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.