What Is Customer Experience Management and Why It’s Important

Webster’s dictionary defines customer experience management as…just kidding. We wouldn’t do that to you! Simply put, customer experience management (CXM) is a strategy that involves continually improving customer interactions to meet or hopefully exceed customer expectations. 

Where product and price used to be the key differentiators for business success, research from 

Salesforce shows that 80% of customers feel the experience a company offers is as important as their products and services. Below we outline the whats, whys, and hows of CXM so that you can set up a strategy that helps improve customer satisfaction.

What Is CXM?

If customer experience is your customer’s perception of their relationship with your company, then CXM tries to ensure that perception is positive. That relationship is primarily based on all their interactions with you during the customer journey. Once you can identify the roadblocks your customers are facing, you can get down to fixing them. With that comes the search for the right solutions and CX partners to help you overcome the problems. For instance, if your feedback channels tell you that your customers aren’t happy with the payment options you’re offering, your top priority should be finding a CX partner with a robust, omnichannel payment platform. Or, if customers feel communication is lacking during power outages, find a partner specializing in multichannel customer communications. Ideally, you’ll find someone that serves all your CX needs under one roof.

Why CXM?

Without a robust CXM strategy, you’re just crossing your fingers and hoping for the best. In our highly competitive world, that’s not enough. According to Adobe’s 2020 Digital Trends Report, companies that prioritize customer experience management are 300% more likely to reach and exceed their goals than their competition. For utilities, who have historically relied on monopolies rather than experiences to retain their customers, CXM hasn’t been a huge priority. But increasing competitive, regulatory, and stakeholder pressures and rising customer expectations are forcing utilities to prioritize CX like never before.

Having satisfied customers means fewer customer complaints to your call center and higher J.D. Power scores. This keeps the regulators happy, which helps grease the wheels when your utility requests more funding or seeks approval for rate increases. Your customers benefit from rich, personalized experiences, which increases their satisfaction. Now that’s what we call a win-win outcome!

How? A CXM Strategy in Five Steps

There are five critical elements to any CXM strategy. 

1. Know Your Customer: It isn’t just about the services or products they need. It’s also about a customer’s behaviors, attitudes, and beliefs. Understanding what’s behind your customer’s decisions gives you insights into what they expect from you and your organization.
2. Map Out the Customer Journey: Understanding every touchpoint is increasingly challenging with omni-channel solutions but no less critical. Emails, social media, chats, phone calls, online recommendations, and customer feedback surveys–all of these interactions contribute to the customer journey. Tracking them allows you to analyze how each touchpoint impacts customer satisfaction and loyalty.
3. Choose the Right Partners: Once you know what you’re trying to accomplish, you can search for a CX partner that will best suit your needs. A suitable partner will listen to and understand your goals and offer solutions and tools to meet them.
4. Nurture Your Customer Relationships: By improving interactions, you can foster a more positive experience for your customers. Having satisfied customers requires you to meet customer expectations at every step of the customer journey. A journey where not just their needs are met at the end, but they also feel like they’ve gotten a little something extra.
5. Leverage Customer Feedback: Negative comments from customers can be hard to take, but just like any medicine, it will help you get better. Including feedback in your CXM strategy allows you to refine and improve customer interactions.

Data Is Your Best Friend (and Enemy)

One last word of advice, get your data in order. As we mentioned previously, unorganized data is one of the biggest obstacles to improving customer experience. Because if you don’t know what’s happening during your customer’s journey, you can’t make that experience better. Only by leveraging behavioral data, customer insights, design, and marketing technologies can you truly understand and optimize every step of the journey. Once you can gather and review data on positive and negative experiences with your company, you can continuously implement solutions to manage those interactions and improve them.