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 touch points 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 touch points, 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.

Customer Experience Management Solutions

General Customer Experience Tools

General customer experience tools, like Zendesk, have quickly become a must-have in every customer experience manager’s toolset. They allows you to empower your agents to deliver a superior customer experience by including a self-service portal as well as a case-based system. When you empower your business with tools like Zendesk, your customers will be able to query and read articles filled with important information about your services and products. At the same time, you can make content about internal processes hidden from the public and only visible to your employees.

These tools give you an excellent way to communicate and track communication with customers and internal stakeholders.

Customer Service Training Tools

While general customer experience tools are excellent at at a number of things, they do have shortcomings, such as:

• No true way to know if your agents are consuming the content in your library
• An inability to tie business performance to employee knowledge
• No way to know if your reps comprehend the information in your library after reading it

Lessonly is a piece of enhanced customer service training software that allows your training content be tracked. As a result, you will be able to gage whether your customer service team is consuming and understanding the information they need. Simply put, Lessonly provides you with the insight you need to determine if your people are interpreting and understanding your content.

We find time and time again that although our customers use Zendesk for communicating with their customers, they love using Lessonly to train their team internally to provide excellent customer service.

Customer Experience Management Articles

Instead of viewing the customer service experience as individual touch points, The Harvard Business Review’s “The Truth About Customer Experience” explains the importance of delivering end-to-end customer service. Even with the proliferation of real-time interactive feedback through the Internet and social media, many businesses still focus on enhancing the customer experience through the traditional channels, such as phone call or at the point-of-sale. However, by focusing solely on these narrow touch points, you may have the distorted notion that your customers are happier with your business than they actually are. The article explains the importance of transcending these traditional touch points to get a true and more inclusive picture of the customer’s journey. Today, customer experience management solutions like Lessonly help your business by ensuring your agents are trained and prepared to best handle customers at all touch points, including training on social media.

To learn more about customer experience management, Lessonly provides articles and comparison lists for your reference. For example, a customer experience management software comparison will outline the specific features of each and provide which software provides what. You can also look at customer feedback examples to get ideas of what they are, how they look, and how they can be used. You can review customer experience management software vendors or learn more about leading customer experience platforms.

Lessonly provides you with the tools and knowledge you need so that you can provide your own company with the tools and knowledge it needs. Customer experience management articles are available for your benefit. Make use of them. Devour them. Then incorporate the knowledge by obtaining the software or other technology tools to get you where you want to be. With the knowledge in your hands, it is up to you. That said, we are here to guide you.

Customer Experience Management vs Customer Relationship Management

What is CRM?

Customer relationship management (CRM) is a tool for effectively managing your interactions with both future and current customers. A CRM includes technologies for organizing, automating, and synchronizing your sales, customer service, marketing, and technical support.

What is CEM?

Customer experience management (CEM) can be defined as the practice of creating an environment designed to maximize each customer interaction. The overall goal of CEM is to increase customer loyalty, satisfaction, and advocacy. This strategy requires continual process changes and new technologies to help effectively advance this approach.

What’s the Difference?

CRM is basically the database that empowers your business to gather information about all of the customer interactions and put them into a single location or a “customer card.”

This information can include:

• emails
• payments made
• service requests
• hotline conversations
• products used

CRMs are sales tools used to provide superior service and manage the sales pipeline (focus on tracking specific actions by customers). On the other hand, CEM tools are designed to help you better understand your customers through collecting information across all touchpoints, analyzing this data, and using it to deliver a personalized and engaging experience to your customers (focus on providing proactive delight for customers). CEM tools help you better understand the customer life cycle and your customers, which will increase customer loyalty and satisfaction.

In short, while companies need both systems, CRMs are primarily used for tracking customer data, while CEMs are primarily used for providing better communication with customers.

Selecting a CEMS—Important Considerations

Selecting customer experience management software is critical to optimize customer experience and how your company incorporates information from that customer experience data into its operations. There are some key things to consider:

• Know your customers. To be able to purchase the right customer experience management tools, you need to know your customer target market as much as you need to know your targeted customer. CEM solutions are founded on this critical knowledge.
• Include all departments in the decision-making process. You want to make sure all departments are part of the process to select the best company out of many customer experience management software companies — each department may have their specific needs and goals, so you want to make sure the CEM software accommodates all of them.
• Know whether to own or not the CEM software. Do you want to own your CEM software or do you want another company to host the software? In the former situation, you control the entire operations, but in the latter, you own the data while the CEM company does all the heavy lifting for you via a software-as-a-service (SaaS) situation. You will want to consider your own resources when determining which way you want to go.
• Ensure scalability. You want to make sure the CEM software is also scalable. As it is, an omnichannel approach is key to customer experience, and channels are growing and diversifying.  You need CEM software that accommodates scalability so that you can grow your own technology.
• Consider your budget. Once you narrow down your CEM options, does your budget match their prices? You want to take into consideration, too, what value CEM solutions will bring to your company, too. This value can be quantified monetarily just as well as qualified in terms of operations and performance.

As you can see, much goes into selecting the right CEM. The research part of it is key. Aligning the research with the goals and tasks of the company and individual departments is paramount. Acquiring the right technology to connect all these sets your company into motion.

In the end, whichever customer experience management you choose, it must ultimately be a CEM that will act as your partner with the abilities and skills to complement your company, your services, and/or your products. The CEM must enable you to expand, grow, and do better internally and externally.