Customer Experience Management Software
Today, customers interact with your business in more ways than ever before. In addition to the customary customer service call centers and purchases, your customers also interact through social media outlets and real-time web tools. As a result, customer relationship management tools that are designed to track these types of transactions may not give you a true picture of the customer’s experience. Today, you must be able to track all customer touchpoints to get a real picture, which requires customer experience management (CEM) tools. While CRM may be a familiar term, the customer experience management definition is the tracking, overseeing, and organizing each interaction with your customer across multiple touchpoints, regardless of how the interaction takes place. The goal of CEM is to create an effective, all-inclusive strategy that makes the most of each customer interaction. Customer experience management is quickly growing to become recognized as the top way to foster a higher level of customer loyalty.
Top 3 Customer Experience Management Best Practices
1. Customer Knowledge
Simply put, your customers typically know what good service is and expect it with every interaction with your company. At the same time, your customers expect you to provide the best end-to-end customer experience on any communication channel they choose. There are major differences in channel preference based on your customer demographics.
For example, younger generations are much more comfortable using social networks, peer-to-peer communication, and chat options. As a result, it’s important for your business to be able to track interactions across all channels.
It is also important for your business to evolve as knowledge changes. In the internet age, things change all the time — so must you. Keeping up to date with the latest and empowering your customers with the latest knowledge and tools is the foundation that everything else is built on.
2. Integrate the Customer Engagement Experience
Another customer service best practice is to empower your agents with the ability to integrate multiple channels in the engagement experience. Your customer service agents should be able to begin an interaction on one communication channel and complete it on a different one. For example, they should be able to start a customer transaction over the phone and then send a follow-up email with more precise information. Customer service agents must have the ability to see the entire session history so they do not have to repeat searches or questions, which would reduce the overall customer experience.
3. Listen on All Channels
It’s important to collect customer feedback following every interaction. You should also pose open-ended questions to get the most honest answers. All of these forms should be appended so your customer service professionals can always use rate solutions, while monitoring social channel comments. In the end, you will be able to optimize the customer experience best practices.
You want to diversify your channels so you can diversify your audience and ensure the feedback you receive is representative of all customers. We want to approach this with an omnichannel strategy to ensure that your communication platforms are integrated and customers are free to engage in whichever platform they so choose.
4. Provide a Personal Experience
Today, customers want to know who they are dealing with; they want a personal, intimate experience, and they want a customer experience platform that cultivates these wants. Providing an omnichannel approach is a means of providing this personal experience. An omnichannel experience is one that allows the customer to choose his or her preferred method of connecting with you. If the customer does not receive the kind of personal experience he or she wants, the customer knows he or she can easily go somewhere else and get it.
Customer experience management is needed to ensure a personal experience is provided to each and every customer.
5. Talk to Customers in Real-Time
When a customer engages you via his or her choice of communication, you need to have the means or tools to respond in real-time. This kind of immediate engagement connects the customer to you in a way you can provide a personal experience in real-time. Customers are not always patient, too, so if they have to wait, then they may just go.
6. Agent Performance/Enablement
Agent performance or performance enablement is about using technology to facilitate and improve the company’s and the customer’s journey. It is about connecting, contributing, enabling, and empowering. The company must enable its people to achieve success via continuous feedback, but it also must empower its customers to feel empowered by providing feedback that is varied and also continuous.
To incorporate agent performance and enablement best practices, you must use the right customer experience management tools, the right data, the right data management tools, and the right collaborative tools. People are the key to performance, both company employees and the customers they serve, so enabling to do their best and provide their feedback and to respond to feedback is critical to optimizing performance.
7. Experience Feedback
Experience feedback is required to build the company’s knowledge and exploit it to improve operations and performance. The experience feedback process involves obtaining feedback directly during or after the customer experience. This method allows for more lively, thorough feedback as opposed to feedback that comes days or weeks later when the experience is less vivid in the customer’s mind. Experience feedback provides more accurate data that can be digested by the company to provide better customer experience. It also enables you to transform a bad experience into a better one immediately.
Thus, to gain valuable and actionable insight, use the omnichannel approach to gather experience feedback. Customer feedback software can provide the tools you need to do so.
8. Treat Employees and Customers
Your employees are your company and what keeps the customers coming, and your customers are what keeps the company thriving. So, they should be rewarded for what they do in the way of “treats.” This builds morale and loyalty among employees and excitement among customers. Top CX companies reward employees and customers, and so should you.