According to Forrester’s US 2022 Customer Experience (CX) Index rankings, “CX quality fell for 19% of brands in 2022—the highest proportion of brands to drop in one year since the survey’s inception.” The customer experience (CX) is inarguably one of the most critical performance metrics for brands like yours – yet many fail at getting it right.
While various causes could be attributed to the drop in the CX quality of brands, they must relook at their customer experience management (CEM) strategy. CEM enables your brand to declutter and focus on what matters most—CX.
CX is the process of managing the entire spectrum of a customer’s journey with your brand, from the discovery phase to the after-sales cycle. If executed well—CEM creates a favorable situation for both brands and customers, as the customers receive delightful experiences while the brand gets more qualified leads and customer loyalty.
Looking to Develop a Successful CEM Strategy? Here’s What you Should Do
A well-executed CEM necessitates a 360-degree view of the customer as well as a flexible system that is willing to adopt this model. This step-by-step guide will help you create a winning CEM strategy:
Begin By Getting to Know Your Customers
Listening to your customers’ thoughts and understanding their needs is the best way to begin. It is vital to take their feedback via different channels and develop mechanisms for routing it to relevant departments.
After taking the feedback, you must:
• map your customers’ needs and desires
• maintain distinct profiles for each customer alongside the touchpoints they have with your brand
• Identify and monitor the channels your customers often use to interact with brands like social media, email, phone calls, and in-person interactions.
This will help you develop valuable customer-centric insights like customer size, customer satisfaction level, and areas of improvement.
Add a Layer of Personalization—the Differentiator
Hyper-personalization is a critical factor that will allow your brand to stand out in the business. The more customers believe your product is tailored specifically to them, the more receptive they are to your brand, and the more likely they will convert and stick.
To get this step right, you need to:
• Leverage the insights generated in the first step and identify—what your customers do and what matters to them.
• Ensure all the customer touchpoints are personalized
• Use geo-tagging to drive location-based content
Your customers will be left wanting more after witnessing such an articulate and high degree of personalization.
Develop a Customer-centric Organizational Culture
Customer experience should never be left to a few departments and front-line teams to take care of. It must be an organization-wide focus and integral to its culture.
You can foster a customer-centric culture in your organization by:
• Building a short, medium, and long-term strategy for improving customer experience and communicating it to all departments and employees
• Invite suggestions and ideas from employees to establish better, customer-centric practices
• Incorporate customer-centric behavior in existing training sessions and introduce new sessions on mastering customer interactions
Creating such a culture is crucial for incorporating a customer-first approach into your brand’s philosophy.
Finally, Invest in the Right Tools and Technology
Your customer experience management strategy is incomplete if it lacks the right technology to back it up. Investing in an omnichannel customer engagement platform will help you leverage the technology stack required to improve connection with your customers, enhance communications, and enable real-time reporting.
The platform must help you:
• Integrate with existing systems seamlessly
• Access end-to-end customer profile storage and retrieval
• Ensure omnichannel customer relationship management
• Utilize capabilities like a personalization engine, AI-enabled automation
• Improve data security and compliance
By including a comprehensive customer engagement platform, your CEM is complete and ready to generate great results.
To Conclude
Delivering customer delight will not only help you win your customer’s hearts but also drive business growth. As Mckinsey’s research reveals, “improving the customer experience has increased sales revenues by 2 to 7 percent and profitability by 1 to 2 percent.” By perfecting your CEM strategy and neatly executing it, you can significantly bridge the gap between customer expectations and customer experience, ensuring satisfied and happy customers.
