Speaker 1: Customer experience management is the set of processes a company uses to track, oversee, and organize every interaction between it and a customer throughout the customer lifecycle. Sometimes customer experience management is referred to as CEM and other times as CXM. In this video, we'll refer to it as CXM. First of all, it's important to clear up any confusion between CXM, customer experience management, and what's commonly known as CRM, customer relationship management. When it comes to strategy and software, they may appear similar, but there are key differences in their perspective and goals. CRM shows what a customer looks like to the company, while CXM defines what a company looks like to the customer. More specifically, CRM strategy focuses on sales and outreach to customers from the company's perspective of capturing more revenue. This sales-oriented system sometimes integrates with customer service and support, but major digital transformation is required to support a broader CXM program. CXM strategy puts customers at the center of marketing, sales, and customer support to drive brand loyalty and repeat business. CXM programs rely on voice-of-the-customer initiatives to measure how customers feel about their experiences with a company. A CXM program will then adjust the areas that generate negative feedback to correct those perceptions. Now let's take a close look at the customer experience itself and how it contributes to customer perceptions, sales revenue, and the company's bottom line. Good customer experiences are more critical today than ever before, partly because of the COVID-19 pandemic. It upended sales and marketing strategies and stiffened competition. As a result, new strategies, tools, and techniques geared to increasing brand awareness, product differentiation, and customer-centric programs are keys to business survival. Customers today are savvier about technology, demand more satisfying experiences, and want to engage with a company on the channel of their choice. Customer experiences can be positive when CXM is done well or negative when some elements of it are left unattended. Let's focus on the positives. When customer experiences are good because of effective CXM, various business benefits will follow. Higher sales and profits. Retaining a customer costs less than acquiring a customer. Studies have shown that a 5% increase in customer retention can result in a 25% increase in profit. Also, satisfied customers tend to purchase more often. Improved business processes. Voice-of-the-customer data comes in the form of web surveys, mobile app feedback, and phone and chat conversations. It provides a blueprint for improving customer experiences and retaining customers. Better employee experience, too. Studies show there's a strong link between customer experience and employee experience. Companies that provide the best customer experiences also focus on measuring voice-of-the-employee data with an eye toward improving employee experience and retention. Word-of-mouth marketing. Satisfied, loyal customers voluntarily endorse a company's brand to their peers. Customer endorsements can often weigh more heavily in buying decisions than advertising or marketing campaigns. And a competitive edge. Measuring customer sentiment yields information about competitors. Customers compare brands when making their buying decisions and offering feedback. Knowing this information can help a company position itself favorably against rivals. Customer experience management requires that companies have a 360-degree view of their customers through integrated, up-to-date data on customer accounts. There are four critical steps in creating a sound CXM strategy. First, understand customer needs and behaviors. CXM teams can develop customer profiles to better understand how to market to targeted customers. Then, they can segment customers into different groups based on factors such as age, interests, and spending habits. Second, create a customer journey map. This helps identify customer touchpoints and anticipate how customers will interact with products or services. That info can often help CXM teams boost long-term customer retention. Third, develop an emotional connection by creating a brand personality that establishes a relationship between the customer and the company. And fourth, capture feedback to measure customer satisfaction in real time. Customer feedback can help track customer perceptions, enable quality monitoring, and measure the success of the CXM strategy. Companies must assemble a customer experience team to execute these steps. This team could include a number of leadership roles such as Chief Customer Officer, Chief Experience Officer, VP of Customer Experience, and multiple Customer Experience Managers with different responsibilities. Customer analysts often report to the Customer Experience Managers or Executives to manage the data projects involved. They also can act as a liaison between the CXM team and other departments like Marketing, Customer Service, Sales, and IT. Again, the best way to understand customers and their interactions throughout all of their experiences with a company is to compose a customer journey map. Let's look more closely at that process. Five stages along the journey tell a lot about customer interactions. First is customer research. The customer discovers the company, often on the web, through ads, or through third parties such as consultants, colleagues, or social media acquaintances. Second is comparison shopping. Customers also learn about a brand's competitors. They compare capabilities, user perceptions, products, and costs. Third is when the customer makes a purchase. This part of the journey is the big business win, but it's just the beginning of customer retention and loyalty building. Fourth is customer support. After a sale, customer service and support teams are where customer loyalty and repeat sales begin or end depending on the competence of these teams. They can make or break the customer experience. And fifth, if all goes well, customers make another purchase or share their positive experiences. Four main obstacles can derail a customer's experience. The first obstacle is when the voice of the customer data is ignored or given short shrift. A company can't solve customer experience problems that it's unaware of. Second is the lack of omni-channel support. Customers who don't feel like they're being listened to on the channel of their choice are more likely to move on to a competitor. Third is ignoring qualitative data. Companies should harvest and analyze individual comments in survey-free text fields. These comments can yield a much deeper understanding of customer experience issues than numbered ratings can. And the fourth obstacle is poor internal communications. Customer experience initiatives will only work if all the information generated by analyzing the customer journey and voice of the customer data is distributed in a way that business stakeholders and sales, marketing, customer support, and senior leadership can understand. The customer journey can be long and difficult to manage effectively. To ensure a successful customer journey with good experiences, customer experience teams must do all of the following. Generate content. Evaluate customer sentiment. Create customer personas and marketing segments. Invest in customer loyalty programs. Evaluate customer touch points. Analyze customer data. Let's look at each of these actions more closely. Content generation comes in two forms. One set of content for internal use and another for external use. Internally, marketing and sales teams can benefit from studying up on supporting research, marketing pieces, and sales enablement literature. Externally, for engagements with customers, sales and service will use personalized emails, text messages, web content, and mobile apps. Simply collecting voice of the customer data isn't enough. Enterprises also need to apply customer sentiment analysis tools and techniques to that data to get an in-depth understanding of customer emotions and opinions. Customer personas and marketing segments are based on the assumption that different groups of customers have different needs. That means building a consistent, engaging experience by addressing and anticipating the specific needs of customers. To do so, different customer personas based on behavior patterns should be plugged into a customer journey map to provide a blueprint for designing a customer experience that caters to each persona. Customer loyalty programs tell frequent customers that they're special and their business is appreciated. Well-executed loyalty programs use savings offers and perks to help drive repeat sales and upsells. Customer touch points must be evaluated so the company knows where and perhaps why customers make their purchasing decisions or flee to its competitors. These touch points show what prompts customers to take action, like traditional media, advertising, social media, and word of mouth. Finally, customer data and feedback should be analyzed to continuously improve the customer journey. Long-term, customer analytics can also help influence the direction of a company's marketing and product development strategies. A customer experience management strategy can only succeed with the right technologies to support it, whether on-premises or in the cloud. Many cloud software vendors have platforms to manage customer experience from end-to-end. These platforms are built on four major components, CRM, marketing automation, e-commerce, and customer service. A CRM system enables sales reps and marketing agents to easily access and manage customer information. It generally pulls data in from a variety of channels and touch points and spares customers the aggravation of repeating their information during each engagement. Marketing automation tools include lead management, customer segmentation, and campaign management capabilities to increase marketing efficiency and eliminate repetitive tasks. With an e-commerce platform, companies can build an online storefront with capabilities such as checkout, product catalogs, and integration with payment processing. Customer service teams use CXM platforms to communicate with customers on different channels based on the customer's choice. Some platforms also offer self-service so customers can solve their own problems through chatbots, product documentation, and other options. In addition, there are several other important customer experience tools that should be included in a sound CXM strategy. Personalization engines, automation tools such as artificial intelligence technology, contact center software, collaboration tools, voice-of-the-customer software, emotion analytics tools, and knowledge management systems. Companies need to keep pace with today's demanding, complex, and savvy customers. These tools, and more, must be considered as part of a comprehensive, all-encompassing, well-executed customer experience management strategy.