of focused effort is what the mission of a CX program should be," says Jeff Sheehan, Managing Director and Principal CX Advisor, CX JS Consulting, in the Clootrack report.

Instead of looking for a lasting cure, you'd need to evaluate and amend your CXM program regularly. Take a second look and discuss the long-term goals of your CX program with others in your organization. Plan your yearly program schedule around periodic economic indicators to allow for future improvement. Then, review your program annually. Determine where you have room to rethink, add activities, modify poorly - designed projects, drop projects, and add operational and economic data that enhances your capacity to forecast consumer behavior by looking at your timeline.

With the proviso that you will be iterating and refining the project once you can integrate it into a larger program, you can handle any urgent organizational needs with an ad-hoc pulse. Good programs are seldom hastily put together.

1. Customer Journey Mapping

Customer journey mapping—knowing your consumers' experiences at each touchpoint—is mostly the first step towards understanding the current experience. Firms usually excel at certain aspects of that journey, but without a customer-centric perspective, they risk failing at key junctures. To contextualize the experience from the customer's viewpoint, consider the journey rather than just the touchpoints.

So, you must be able to comprehend where and how these events occur to assess, analyze, and improve the customer experience.

Be aware of who your target market is.
Know all the points of interaction they have with your business.
Create a map of the entire customer journey, including initial contact, awareness, investigation, choice-reduction, purchase, and delivery of goods and services.

The objective is to analyze where enhancements can be made in the customer journey and to ascertain their effect on the overall customer experience.

2. AI-Powered Customer Experience Analytics

The qualitative data from customer comments can help you develop your customer experience management program strategy by providing context for ratings and providing answers to problems you hadn't considered.

However, insights from unstructured data don't necessarily fit into a neat box, unlike the quantitative data you're gathering through the CX survey. Make sure they line up with the way you're tracking them.

Brands may better assess the level of customer service engagement by categorizing and automatically evaluating customer interactions. This process also reveals insights that indicate possible courses of action that would increase customer satisfaction.

Following brand-specific product hierarchies, tag and organize comments.
Separate important categories and subcategories to focus on in more detail.
To maintain an upward trend in customer satisfaction, refine your areas of concentration.
Get a broad understanding of the recurrent themes and shifting sentiment.
Utilize interactive heat maps to explore differences between regions.
Keep track of how performance and mentions of products and services correlate.
To keep ahead of low-frequency, high-impact events, use predictive analytics.

3. Omnichannel Support

Customers cannot communicate their requirements and want when brands cannot hear them via the channels they are using to contact them, including email, social media, web chat, mobile apps, and smart speakers. Customers who don't feel like they've been listened to are more inclined to switch to a rival.

Understanding how your marketing material contributes to the consumer journey is critical. You may determine where different categories of information, such as informative, instructional, and engaging content, appear by analyzing your content.

Before conducting your analysis, you must ensure that all of your information is accurate and current.
Verify the functionality of any web connections, phone numbers, and your chatbot.
You should take optimization into account while producing content for a particular campaign. And decide if you can use it in your omnichannel marketing.

Your digital platforms will have a smoother customer journey if you use identical graphics and content since customers will be exposed to the same branding and messaging. You must watch out that you don't lose sight of the big picture when considering your omnichannel strategy. You need to consider the final product or service you intend to provide to your customer. Try to keep with common terms that people use to describe things. And comparable marketing techniques to produce a positive customer experience.

4. Content Generation

Any content that is created by users or customers rather than the company is referred to as user-generated content. Images that people post to social media platforms are one of the most prominent instances of this in the travel business and may have a huge impact because they usually reflect customer opinion.

The trick, for instance, in the tourist sector is to figure out how to let customers produce user-generated material that enhances their experience and acts as effective word-of-mouth advertising. Many tourist attractions accomplish this by using branded photo booths, which let visitors simply post photos they've taken to social media with a logo or other discreet branding.

Apart from this, each team will have opportunities to demonstrate value to customers thanks to supporting research, marketing materials, and sales enablement information. To go even further, organizations ought to think about personalizing customer-facing information, such as emails, texts, websites, and mobile apps, to increase relevance and consumer engagement.

5. Customer Sentiment Evaluation

To determine where to improve experiences, CX teams should gather the voice of the customer data throughout the entire journey. Brands should utilize consumer sentiment research tools and strategies to comprehend customer sentiments rather than relying solely on that data.

Make sure you provide customers the freedom to describe their customer experience as it really was. Use multiple-choice questions with more than one response and rating scales with a wide range of choices (1–10) to achieve this.

You can use the following questions on feedback forms:

How user-friendly do you think our website is? How likely are you (on a scale of one to 10) to tell a friend or family member about our service? How simple was it for you to find what you were looking for on a scale of one to ten? (between one and ten)
What do you think of the checkout procedure? (between one and ten)
Which of the following goods do you think is the most practical? (Provide three to five alternatives)
What feature of our store's layout do you find most appealing? (Provide three to five alternatives)
What was the most challenging aspect of your shopping trip? (Provide three to five alternatives)

Check answers every week after you've generated the forms and added them to your website, emails, receipts, and social media profiles. Keep an eye out for trends and start listing ways to enhance the customer experience. Simple solutions can be put into action immediately and quickly, while more complicated ones require careful planning and execution. Make sure you have enough evidence to support the need for and likelihood of improvement in customer satisfaction from these solutions.

6. Siloed Ecosystems Collaboration

Consistent delivery throughout the journey can be difficult, which is made worse by a company's siloed processes. Progress won't be possible unless everyone in the company is aware of their influence on customer satisfaction.

Billing and credit operations, for instance, could consider themselves to be distant from frontline delivery, yet for a consumer, a bad billing experience might trump a good store or online experience.

The firm may overcome these silos and significantly improve the customer journey experience with the help of cross-functional experience governance. The organization may realign existing processes and create better experiences by committing to a customer-centric perspective.

A multidisciplinary engagement is the foundation of a successful and effective customer experience strategy, and it ensures that staff members are aware of how each individual influences the experience in some manner.

7. The Voice of the Customer Analysis

Companies that integrate customer feedback into every aspect of their operations, getting feedback from customers wherever they are and sharing it with all employees to close the loop, do far better than those that do not. Email, interactive voice response (IVR), internet, mobile, receipts, and social media posts are all examples of multi-channel feedback.

The appropriate processes fuel quantifiable improvement to collect consumer feedback, give personalized insights, and prioritize actions for each employee.

For instance, businesses that give staff members access to customer feedback "on the go" via mobile devices saw an average increase in Net Promoter Score (NPS) of 11 points.

8. Frontline Employee Empowerment

Enable your frontline employees to manage necessary remedial steps and close the loop with the end user by setting off notifications. Your chances of having a happy customer base and more contented staff rise when you give your customer support team more authority.

For anyone, conducting business can be challenging if they lack the proper tools. So, provide your employees with internal chat platforms, help desk software (such as ticketing systems) to serve as a resource for customer questions and to quickly troubleshoot problems, and automation tools to streamline tasks. This will allow your representatives to respond quickly to customers while they are on the phone with them.

Moreover, they must have sufficient training to assist customers appropriately and be knowledgeable about how to address typical and uncommon problems without always seeking assistance.

9. Customer Feedback Utilization

Include customer metrics together with other conventional scorecard data in the company's balanced scorecard. This procedure will guarantee that executives and staff are aware of the significance of these indicators and the present levels of customer satisfaction and loyalty. Official documentation and company meetings are the results of current customer feedback.

Every comment should be written down and saved. A major component of your product or service may be missing or in need of an update if numerous customers are providing the same kind of comments. So that your development team can improve your product or service, gather all input. Once you've made these improvements, keep tracking customer happiness.

When you pay attention to what customers are saying, you may anticipate what will need to be covered in new hire training. For instance, if consumers frequently have trouble navigating the online portal on your website, make sure new hires are prepared to assist them.

Finally, it is crucial to let customers know that you value their feedback and will consider it. Make sure your consumers are aware of any adjustments or new features that have been made as a result of their direct feedback whenever you release a product update. Customers like to be understood.

The Key Takeaway

Revision and deployment must be continuous if customer experience (CX) programs are to be effective. Businesses often "start up" CX projects, then abandon them, only returning to the program's measuring framework when something goes wrong. Increasing customer satisfaction entails relying on a static survey tool or all-powerful database for far too many. Instead, a company's CX program should be a seasonal process that regularly evaluates fresh ideas to influence business decisions.