Customer experience management.
Customer experience management (or CXM) is the practice of managing the experience of every customer across all touchpoints and departments. Better CXM helps businesses with their better brand image, helps them retain more customers, and even convert them to brand advocates.
Gartner defines customer experience management as "the practice of designing and reacting to customer interactions to meet or exceed their expectations, leading to greater customer satisfaction, loyalty, and advocacy."
What is a customer experience management platform?
A customer experience management platform is a solution that enables you to manage and improve your customers' overall experience by providing a 360-degree view of their interactions with your business, such as support calls, sales emails, and social media interactions.
The platform also enables a seamless flow of customer information from one department to another, allowing improved marketing campaigns, lead qualification, support quality, and customer retention. An ideal CXM platform should help your business unify all your customer data so you have access to a centralized place for all your valuable customer information.
How is a CRM system different from a CXM platform?
A CRM, or Customer Relationship Management System is focussed on your sales teams. A CXM, or Customer Experience Management Platform is an extension of your CRM system, focussing on your sales, marketing, and customer support teams.
CRM System
A CRM, or Customer Relationship Management system, is an application that's focused on your sales teams. It started off as a database to maintain prospect and contact information, and over the years, the capabilities of CRM have evolved to acquiring prospects for your business, nurturing them through automation, and improving your customer relationships.
CXM Platform
A customer experience platform is an extension of your CRM system, scaled to your entire organization. A CXM platform can map your customers' entire journey with your business across sales, marketing, support, social media, and operations. Show More
Why should you choose Customer Experience Management (CXM) software?
Do you know what your customer's most recent purchase has been? Do you know the number of times your prospect has visited your website? Do you know what your customers are talking about on social media?
Becoming a customer-first organization starts with alinging and making good use of customer information. Traditionally, customer information is scattered and diluted across separate applications for sales, marketing, customer support, and operations. This siloed approach can negatively affect your end customer's experience. A customer experience management platform unifies all your customer-facing teams, empowers them with quality customer data and tools for top-notch customer support and retention.
Top 3 areas
Customer experience (CX) is one of the top 3 areas of marketing investment.
52%
of the marketers with CX expect their budgets to remain the same or to decrease.
80%
of companies believe that they deliver great customer experiences, while only 8% of their customers agree.
Benefits of choosing a CXM platform
- Seamless flow of customer information
- 360-degree customer view
- Unified business operations
- Contextual customer support
- Connection to social media
- Increased customer retention
- Built-in AI assistance
- No need to manage multiple apps
- Single setup
- Effective process automation
- Better brand image
- Unified business analytics
- Connection to social media
- Increased customer retention
- Better brand image
- Unified business analytics
Key functionalities of a Customer Experience Management software
Omnichannel Customer Engagement
A CXM platform provides an omnichannel experience to both your customers and employees.
- Your business teams will be able to switch between channels while keeping complete customer context intact. Providing your customers targeted care and attention will build customer retention.
- It allows your customers to reach out to you across email, telephone, social media, or live chat.
Sales Automation
Until recently, a significant part of the everyday sales cycle has been consumed by routine tasks like data entry. A Customer Experience Management platform can automate repetitive work, allowing you to focus on your customers.
- Use workflows to automate sending emails, updating fields, and scheduling tasks.
- Assign leads to sales reps with effective lead scoring.
- Automate your entire sales and support processes, ensuring compliance from the entire team.
Marketing Automation
Marketing automation allows you to accurately target specific demographics of your potential customers, making it another important aspect when it comes to a Customer Experience Management platform.
- Create, send, and monitor targeted campaigns to narrow audience segments while measuring effectiveness in terms of sales revenue.
- Send out customized email campaigns using email marketing automation.
- Connect your business with webinars, surveys, social media posts, and even Google Ads without having to leave your interface.
Social media
Post and monitor across your social media channels from one place.
Email Marketing
Create, send, and track your email campaigns.
Google Ads
Effectively combine Google Ads spending with your sales data and track ROI.
Webinar
Create and launch webinars, set up polls, questions, and measure performance.
Survey
Send targeted surveys and listen to the voice of your customers.
Social media
Post and monitor across your social media channels from one place.
Email Marketing
Create, send, and track your email campaigns.
Google Ads
Effectively combine Google Ads spending with your sales data and track ROI.
Webinar
Create and launch webinars, set up polls, questions, and measure performance.
Survey
Send targeted surveys and listen to the voice of your customers.
Social Media Marketing
A Customer experience management platform can help your business with social media marketing.
- Stay in the loop with what your customers or prospects think about your brand across popular social media platforms, like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and even Google My Business.
- Suggests the best day and time to post your social updates based on prior brand engagement to reach the broadest possible audience.
Website live chat and visitor tracking
A CXM platform helps you make the most out of every website visitor with embedded live chat and visitor tracking, and connects them to your CRM.
- Visitor tracking helps you learn about your new and return visitors—how much time they spend on your site, and what pages they interact with. This can help you target your leads by initiating follow-ups based on their interests when interacting with your site.
- Proactively initiate a chat session through a live chat window or build your own customizable chat bots.
- Seamlessly convert ongoing chats to phone calls.
Unified Business Analytics
It's crucial to know what is and isn't working along your customer's journey.
- A unified CX platform will also allow you to create dashboards that can blend different aspects of your business. Run combined analysis correlating your marketing efforts with sales revenue, or your customer data in CRM with support tickets.
- Access individual insights on your sales, marketing, and support operations with powerful dashboards.
Customer Service
Customer experience management is centered around the customer. By closing the gaps between your teams, people who do business with you will notice and appreciate the higher quality of service.
- Your business will be able to view relevant sales and marketing context for every customer ticket that comes in.
- Convert unhappy tweets into customer tickets and assign them to your support agents.
Artificial Intelligence
An efficient CXM will often have built-in artificial intelligence functionality which you can use to dictate information and trigger complex actions.
Learn more about AI
- A built-in AI assistant can make use of machine learning to identify the probability of winning or losing a deal based on your existing record of sales activities.
- AI assitance can use sales data to suggest the best time to contact your leads while also analyzing the tone of your customer emails or support tickets to identify urgency.
How can the best customer experience be delivered?
Ensure there is a seamless flow of customer information and requirements are readily available to all teams who are part of the process.
Prioritize the voice of your customers across all channels and get customer queries answered faster.
Make your business open to omnichannel engagement so your teams have the ability to pick up their desired channel of communication.
Implement well-defined process management so your teams do not waste time around internal complexities.
Always stay on the lookout for mentions of your brand/industry on social media.
How you can benefit from better customer experiences
Explore Zoho's unified customer experience platform
Zoho CRM Plus is the most integrated and unified customer experience platform on the market for unifying your sales, marketing, and support teams. CRM Plus helps businesses of all sizes and industries sell better by reaching out to the right prospects, sell better, and retaining more customers. The CXM platform includes sales force automation, marketing automation, help desk, analytics, visitor tracking, project management, social media marketing, and more.
Employing the right Customer Experience Management platform can earn your customers' loyalty and pave the path towards a long-lasting business model. Try it out now, and start delivering exceptional customer experiences.
