How your clients perceive your brand is shaped by all of their interactions and moments with your company and helps define their customer experience. Each memorable interaction helps to forge deeper client relationships, and create fans of your brand – not just consumers. Customer experience management (CEM), as defined by Gartner, is “the practice of designing and reacting to customer interactions to meet or exceed their expectations, leading to greater customer satisfaction, loyalty and advocacy.” This practice is meant to ‘close the gap’ between the intended customer experience and the actual customer experience, and requires having a holistic view of customers with integrated data and analytics at your disposal.
Customer Experience Management (CEM)
Customer experience management involves getting to know everything (or nearly everything) about your clients so that you can respond using a personalized, targeted approach that speaks to their needs and wants, and deliver an amazing experience and value across all available digital engagement channels. Utilizing online research and qualitative research tools enables you to harness data with speed and accuracy to gain customer experience (cx) insights and create a unified customer profile. This in turn provides you with the ability to employ a real-time strategy to build experiences to match the customer’s profile.
How Customer Experience Management Will Help Your Brand Connect
- Put customers first and manage their journey.
Customer experience management enables you to truly put the customer at the center of your business, and deliver the right content in the right context at the right time. With access to real-time data, you are able to extract valuable insights into your customers’ behaviors and interests to create an emotional connection and establish a relationship with them. You can also use the data to determine how to best move forward regarding product development, sales and marketing, client servicing, and upselling opportunities. Customer experience management allows you to use data to develop business and marketing strategies that align with your customer needs.
- Tailor your communications to customers.
Optimize customer engagement at certain touch points with highly personalized messaging based on your conversations and what the online data and research tells you in terms of where the customer is on their journey with your brand and their preferences and behaviors. You’ll be able to create compelling and relevant content and deliver insightful offers, recommendations, advice, and service actions when a customer is most receptive. In addition, you can create personalized content and experiences at scale.
- Deliver a consistent customer experience across multiple engagement channels.
Today’s consumers expect a brand to be everywhere they are – mobile, apps, social media, website, email, phone – to connect and engage seamlessly across all channels. Accomplishing this provides you with a complete picture of each individual customer and their interactions with your company.
- Capture customer feedback in real-time.
Use embedded analytics to learn how customers engage with your brand and predict what that engagement will look like in the future. People today expect companies to know how to address their future needs, too. Having this type of information at your disposal helps you track customer perceptions and will allow you to identify potential buying trends and how you capitalize on them.
- Measure and enhance customer loyalty.
Create memorable experiences for personalized customer loyalty programs and to gain advocates for your brand. Strengthening brand loyalty can lead to higher spend, with brand advocates purchasing more items or services and returning to the brand more frequently.
CEM
Customer experience reigns at the top of a marketer’s food chain, as it helps boost revenue and drives brand loyalty. According to a study conducted by Forrester, experience-driven businesses report higher customer retention, repeat purchase rates, and average order values. They are also more effective at turning loyal customers into advocates. Discuss.io can help you optimize the entire customer experience and empower your organization to get closer your customers to deliver what they need with our smart video conversation platform and embedded online research and qualitative research tools.
