Customer experience management, also known as CXM or CEM for short, is a term we hear a lot in the world of consumer facing business and marketing. But what exactly does it mean? In this article, we’ll cover what CXM is, how it works, and what it can do your business.
The customer experience management model is a system of marketing strategies and technologies that focus on customer experience, engagement and satisfaction. Companies use AI and customer experience management to track, oversee, and organize every interaction they have with a customer across the entire customer lifecycle. Think of it like this: customer experience or CX, refers to the collective and ongoing experience a customer has with a brand resulting from every interaction with that company; CXM is how the businesses understands and analyzes these experiences.
Research shows that improving CX leads to growth and increases profits.
Customer experience begins when a consumer discovers your brand and remains important throughout the lifecycle. Every customer brings unique needs, issues, and context to brand interactions, and their expectations can also vary greatly. However, companies often struggle when it comes to personalizing the experience for each customer. Traditional methods of customization are resource-intensive and difficult, if not impossible, to scale. As a result, CX is often compromised.
Customer experience is impacted by a wide range of activities managed by multiple departments—including marketing, sales, and customer service—and is profoundly affected by everything from accounting rules to HR policy. But according to Gartner, over 70% of CX leaders struggle to design projects that increase customer loyalty and achieve results. To gain a competitive edge, you must develop marketing strategies that optimize customer interactions and drive business growth.
Consistently providing what’s considered a “good” customer service experience not only helps companies build a strong customer base, it also helps you attract and acquire new customers. Providing a seamless CX and gaining trust paves the way for new connections. But one bad experience can send customers looking elsewhere. To put it simply, good CX breeds loyalty while poor CX can cost you business. If you’re not providing a good CX, you’re handing your competition a serious advantage.
A number of factors influence a customer's journey towards buying a product or service as well as whether or not they decide to continue doing business with your brand. It’s important to understand the customer’s expectations and reactions. Things like demographics, background, and goals all play an important role in converting a browser into a buyer.
Once a customer is onboarded, CXM is all about keeping them satisfied. Brands need a strategy and solution to handle the entire CXM process. If done right, CXM can be a critical lever for boosting long-term business performance. CXM helps define what your brand looks like to your customers, putting them at the forefront of marketing, customer support, and sales efforts to drive brand loyalty and retention. Effective CXM requires a 360-degree view of customers that’s up to date, 24/7. Start by building a CX-focused team whose job is to understand customer needs and behaviors and create a unique customer journey map. The CX team can also create and fine tune the brand personality. The goal should be to build a connection with your customers and capture continuous customer feedback.
Now that you know what CXM is, how do you go about making it better? A great place to start is by implementing artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance your CX. Advanced in AI has made it possible to anticipate what a consumer is trying to do and deliver a personalized, predictive, and effortless customer experience—at scale. Here are some of the things that effective AI can help brands achieve.
AI works on behavioral analytics, the base of which is data unification. Pulling together and filtering data, for example, by timeframe, for analysis provides critical insights into customer behavior—their wants and needs. Journey analytics makes this tedious task easy and also provides accurate data you can use to create practical business strategies. Say goodbye to the mind-numbing days of crunching numbers and juggling countless spreadsheets to arrive at the best business decision. With the right technology, you can get what you need quickly—access more information, in less time, and with less effort.
Today’s customers want to get what they need with maximum convenience and minimal effort. When it comes to reaching out to brands, that means using popular messaging apps that support asynchronous communication—conversations that happen across time as opposed to live chat, which happens in real time. To provide customers with the best possible experience, you need to choose the technology stack that best suits your goals by enabling asynchronous communication. To optimize productivity in an asynchronous workflow, make the most of the tech stack and keep finding new ways to enhance asynchronous communication. This will directly impact CX.
In today’s always-on digital world, CXM is all about connecting the relevant dots and extracting meaningful data. Journey analytics technology enables data collaboration on cross-functional platforms. Generating real-time insights makes the data valuable and useful while also relieving businesses of the need to constantly monitor multiple data sources that work independently of each other.
To get the best outputs, you need the most informative inputs. Each business has different goals, and each customer has a different journey. When given the business content, AI can analyze the data and identify causes of stagnant growth—for example, how some events shape customer behavior. Touchpoint details that impact KPIs and the customer journey are also vital inputs that help AI generate insightful results.
It's amazing how ai can improve customer experience+1. By responding to customer queries and problems with customer experience real time, customers feel valued. Delivering personalized customer experiences is time-consuming for human agents, leading to increased turnaround time. On the other hand, if you use AI, you can get the same thing done in a matter of seconds which is a true competitive advantage in today's reality. Tools such as chatbots and virtual assistants are the best option for providing quick responses at scale. They analyze data in real time and answer instantly, creating a seamless customer experience. Personalized automated conversations not only eliminate delays without compromising conversation quality, but also acquire data from customers that can be used to train the algorithm. As a result, AI-based automation keeps getting more powerful over time.
The data-driven functionality of AI has many advantages, one of which is ad personalization. The journey of one to zero clicks is possible only with AI, which can create personalized customer experiences quickly and automatically, driving higher conversions and uplift. CX becomes smoother thanks to prediction and intelligent responses. Communication is easy and hassle-free. And AI can assess customer behaviors to drive continual improvement.
By creating dynamic digital ads that stand out and break through the digital noise, ad personalization makes it easy for customers to engage with your brand. Drawing on web journeys, purchase history, demographics, personas, and other digital signals, AI can identify patterns in interaction data and anticipate customer intent. Using machine learning, ad personalization can optimize return on advertising spend, providing a clear line of sight into campaign performance by time, segment, metric, channel, and creative.
With an ever-increasing customer base, it’s difficult to capture all customer segments and personalized experiences accordingly—especially if you’re relying on human effort. If you use AI-powered tools such as customer journey analytics help get it done, efficiently and effectively. Rapid insights and actionable recommendations using the customer experience management model can empower more agile and fluid business decision making.
AI can understand different customer expectations and help personalize experiences accordingly. Plus, AI can extract insights from big data and design a relevant, effective automation solution. And AI adds positivity to a customer's experience, helping to establish a better brand image. That’s why more companies are choosing AI for CX.
Consider what “doors” your business currently has that a customer might come knocking at. Your phone number, email, and website are likely the first things that come to mind. Perhaps you consider social media accounts as points of entry too, as well as messaging apps like Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, WeChat, and many others. Billions of people use these apps to communicate every day, and they also provide a powerful customer service platform. In the recent years, many have also added a platform to sell goods. The goal of engaging with messaging apps and automation is not to reduce headcount; instead, the goal is to lower barriers to entry and open doors to new customers.
Keep in mind, supporting conversations through messaging apps doesn’t necessarily mean fewer phone calls or website visits. But you may find different or new customers available to you through these channels. Messaging apps are a good place for customers to evaluate your brand, ask for help, and engage, in addition to purchasing products or services.
In May of 2020, we asked Dimensional Research to conduct a CX Reality Check study to find out if customer experiences align with what businesses believe they are providing. The results were clear: customers were embracing technology and digital support channels, but brands were playing catch up. While 96% of businesses reported that technology had motivated them to rethink their customer support strategies, they still needed time to implement automation, conversational AI, and other digital support technologies.
And although 61% of businesses felt their digital channels delivered consistent customer experiences, the truth was that 50% of the time the automated channels failed. And when switching support channels, 89% of customers were asked to repeat information. This suggests a significant gap between the kind of CX companies think they are providing and what customers are actually experiencing.
The COVID-19 pandemic left many businesses reeling and others scrambling to evolve their service models for enterprise survival. Curious to know where things stood in the wake of this global disruption, we asked Dimensional Research to conduct a follow-up CX Reality Check study in July of 2021. The results were surprising—but also not surprising. Digital transformation of customer experience efforts, sometimes referred to as customer experience transformation, stalled during the pandemic. When sweeping lockdowns first started, companies quickly realized just how far behind their CX efforts actually were. Many businesses discovered that their solutions weren’t up to the challenge; companies couldn’t scale their solutions when demand spiked. And customer experiences suffered as a result.
"Predictive CX platforms allow companies to better measure and manage their CX performance; they also inform and improve customer experience, along with strategic decision making. These systems make it possible for CX leaders to create an accurate and quantified view of the factors that are propelling customer experience and business performance, and they become the foundation to link CX to value and to build clear business cases to improve customer experience. They also create a holistic view of the satisfaction and value potential of every customer that can be acted upon in near real time. Leaders who have built such systems are creating substantial value through a wide array of applications across performance management, strategic planning, and real-time customer engagement."
Source: McKinsey & Company
As CXM evolves, companies will have to:
Source: Forbes
SiriusXM is an American satellite radio company with more than 32 million subscribers. For years, its customers called a 1-800 number when they needed support. But the company began considering automating the more routine customer service needs to provide more self-service options.
For nearly 20 years, SiriusXM focused its customer engagement efforts on calls, because most people listen to satellite radio in their cars and call in from there when they need help. The company had built up its call center into a robust operation. However, with a rapidly growing customer base and rising consumer expectations, SiriusXM began to explore how technology, particularly AI, could enhance call center productivity. If many routine questions and customer interactions could be automated, the best agents could be freed up to focus on higher touch interactions that require emotional intelligence as well as higher value transactions including selling.
As SiriusXM’s subscriber base grew, the company needed a way to control costs without sacrificing CX quality. Any initiatives had to have support from the top down—and had to provide the right ROI. Getting people to switch from the channels they’re accustomed to using is a challenge, so the company had to present this to customers as an opportunity to go down an easier path.
In line with the innovative culture at SiriusXM, the company decided to pilot chatbot technology in the agent environment to create a partnership between people and technology that supports them. The goal is to improve CX while containing costs, enabling consumers to get their needs handled as quickly and efficiently as possible. Making the experience great is critical to adoption.
To start, SiriusXM analyzed thousands of call transcripts looking for patterns. The company then put the data to use in three ways:
In each case, the company used natural language processing (NLP) to make the conversation feel natural while also ensuring that a human agent could quickly be brought in if needed.
Within months, the company saw a 25% increase in chat volume year-over-year when comparing a six-month period. Additionally, approximately 25% of consumer queries are contained in self-service interactions with the virtual agent, supported by the [24]7.ai industry-leading AIVA conversational AI technology. Integrating NLP with predictive technologies that map consumer intent was the key to these efficiency gains.
Automation with an AI-powered chatbot has become the first point of contact for many customers trying to access specific information or resolve certain issues. If a SiriusXM subscriber’s radio stops working, instead of calling the 1-800 number they can visit the SiriusXM website and see an option to chat on every page. Clicking on the chat icon immediately connects the customer to a chatbot that offers to help and can engage the same way a human agent would. That’s the power of AI for CXM.
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When COVID-19 forced offices worldwide to shut down, contact centers had to quickly adapt.
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