Customer Experience Management (CXM) has emerged as a key differentiator - and top priority - for businesses today. And for good reason. Here's what the data tells us about its importance and growing popularity:
"CX drives over two-thirds of customer loyalty, outperforming brand and price combined according to CX leaders." (Gartner)
"Companies that prioritized and effectively managed customer experience were three times more likely than their peers to have significantly exceeded their top business goals in 2019." (Adobe/Econsultancy)
"High-performing CX organizations are more than 9X likely to integrate data from multiple sources, analyze customer interactions across channels, and engage customers optimally across channels." (Pointillist)
Clearly, engaging in customer experience management is the need of the hour. At this point, you might be wondering: "What is CXM?"
CXM involves monitoring customer interactions across physical and digital touch-points in a customer's journey. The end-goal is to offer holistic, customized omnichannel experiences that boost brand loyalty, customer satisfaction, as well as revenues. It requires extensive planning, informed decision-making, and the use of intuitive technology in order for it to be successful.
Stripped down to its essence, CXM makes collaborative use of digital technology (think: chatbots, live chat, project management tools, etc.) that empower customers to self-serve as well as strategic decision-making to further your marketing, sales, and customer service efforts. Additionally, CXM takes into account the customer's emotions and how customers feel when they interact and connect with your brand. To that end, let's look at the top-five CXM strategies that can boost customer happiness, employee morale, and overall brand perception. Measuring your NPS score is crucial to your CX strategy.
Top-5 Customer Experience Strategies Worth Investing Your Time, Energy, & Efforts Into
1. Get to Know Your Customers & Draft an Accurate Buyer Persona
Image source for the following two images: Brafton.com
As obvious as this strategy seems, you'll be surprised to know that most brands don't spend enough time in creating an accurate buyer persona that fits the bill. Not understanding who your audience is like shooting in the dark. You need to get a pulse of what your ideal buyer's ambitions/needs look like, what their pain-points include, among other things. You also need to analyze which of your customers have the highest commercial value in order to maximize your marketing and sales efforts.
This is where creating an in-depth buyer persona and getting a 360-degree understanding of your buyer can help as it includes a string of defining characteristics that can best describe your ideal buyer. Here's an example of a B2C buyer persona from Munro:
2. Foster an Emotional Connect by Delivering Personalized Customer Experience
"57% of online buyers are happy to exchange personal data in return for personalized offers or discounts."
A direct extension of the first strategy, brands can only hope to personalize the customer experience if they know what makes their customers tick in the first place. By gathering valuable data, companies can target customers with personalized offers and tailor-made experiences that lead to a winning customer experience combination. Let's look at a real-life example to understand this better. Clothing retailer Pull&Bear's website takes a personalized navigational approach to segment users based on what they like and then personalize the experience from the get-go:
Image source for the following three images: Pullandbear.com
If a user selects "Woman," they are taken to the following page:
Notice how the website neatly categorizes its offerings so that the experience is seamless and intuitive at every step of the way. Of course, note that visitor choices can be captured via cookies so that you can make the necessary alterations and customize the experience, especially when users create accounts, browse through products, or connect with the brand on social media channels. All in all, a consistent and unified personalized experience can delight customers and boost brand loyalty:
3. Focus on Capturing Customer Feedback to Drive Continuous Improvement
Some of the most successful brands always go the extra mile to capture customer feedback. This makes sense. Instead of second-guessing what issues your customers might be facing, why not ask them directly?
More importantly, brands should look at ways to make the feedback gathering process fun, interactive, and quick (instead of using the long and boring forms). This is where you can use live chat tools, social media polls, emails, etc. to roll out fun surveys and store real-time interactions with customers. Mostly, customers will need to choose from a list of predefined options (as opposed to typing long answers.) Here's an example of 'social listening' where users provide candid and real-time feedback which is invaluable for the brand in terms of actionable insights and user-centric data:
Image source: Helpscout.com
The process is speedy and seamless, to say the least. You can also send follow up emails to customers to gain more insightful feedback.
4. Consistently Measure the ROI from Offering Exceptional Customer Experience
It is great to roll out initiatives that are enhancing your customer's experience, but it is equally important to measure the efficacy of said efforts. One way to do this is through a Net Promoter Score survey (NPS). Quite simply, NPS assesses whether or not your customer is likely to recommend your company/specific product or service to their friends, relatives, or colleagues. This is what an NPS survey looks like: Image source: Questionpro.com
If you wish to understand where your brand stands in terms of customer loyalty and satisfaction, using key performance indicators such as NPS, Customer Satisfaction Score, Customer Effort Score (CES), etc. are key.
5. Build a Strong Team to Boost Customer Experience
All things considered, you cannot deliver an exceptional customer experience if your in-house team isn't driven and motivated. Here's how you can build a rock-solid team culture that ensures that your employees and customers are always at the center of every operation and initiative:
Train your team with the requisite expertise and skills.
Empower your team with self-help assets, resources, and training material that they can access at the click of a button. Plus, make sure that all the material is constantly updated in real-time.
Focus on driving empathetic communication. Your CX team should be patient and trained to make the customers feel special. The idea is to offer help and build trust in frustrated users.
A strong team that works in collaboration paves the way for a great customer experience that can exceed customer expectations while simultaneously aligning with business goals and outcomes.
Closing Thoughts
Understanding the NPS benchmarks for your respective domain is essential for your strategy. Here's the long and short of it: CXM, if implemented correctly, can reduce customer churn, boost sales, enhance brand loyalty, and increase profits. What's important to remember here is that customer experience involves more of your customer's emotions and feelings, and measures how customers feel as a key performance metric. While it deals with many metrics that are intangible, you can take 5 tangible steps to create a winning CXM strategy:
Get to know your customers and build an accurate buyer persona.
Foster an emotional connection by delivering a personalized customer experience.
Focus on driving customer feedback for ongoing improvements.
Consistently measure the ROI by offering an exceptional customer experience.
Build a strong team to boost the customer experience.
There you go. Try these time-tested strategies and create a CXM strategy that can wow and woo your customers, all at the same time.
Post submitted by Ashwini Dave
Ashwini is passionate about Business, Entrepreneurship, E-commerce, emerging technology, and Digital Marketing. She is working with Acquire ( https://acquire.io/ )as a digital marketing expert. She is a free soul and adventurous scholar who spends her free time with herself, loved once, music, as well as watching & playing sports. She is ocean addicted and on roads being a thrill-seeking traveler to get new experiences as she looks at life as our very own works of art.
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