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.

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.

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.

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.