There was a time when content almost entirely flowed one way – from enterprises to customers. Customers’ responses were effectively measured in sales and occasional surveys. But in today’s digital world, customers demand a two-way omnichannel customer experience.
They expect a customer experience that delights or they will go looking at your competitors. Customer Experience Management (CXM) software provides a comprehensive platform to improve customer experience, build sales and increase customer loyalty. CXM is about listening to your customers and acting accordingly, taking full advantage of the digital engagement channels available. Delivering a successful omnichannel customer experience not only drives customer loyalty, but it also builds advocates that will promote your brand, helping to ensure your message reaches a wider audience.
What are the benefits of CXM?
In the digital age, when people are consuming content across a range of platforms, in different ways, at different times, the issue for companies is less about impressive marketing campaigns, and more about continuous, always-on customer engagement.
Any customer experience improvement process must be able to deliver highly targeted and personalized messages to customers at the correct point in the customer journey. Get your customer experience strategy right – backed by a powerful CXM solution – and there are many benefits you can achieve:
- Become a ‘customer-centric’ business
CXM, for the first time, truly lets you put your customer at the heart of your business. Through in-depth data analysis you can quickly establish the behaviors and interests of all your customers. It provides you with actionable insights to improve decision-making on all business aspects from product development to sales and marketing to after-sales support. You can align your business strategies and policies to the needs of your customers. - Create highly personalized customer communications
By better understanding your customer, CXM allows you to plan and implement improved customer engagement based on the actual requirements of each individual customer. Personalization moves from a birthday card with their name on it to highly personalized messages based on their customer journey stage along with their preferences and behaviors. In addition, the best CXM solutions allow for ‘personalization at scale’ where one or 10 million personalized communications can be sent in real-time. - Deliver omnichannel customer experiences
Customers today connect across multiple customer engagement channels – websites, email, social media, mobile apps, phone and more – and they expect the customer experience to be consistent across channels. They want to be able to begin a transaction on one channel, continue it on another and complete it on another and the experience to be seamless. Creating an omnichannel customer experience will help provide you with a holistic view of each individual customer and their interactions with your company. - Build customer feedback into your business
Customer feedback has been traditionally gathered through large, cumbersome surveys. While surveying your customers is still important, modern CXM software includes embedded analytics that can tell you how your customers actually engage with your company today, predict what customer engagement will look like tomorrow and collect and analyze data from social media and the web to conduct ‘sentiment’ analysis to identify potential buying trends before they happen. - Measure and improve customer loyalty
The right CXM software helps you track and improve loyalty, such as each customer’s Net Promoter Score (NPS). You can ask for the NPS across multiple customer engagement channels. This gives you the basis to determine which customers are most likely to become advocates and allow you to personalize customer loyalty programs towards those customers. - Motivate and empower your frontline staff
While the CXM solution is mostly for external customer engagement, it also has a strong internal element that delivers the right information to the right staff at the right time. For example, a contact center rep will have all the relevant information on the customer in front of them as soon as the customer calls. They will be empowered to use the information to improve the customer experience and solve the issue the first time. There is a growing body of research showing empowered staff are more motivated and more loyal. They are less likely to quit, even for more money, which in turn reduces the cost of recruiting, hiring, and training new employees.
Implementing an effective CXM strategy and solution can bring significant benefits. Customer-centric brands report profits that are 60% higher than those who fail to focus on CX. A majority of customers – 73% – now say CX is the number one thing they consider when deciding whether to purchase from a company. Those figures speak for themselves – finding the best ways to engage with customers over the long-term leads to healthier business growth. And customer engagement needs to be two-way, and consistent across your organization, as consumers increasingly expect to be dealt with as individuals, not just numbers.
What are the features of CXM?
An effective CEM strategy consists of a set of actions and technologies working together to create outstanding customer experience. The CEM solution must create customer experience that is:
- Continuous
You can scale and connect many customer journeys. You can collect and analyze data from all sources – from marketing to customer service – to deepen your organization’s understanding of customers and improving customer experience across departments and channels. You can continuously adapt to customer needs and make real-time adjustments that achieve massive improvements in cost, brand health, actionable insights, and customer satisfaction. - Optimized
You can go beyond optimizing a single interaction to automatically personalize at scale. You can make recommendations to customers for better customer engagement and increased returns on marketing investment. You can optimize all complex operational content and process issues that lead to greater synergy and improved customer experience. It should be clear that, like Enterprise Information Management (EIM), CXM is not a single solution but comprises a series of software components including: - Customer Communications Management
Customer communications management (CCM) solutions improve customer experience through the personalization and automation of customer communications. Both business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) organizations use our CCM solutions to design and deliver critical business communications that are highly personalized and interactive —and drive profitable customer engagement. - Customer Experience Analytics
From strategic marketing to customer service, organizations have exhaustive data about their customers, including transaction histories, mobile app usage data, contact center records and more. Customer experience analytics provides a scalable analytics, reporting, and data visualization platform that enables teams to design, deploy, and manage secure, interactive web applications, reports, and dashboards fed by multiple data sources. With all these components working together, you can establish progressive feedback loops that can be built into effective strategies for delivering what your customers need from you, however and whenever they want it.
Why choose OpenText for CXM?
OpenText has significant experience in delivering successful CXM solutions, with a range of technologies and solutions to help gather, report and respond to customer interactions. Global analyst and research firm Aspire Customer Communications Services has recognized OpenText as a leader.
Discover how customer experience management is linked to better business outcomes.
