What Is Customer Experience Management & Why It Matters

The quality of your customer experience can make or break your business. Today’s customers demand excellence from every brand. Can you keep up?

As competition intensifies, you must take a proactive approach to defining the playbook for your team to boost customer satisfaction and retention.

That’s where successful customer experience management (CXM) comes into play. It acts as a map, guiding business owners through every detail of their customers’ journeys.

Customer interactions — be they on social media, in physical stores, or on a support center call — must have positive customer sentiment, ultimately serving as a building block for a lasting brand–customer relationship.

In this guide, we’ll explore the benefits of CXM, discover strategies to refine your ‌customer lifecycle and learn about CXM software that can help you chart a course to exceptional service.

What Is Customer Experience Management?

Customer Experience Management (CXM) is the set of strategies and processes businesses use to track, organize, and optimize every customer interaction. 

From their first visit to your website to their post-purchase survey, CX management is a complete map of their journey with you. It provides a chance to get to know your customers inside and out, predict their needs, and tailor their experiences to meet or exceed their expectations. 

Think of customer experience management as an orchestra, and you, the business owner, are the conductor. Each part of the orchestra represents a different department: marketing, sales, product development, or customer support. Your job is to make these elements work in harmony to deliver a great experience.

With each interaction, you’ll take note of an insight, notice a pattern, or receive feedback Voice of the Customer (VoC). Use this information to make changes, such as adjusting your marketing or enhancing your customer advocacy, to continuously improve your customer’s experience.

Business owners will be happy to hear that 70% of consumers spend more with companies that offer great customer experiences, according to a 2023 report by Zendesk.

Echoing this report is the success of the consulting firm McKinsey. Their customer experience strategy has led them to impressive results over the past decade, including increases in sales by up to 20%, decreases in service costs of up to 50%, and increases in customer satisfaction of up to 20% for over 900 of their clients.

A customer experience management strategy isn’t a month-long initiative. Ongoing, integrated tactics will help your business tap into the greatest benefits of CXM. Read on to learn more. 

Benefits of Customer Experience Management

1. Achieve a stronger product–market fit

An effective customer experience management strategy is like a compass that guides you through the needs of your existing and new customers. By staying in constant contact with them, you gain more opportunities to promote greater customer advocacy.

This helps you anticipate and exceed expectations, crafting offerings perfectly suited to each customer profile.

2. Improve your employee experience

Customers aren’t the only ones who benefit from effective CXM — employees do too. Having more positive customer experiences means dealing with fewer angry ones, resulting in more enjoyable interactions for employees.

A happier workforce leads to more trust, engagement, and productivity at work.

3. Reduce churn

By cultivating deeper links and unlocking customer loyalty, effective

management reduces customer churn.

A business that prides itself in consistently meeting or exceeding customer expectations knows how to foster trust with customers and deliver satisfaction, making it much less likely that customers will turn to your competitors.

These days, the stakes are high.

A single negative customer experience can have significant consequences on brand loyalty: 32% of customers would consider switching companies after only one poor experience, reports PwC and 16% would even pay more for higher quality service.

At the heart of reducing churn lies empathy.

Customer experience best practices, such as personalized experiences, simple onboarding, and proactive problem-solving, create caring connections with your existing customers and help ease their pain points.

Good customer experience management adds stability to your customer base and ensures long-term profitability.

Effective strategies to lower customer churn (via Gartner)

4. Create more profitable customer segments

A focus on CXM initiatives can also help you identify and cultivate more profitable customer segments.

By studying these segments, identifying patterns, reviewing customer interactions, and analyzing feedback, companies can establish which segments are more engaged and assign these a higher lifetime value.

With the right customer experience management platform, companies can now tailor their offerings based on qualitative customer data, ultimately boosting their bottom line.

By knowing and providing your customers with exactly what they need, they’ll become brand advocates, sharing word-of-mouth reviews and driving further business growth on your behalf.

5. Increase operational efficiency

The impact of CXM on operations is often overlooked.

Key customer insights can identify redundant processes and help you shape more efficient operations for customers. This measure is all about cutting costs and creating an agile company that responds well to customer needs.

Above all, customer experience management helps your entire team meaningfully increase customer loyalty as a routine business function — not merely a one-off effort to grow NPS survey responses.

Helpful Strategies for a Unified Customer Experience

🌐 Optimize omnichannel experiences

Objective: Deliver a consistent experience across all channels

Modern customers often switch between devices, platforms, channels, and physical stores, making it important to deliver consistent service. This ensures customers receive the same level of attention no matter how they choose to engage with your business. It also creates a rare atmosphere of consistent customer support.

Unfortunately, ensuring this consistency is often easier said than done.

By integrating your communication channels and your customer data into a central system, you’ll be able to deliver and manage seamless service across all touchpoints.

📌 Proactively address at-risk customers

Objective: Identify early indications of churn

The familiar saying holds, confirms Gartner: It’s far more cost-effective and profitable to retain and sell to an existing customer than to acquire a new one.

That’s why proactively identifying and engaging with at-risk customers is a strong strategy for minimizing churn. To minimize churn, you need to monitor customer behavior and feedback to identify early signs of dissatisfaction. 

Then, you can take preemptive action by reaching out with personalized digital experiences or solutions, automating the deployment of special offers, or simply reminding them that you value their business.

Related: How to Build the Best Digital Customer Experience Strategy in 2024

📝 Streamline onboarding steps 

Objective: Provide numerous check-ins and opportunities for feedback

Customers appreciate simple processes, and if your onboarding demands too much of them, you’re off to a bad start. Simplifying the onboarding process is key for maintaining customer interest and lays a strong foundation for a long-term relationship. 

This could look like:

• Providing simple information and instructions
• Guiding customers through the first steps
• Setting clear expectations and being transparent

It’s also best practice to check in often during this process, allowing customers to provide feedback. It’s rarely too early to ask them what they think.

❌ Don’t box knowledge in 

Objective: Share insights openly with team members

Encourage the sharing of insights within and across teams for the most cohesive customer-centric experience. Cloud-based, self-service CXM software can help companies avoid detrimental data silos.

You never know how other colleagues or teams may benefit from customer data, and collaborating enhances the customer experience.

According to Treasure Data, access to customer experience data remains a challenging factor for 54% of organizations.

High-quality customer service starts with well-informed, unified teams that frequently share insights. 

Nurture a culture of knowledge sharing with regular data training sessions and team meetings and make centralized pools of customer feedback and insights easy for everyone on the team to access, not just data ops individuals.

Related: How to Create a Unified Customer Experience (CX) at Scale in Four Steps

Top Features in Customer Experience Management Software 

1) CRM integration

A customer relationship management (CRM) platform stores customer information, tracks interactions, and helps businesses create stronger connections.

It plays a large part in CXM, and having a CRM integrated with your systems makes it easier for your teams to work together, deliver excellent support experiences, and put the customer first.

Key benefits of CRM integration:

• Sync all customer data into a single, unified system
• Access a comprehensive view of customer interactions and history
• Enhance personalized service and informed decision-making
• Provide workflow and marketing automation capabilities

Nextiva’s Salesforce integration, for example, bridges the information gap between your CRM and phone system. This handy integration helps your team access additional features, such as real-time call logging within Salesforce to store notes on a call and automatically log activity in Salesforce. 

A feature like this further enriches your customer data and the potential CXM insights drawn during analysis. 

2) Customer journey mapping

Customers pass through multiple stages as they interact with your brand. A customer journey map visualizes this path from start to finish.

Each map is made of touchpoints that include interactions such as discovering your product on Instagram or reaching out for technical support. Each interaction serves as an opportunity for you to delight customers while collecting valuable data.

Having a clear map of your customers’ journeys allows you to identify and track key touchpoints, such as trial signups or predicted outcomes.

It’s a vital component of managing the customer experience and one that Gartner outlines as a key factor for customer success. Of marketers polled, 47% said journey maps positively impact the success of their CXM efforts.

Key benefits of customer journey mapping:

• Model customer journeys with your brand from start to finish
• Observe the sales experiences from your customer’s perspective rather than the sales perspective
• Identify key touchpoints and milestones
• Predict how customers will behave as they travel through your sales funnel

Here’s an example that begins with a visit to your website:

Your customer visits a landing page, signs up for your newsletter, and begins a chat with your support agent. Several days later, the customer receives your newsletter, which leads to a demo booking and, eventually, a purchase.

3) Omnichannel customer engagement

Opting for a platform that embraces omnichannel customer engagement results in a unified experience across all platforms. This seamless experience thrills customers, who often interact with brands across three to five communication channels.

Key benefits of omnichannel customer engagement:

• Captures customer experiences across channels (online, in-store, and on mobile)
• Helps maintain a cohesive and consistent brand experience
• Ensures a smooth customer journey
• Leads to high customer retention and brand loyalty
• Gains better customer insights

Effective omnichannel engagement strategies in action include consistent messaging, omnichannel staff training, and proactive support quality across all channels.

For a retail brand with a website and mobile app, effective omnichannel engagement could mean syncing a customer’s shopping cart across devices or ensuring that a contact center agent is already informed about an issue a customer raised on social media.

For modern customers, it’s all about providing a seamless experience where the customer picks up exactly where they left off.

Related: Omnichannel Customer Experience: The Complete Guide

4) Enterprise analytics

Enterprise analytics go beyond traditional data analysis by incorporating elements such as AI. Businesses can forecast customer behavior and build more accurate customer journey maps thanks to advanced features.

Key benefits of enterprise analytics:

• Capture data about customer profiles, personas, and behaviors
• Produce sophisticated, easy-to-read visualizations for informed decision-making
• Predict outcomes, allowing you to anticipate customer behaviors
• Provide real-time metrics that are easily shared with your team
• Highlight customer behavior, preferences, and trends, aiding in strategic decision-making and targeted marketing efforts

A fast-food franchise, for example, can leverage predictive enterprise analytics for CXM by forecasting regional ordering trends. This helps teams create tailored menus, efficient supply chains, and strategic outlet placements. 

The result? Customer needs and preferences are proactively being met.

Related: Customer Experience Analytics: How to Track and Improve CX

5) Call Pop

Call Pop, which is also known as a screen pop, is a handy feature for customer service operations. The service experience is significantly improved when agents are equipped with comprehensive customer information during calls. 

Key benefits of Call Pop:

• Provides contact center call agents with customer information for every incoming call, such as contact information, company, payment details, customer history, and customer sentiment
• Reduces abandonment rates and average handle call time
• Improves sales conversions with relevant sales offers

Call Pop enables call center agents to answer every call with valuable customer context. Useful features include displaying the account value, a last interaction indicator (i.e., positive or negative), and an experience score. 

These data points help call agents deliver remarkable customer service experiences with personalized conversations. Save time, build trust, and gain deeper insights with each call.

Elevate Your Customer Experience With Nextiva 

Effective customer experience management is a pivotal element of business that small business owners cannot ignore. 

Knowing the needs of your customers and having a deeper understanding of their pain points leads to loyal customers. 

CXM provides business owners with a roadmap to delivering an unforgettable experience that makes customers feel understood and keeps them coming back for more.

In recent years, AI has transformed the customer service experience, introducing smarter chatbots and more personalized service than ever.

Yes, this technology still has a way to go, but it’s anticipated that AI will dominate this arena sooner than we think —  70% of leaders say that expanding AI across the customer experience is a priority for 2024.

You can expect more AI-driven digital transformations to improve the effectiveness of customer touchpoints and personalize services to meet individual customer needs.

The importance of actionable customer data will only amplify as customer expectations grow.

The key to success with your customers and CXM lies in choosing the right tools that provide omnichannel experiences, accurate customer journey mapping, and insightful analytics.

Nextiva’s unified CXM platform empowers leaders to do just that. By offering unified customer data in an omnichannel environment, your customer experience will be unmatched in the marketplace. 

Discover how to create the ultimate customer journey with Nextiva today. 

Related: How to Build a Customer Experience Dashboard (+ Best Practices)

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