Customer Experience Management

What is Customer Experience Management?

Customer experience management (CEM)- if we wanted to be terse, we would say that the name contains the definition, ie; to manage the experience your customer has not only while completing transactions but during any interaction with your company or brand.

Customer experience definition: Customer experience simply means how the customer feels about their interactions with your brand in the broadest terms.

Customer experience examples include;

interacting with a sales clerk in a retail department store

making a purchase or requesting service via telephone

searching for your website online and navigating its pages

While this is accurate, it does not exactly capture what we mean by CEM. CEM is really a web development term. A CEM is an experience your customer has during digital and physical touchpoints with the objective of optimizing the customer’s ease and satisfaction in order to maximize the probability of return sales. In short, what we’re talking about is online customer experience.

Forbes contributor and CMO Network professional Blake Morgan writes, “Customer experience can include a lot of elements, but it really boils down to the perception the customer has of your brand. Even if you think your brand and customer experience is one thing, if the customer perceives it as something different, that is what the actual customer experience is. You may think you have high-quality products and a strong customer experience, but if a customer gets a broken product that isn’t fixed, their perception of your company as lower quality then becomes the reality.”

This is instructive, but again, what we’re concerned about here is Online Customer Experience Management, (CXM). There are good reasons to focus on your online CXM. They are to do with the growing trend in which online sales is overshadowing brick and mortar sales. That’s probably the biggest reason. But another great reason to focus on CXM is the fact that it is the one vector of interactions and sales, which allows you to fully leverage user data to optimize future interactions.

With CXM, you can monitor clicks, mouse movement and mouse stillness, hesitation times, and more to measure total customer satisfaction. In short, CMX happens within a full-spectrum-control environment with total information. That means the optimization potential is only limited to your imagination, knowledge, and willingness to strive for perfection.

Understanding the Importance of Customer Experience

You may have heard the saying, “Look to you and from you.” It is a brief way of saying that you should not just look at others from your own perspective and judge interactions on that basis, but that you should also do your best to try to imagine how others see you.

There’s a lot of wisdom to be gained from this practice, and fortunately, the human mind is specially evolved to do just that. In psychology, we call it, “theory if mind.” It is the ability human beings have to create a model of another person’s thinking patterns, feelings, and background of experience. Even when these are not accurate, they can be exceedingly handy. And everyone has them whether they are aware of it or not.

In business, it can be less intuitive to operate on the ‘to me and from me’ mentality. But if we think about it in this way, it’s not hard to understand the importance of customer experience. If we want to do our best to promote good customer experience, that means setting down some policies and practices to promote better CXM and CEM.

Creating a Customer Experience Training Model

Building a successful quick reference guide or training model for your employees to develop better CXM and CEM skills isn’t difficult. You need only outline three basic reference tools. They are;

Customer experience strategy example

Customer experience management examples

Customer experience management framework

These together will give team members a fully fleshed out concept of how your organization promotes positive customer experiences. We’ll discuss these in more depth at a later point.

Customer experience strategy best practices

Here, we will briefly cover some general principles and best practices for promoting and maintaining excellent customer experiences.

Treat employees like your first customer

A lot of hard-nosed bosses don’t want to hear it, but if you treat your employees poorly it will absolutely trickle down into the customer experience. If you want to be tough and push competitiveness, that can work. Just don’t forget to include a hefty dose of fairness and opportunity to advance.

Build emotional connections with customers

There’s a good reason that the purpose of branding is to create an image of your company as being like a person. People WANT to relate to others. So make sure that interactions feel as human as possible whether it’s an online chat experience or a person to person interaction.

Act on feedback ASAP

When customers offer feedback- even if it’s nasty- it is, at least on some level, an indication that they believe you could do better. Whether it’s positive, negative, or neutral- any feedback is your golden opportunity to show the customer they have been heard and to tailor the experience to suit them better.

Don’t leave AI out of the mix

As mentioned above, we’re talking more about the online customer experience than general customer experience. That means your old buddy AI is just waiting to offer loads (to put it mildly) of information and analysis that you can use to optimize CXM. Don’t let this vast resource go to waste. Use it.

Prove your appreciation

Admittedly, a reiteration of “Act on Feedback ASAP”, but it bears repeating. When customers buy something, say something, or even breeze by- show them that you noticed and that you appreciate it.

Don’t smother them with management speak

People have been inundated with management speak their whole lives- so you can get away with a heck of a lot of it. But management speak alienates people. It tells them that you are not listening and if they want you to change, they’ll have to force you to change. That’s not a positive situation to be in.

Customer Experience Roles and Responsibilities

Every member of your team, staff, crew, or what-have-you bears some responsibility for promoting positive customer experiences. Depending on the nature of your business, this can be more or less apparent. For example, if you’re a construction contractor- customer experience is going to largely revolve around the end-point quality of the work you do. If, on the other hand, you’re heavily public facing- such as in the hospitality business- then it’s quite obvious that customer experience is everyone’s job.

In any event, your staff will want to be focused on the tasks that are described in and relate to their job description. This means that building a Customer Experience Team (CET) might be a good idea.

You can build a CET from your current staff, assigning special roles to individuals who best suit them. Or, you can create an all-new CET from scratch, hiring outside talent to fill the role.

Create an in-house CET

Building your CET from your existing team will require some training. Your team will have to learn how to become a customer experience manager and develop the appropriate skills. Likewise, your customer experience managers will need to develop customer experience management skills.

Recruit a CET

Conversely, creating a CET from outside talent means engaging in the recruiting process. You will need to settle on an appropriate customer experience manager salary, develop meaningful customer experience job titles, create job descriptions for customer experience manager jobs, and decide what it is you want to see on a customer experience manager resume.

Recruiting a new team can be expensive, and time-consuming. But it also helps to guarantee that your existing team will be able to get on with their duties more or less undisturbed.

How to Improve Customer Experience

Now it’s time to talk about some of the practical ways we can make the customer experience as great as it possibly can be. For starters, let’s revisit the customer service strategy template we mentioned earlier. This includes;

Customer experience strategy example
Customer experience management examples
Customer experience management framework

These are quick reference guides, and/or fully-fledged training modules you will use to keep your team member’s heads in the customer experience game.

Customer experience strategy example

This should given to public-facing team members for a quick reference guide to a common customer interaction or set of interactions. It can come in the form of a flow chart or a simple dialog which they will attempt to emulate.

Customer experience management examples

Similar to the customer experience strategy example, the management version helps managers deal with potentially difficult or volatile situations where customers have insisted on speaking to a manager. These will be oriented toward remedying the customer’s complaint, restoring brand confidence, and helping the public-facing employee handle similar encounters in the future.

Customer experience management framework

This learning and reference tool gives team members and management an easy to understand model of how the customer service system you have established works as a whole. It could come in the form of a flow chart, a Q&A list, or both. It could also be a simple description of your CEM policies. However, we find that as a quick reference guide for team members, flow charts are very effective and easy to understand.

Here at Lessonly, our goal is to make your team training and learning endeavors effective, affordable, fast, and functional. We can help you develop a strong and focused training and guidance framework to give your team the tools and the training they need to optimize customer experience from initiation to completion and beyond. Learn more about Lessonly or get a demo today. Learn more or get a demo today.