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In a world where nearly three-quarters of all consumers say they are at least somewhat likely to buy based on experience alone, customer experience (CX) is more than a key differentiator for businesses. It is the differentiator.
Providing a superior customer experience ensures that you’ll attract and retain customers and encourage them to spend more with you. We know this because we surveyed 500 consumers who had made big purchases and that’s what they told us. Invoca’s research found that:
In this article, we’ll examine how effective customer experience management (CXM) can help ensure your company is well-positioned to deliver a standout customer experience.
Main Takeaways:
“Customer experience” describes all the feelings and perceptions a customer has about a business as well as their interactions with that business at every point along their customer journey.
That’s a lot to manage, and it’s why taking a formal approach to customer experience management is so important for a business. According to Gartner, CXM is “the discipline of understanding customers and deploying strategic plans that enable cross-functional efforts and customer-centric culture to improve satisfaction, loyalty, and advocacy.”
Quite simply, CXM is knowing your customers so well that you deliver an experience that keeps them close and willing to sing your praises.
Take care not to confuse CXM with CRM. Customer relationship management is the process of managing and analyzing customer data and interactions. When we think of CRM, we think of technologies or a system, like Salesforce. A CRM system contains everything you want to know about the customer, the “single source of truth” as Salesforce calls it, all in one place.
CXM and CRM are not the same, but they do complement each other. With CXM, you take the wealth of customer data contained in the CRM and use it to design data-driven strategies that help you deliver a superior customer journey.
CX management offers clear advantages for businesses committed to building trust and developing relationships with customers that lead to higher revenue and enhanced customer loyalty. Here are six advantages of establishing a superior CX management program.
You can’t have satisfied customers without providing them with a satisfactory (or better!) customer experience. Delivering a consistently good CX is also important.
A CX management program helps you do both by effectively managing a customer’s entire experience with your brand across all touchpoints. By focusing on the customer journey, you can identify pain points, optimize interactions, and create a more positive and seamless experience.
CXM can also help you increase customer loyalty. Good CX is warm and fuzzy. It is friendliness and personalization, and going the extra mile to help customers and make them feel like VIPs.
A superior CXM program helps you foster the good vibes that drive customer loyalty. Even better, it can help you evolve customers into brand advocates who attract more customers to your business. Yes, you want customers to buy from you again and again. But when their CX is so profound they want to evangelize for your brand, that is a powerful thing to behold.
Another advantage of superior CXM is that it helps enhance your brand’s overall reputation. An effective CXM program helps you instill trust in consumers, and trust is the number one factor in enhancing brand reputation. (Think about it: Would you make a serious purchase from a vendor that you didn’t trust?)
Creating a CXM program can help you earn consumers’ trust by enabling your business to provide, among many other things:
It’s a fair bet that most marketing professionals know the defining statistic from Fred Reichheld’s “Prescription for Cutting Costs” paper for Bain & Company. That is, a “5% increase in customer retention produces more than a 25% increase in profit.”
Customer retention is an outcome of good CXM. Just consider an example that Reichheld cites in his paper: Mutual fund Vanguard’s CEO backed his team’s decision to reject a fund investment because they feared the investor would flip the investment for a quick profit, raising costs for the remaining investors. The CEO used the opportunity to deliver a powerful CX message: Vanguard valued long-term relationships.
In addition to lowering costs through reduced customer churn, good CXM also leads to higher revenue. You can bet customers in Vanguard’s fund appreciated the firm putting long-term relationships over a one-time profit and came back for the next fund, and the next one. And, as Reichheld points out, they were probably willing to pay more to invest with Vanguard again.
Part of a good CX initiative is gathering valuable data and insights about your customers. A CXM program uses technology to help manage and collect customer feedback from various sources so that you can use data analysis to develop actionable strategies. Feedback can come from surveys, reviews, and focus groups that reveal the voice of the customer (VoC).
You can also retrieve VoC data from touchpoints like phone conversations. In fact, phone calls are one of the most valuable sources for capturing customers’ thoughts and feelings.
Data from phone calls can be easily collected at scale using call tracking, recording, and analysis software powered by artificial intelligence (AI). Tools like Invoca capture 100% of content from 100% of phone calls and use AI to provide marketers with a rich supply of insights into customer behavior, preferences, and pain points.
Businesses serious about CXM can gain a significant competitive edge in the marketplace. Companies like Apple have successfully used the customer experience to differentiate their brand, enhance customer loyalty, and drive new revenue streams. To achieve this, they have approached CXM from a customer-centric perspective: What does the customer want or need?
A prime example of this focus on CX is Apple’s iPhone launch. Steve Jobs insisted that the company set up a dedicated contact center to support the launch. He recognized it would be a watershed event, and he wanted to make sure that iPhone customers had a dedicated and skilled call center team with fast response times to handle their questions.
What customer experience management solutions and strategies can help your business execute an effective customer experience strategy? Here is a step-by-step approach to follow.
Start with a clear vision of what you want your brand’s CX to be. Do you want to be known for accommodating customers, like Apple, or protecting customers, like Vanguard? Does the vision align with overall business objectives? Vanguard’s CEO emphasized long-term relationships with clients over one-off sales, an experience existing customers valued.
Also, make sure your CX goals are achievable. Sure, you can swing for the fences if you like, but even power-hitting Aaron Judge only hits a home run every 10 at-bats. One in 10 works as a baseball power-hitting stat, but not for customer experience.
A data-driven customer journey map will help your marketing teams visualize and track the customer journey so that they can provide the right content and present solutions to the customer at the right time. A customer journey rarely happens in a short, straight line, so mapping the typical journey can be extremely helpful.
Touchpoints and interactions you might include on the map are customers calling for more information on a product or service, signing up for a newsletter, attending a webinar, or making a purchase. The typical customer journey starts from the moment consumers begin to interact with your brand to the point where they (hopefully) start to advocate for it.
If you are an omnichannel marketer, you should use data from all channels and methods you deploy, including apps, email, text, digital ads and social media, to inform and build out the map. You can collect data in many ways. Some of the easiest digital sources to use are online forms, email newsletter sign-ups and blog subscriptions, website tracking, chatbot interactions, and customer transaction activity.
You can also gather first-party data from interviews, focus groups, surveys, and in-person interactions. Phone conversations provide a rich source of first-party data, especially if you can capture data at scale using conversation analytics tools like Invoca. Statistics show that more than two-thirds of consumers prefer to communicate with businesses by phone, so there’s little doubt your phone calls can offer a trove of valuable data and insights.
Invoca uses AI and machine learning to automatically track, record, and analyze the entire content of phone calls to retrieve relevant data based on keywords. By training on the words and phrases most relevant to your business, Invoca’s AI learns to look for these relevant phrases and report them back to you.
Customer segmentation is crucial to CX. Not all customers are the same. Segmentation allows you to group customers based on common behaviors, preferences, demographics, and even location. You can segment customers in various data-driven ways.
For example: You run a travel business and receive a lot of phone calls from customers checking on the availability of flights and hotel packages to Turks and Caicos. With a tool like Invoca, you can use AI to detect trends in those phone calls. You can use the data to segment the customers interested in Turks and Caicos and target them for future campaigns.
Or, let’s say that your business is a bank. Analysis of thousands of phone calls shows that over the past three weeks, your call center has fielded many calls from customers checking rates on six-month certificates of deposit (CDs). That’s a segment to watch.
You can take data even further by using it to tailor interactions and communications. In our travel agency example, marketers might construct a special campaign aimed at the Turks and Caicos segment, offering them special flight and hotel package rates. Meanwhile, the bank’s marketing director might decide that the CD-inquisitive customer segment might respond to a specific incentive program.
Personalization is becoming increasingly important (and expected) in the customer experience. With AI tools like Invoca’s PreSense, you can hyper-personalize experiences in the call center. You can intelligently route calls to the right agent based on a caller’s online journey, and then further personalize the experience in real time by automatically alerting the agent to the caller’s details so that the agent can greet them by name and get straight to a resolution.
If you successfully conduct personalization at scale across multiple channels, you can kick marketing into overdrive with higher conversion rates and increased customer loyalty. A good example of this at work in the real world is Netflix. Netflix customers can seamlessly continue their viewing experience across mobile, computer, and TV from wherever they last stopped watching, and also receive consistent viewing recommendations across those channels.
Netflix offers omnichannel integration, another top goal of modern marketing operations. Omnichannel integration is a customer-centric approach that creates a seamless experience across all channels with consistent messaging and delivery. Customers have a better CX when they know exactly what to expect.
Invoca is another great example of omnichannel integration, bridging the gap between a customer’s digital experience and the experience they get from making a phone call to a business. Invoca connects the end of the digital journey to the start of the phone journey by intelligently routing the call and providing the caller’s name and their likely reason for calling to the right agent, making it possible for the agent to begin the call in a personalized way.
It’s impossible to develop an effective CXM program without engaging customer-facing employees. Contact center agents, customer service agents, and sales and marketing professionals all play a role in delivering exceptional experiences to your customers. Therefore, they must be engaged participants in CXM.
Fostering a customer-centric culture will help motivate your team members to understand the business value of providing a great CX. Relevant training is also essential. So, too, is using the right technology to measure the quality of agents’ performance objectively so they understand how and where they can improve their efforts to create standout experiences for customers.
AI tools can automate contact center quality assurance (QA) and provide objective performance-grading that all agents can learn from. Invoca’s AI can also help identify CX pain points on calls, highlighting them as coachable moments to help agents up their game.
Customer feedback can help you refine your CXM approach and improve customer experiences. Customers who complain take notice when they are heard and changes are made. Positive feedback helps you understand what you’re doing well, so you can build it.
So, make a point to collect feedback and find ways to incorporate it into your CXM program. You can gather relevant feedback from an array of sources, including online review sites, surveys, focus groups, and phone calls (if you are using conversation intelligence tools).
To gain even more of an edge in your CXM efforts, consider using newer capabilities like advanced sentiment analysis from Invoca, which uses neural network models to track the sentiment of callers and agents throughout every call, including how sentiment changes as calls progress. Sentiment is reported in Invoca dashboards and reports and displayed visually in Invoca transcripts on a line-by-line basis for easy review, so you can see exactly what parts of the conversation were negative and which were positive.
Finally, no CXM program is complete without ongoing measurement. You must develop metrics and KPIs that your contact center, customer service, and marketing teams can meet and continuously measure against.
These KPIs might include:
Use these and other relevant KPIs to highlight where improvements are needed in your CX management and make those adjustments quickly.
Let’s look at strategies you can use right now to make your CXM more effective and improve your customers’ experiences.
Automation helps CXM in several ways. Most importantly, automating routine processes provides sales, marketing and customer support staff with time to handle more complex issues.
Automation, combined with other AI processes such as machine learning, can help you quickly and efficiently sift and sort huge volumes of invaluable CX data to inform your CXM program.
Tips:
Good communication with customers is vital. This includes proactively reaching out to warn them about impending issues, such as if your website will be down for maintenance.
Tips:
To positively impact CX, you must get feedback from customers and respond to it quickly. You risk losing business if you wait too long to address problems, or even acknowledge positive comments. Make sure you have a system in place to collect feedback and close the loop by letting customers know you’ve heard them and to alert them when you’ve made changes.
Tips:
CXM is easier when customers are engaged and feel valued. Rewards and customer loyalty programs can be powerful tools for maintaining engagement and keeping customers coming back again and again.
Tips:
Predictive analytics uses modeling and statistics techniques on datasets to forecast future performance or outcomes. If you use data on hand to get ahead of the customer as part of your CXM strategy you will elevate the customer experience.
Tips:
As PwC put it several years ago: “Customer experience is everything.” Providing a positive CX satisfies customers and keeps them loyal. Providing a superior CX creates brand evangelists.
CX is so important to business success that you should consider implementing and maintaining a formal CX management plan. CXM helps ensure your business is customer-centric and consistently focused on delivering a superior CX.
Modern technology is critical to supporting a successful CXM program. AI-powered tools like Invoca can help you develop and maintain a seamless transition from online to offline for a true omnichannel customer experience that makes customers feel valued. Companies that overlook offline experiences, such as phone conversations, don’t have a CXM strategy because they only see half the picture. Only by merging online data with data from offline interactions, like phone calls, at scale, can businesses can get a true gauge of omnichannel interaction.
To learn more about the role of phone conversations in CXM, see these resources from Invoca:
Book a free demo today to discover how Invoca’s advanced sentiment analysis and other capabilities can help you transform your customer experience management and provide seamless, insight-driven interactions.
