Customer Experience Platform: Differentiator Between Successful and Unsuccessful Businesses 

There’s one factor that can mean the difference between a flourishing enterprise and one that fades into obscurity: the customer experience. With the advent of the digital age and rapidly changing consumer expectations, the role of a Customer Experience (CX) platform has become more critical than ever.

The interconnected global marketplace that we live in is experiencing a revolution that has been termed the ‘Customer Experience Movement.’  Businesses around the globe are now tweaking their strategies to be a part of that movement. This blog will talk about the basics of Customer Experience Management (CXM) and how it can positively impact any business. 

It is evident from a lot of case studies that the customer experience platform will be one of the most significant differentiators between performing and non-performing businesses. 

Customer Experience Platform As A Strategic Asset

Successful businesses recognize the significance of a Customer Experience platform as a strategic asset. It’s not just another piece of software; it’s a central hub that facilitates the delivery of outstanding experiences to customers. It allows for the collection of valuable customer data, which can be harnessed to tailor interactions, predict needs, and streamline CXM within organizations.

Let’s break down the statement:

1. Recognizing Significance: Successful businesses are those that understand and acknowledge the vital role played by customer experience platforms. They see them as more than just another tool; instead, they recognize them as a crucial component of their business strategy.
2. Not Just Another Software: This part of the statement emphasizes that a CX platform is not to be treated as ordinary software. It’s not a standalone application but something far more integral to the business’s operations.
3. Central Hub: The statement describes a customer experience platform as a “central hub.” This means it serves as a central point for various activities related to CXM. It’s where different aspects of customer interactions come together, making it easier to manage and enhance those interactions.
4. Facilitating Outstanding Experiences: The primary role of this central hub is to facilitate the delivery of outstanding customer experiences. It provides the tools and capabilities necessary to ensure that customers have a positive and memorable experience when interacting with the business.
5. Collecting Valuable Customer Data: A customer experience platform allows businesses to collect customer insights. This data includes information about customer behavior, preferences, and interactions with the business. This data is invaluable for understanding customer needs and expectations.
6. Tailoring Interactions: The data collected can be used to tailor interactions with individual customers. In other words, the business can use the information to customize its communications, offers, and services to match the specific preferences and needs of each customer.
7. Predicting Needs: By analyzing customer data, a customer experience platform can help predict what customers might need in the future. This predictive capability allows businesses to be proactive in meeting customer needs and surpassing their expectations.
8. Streamlining Customer Experience: The use of a customer experience platform helps streamline the management of the overall CX within the organization. It makes it more efficient to oversee and optimize all customer-related processes and interactions, ultimately resulting in a more seamless and satisfying experience for customers.

In essence, the statement underscores the idea that successful businesses view a Customer Experience Platform as a strategic tool that centralizes and optimizes customer-related activities, leverages customer data for personalized interactions, and plays a crucial role in delivering exceptional customer experiences – a key factor that sets them apart in the competitive business landscape.

Understanding the buzz around CXM!

Let us first understand the impact that CXM creates. 

One of the major goals of effective CX management is to create hyper-personalized communication of your brand with customers to generate loyalty, and, in turn, long-term profits.

Great customer experiences are achieved by effectively listening to the voice of your customers and transforming their feedback into action.  

Within this crash course in CXM, we will define and underline its importance, outline basic strategies and difficulties, and go through the best available tools. 

CXM takes a bird’s eye view of the entire interaction between customer & business and prioritizes the impression of your company that they leave with over any individual sale. Positive impressions can generate brand loyalty, curb customer churn, and inspire customers to vocally advocate your product. 

CX management, as we’ve established, seeks to boost customer satisfaction and in turn loyalty, whereas CRM seeks solely to increase sales by using customer data to inform sales teams.  

Quantifying customer experience to form CXM strategy is possible through customer satisfaction metrics such as your NPS score.  

NPS scores, among other customer experience (CX) metrics, gauge customer loyalty through 1-10 satisfaction surveys and open-ended written response data, which can be analyzed to improve your business at key touchpoints.  

Let’s go over why your team should make an effective CXM strategy a priority. 

Why is Customer Experience Management Crucial?

Bluntly put, businesses understand why they need a positive brand impression, however, often misunderstand how their customers feel about their brand. 

This is known as the ‘Customer Experience Gap’, and it means that there is a ton of room to grow for many companies when it comes to realizing a successful CXM Approach.  

However, things are changing as businesses are realizing what impact a better customer experience can have on the overall wallet share. 

However, in the race to better CX, many businesses may have to come to terms with where they stand, as plateauing or declining customer experience scores were the norm for the majority of brands – 81% of CX scores stagnated, and 5% declined in previous years. 

Now, the customer experience platform is not only set to be the number one brand differentiator from 2021 on but positive CX is the largest influence on customer loyalty, which has proven to be the leading factor in driving long-term profits.  

Here is some data to highlight the importance of positive Customer Experience Management:  

• Customer Loyalty: It is true that “Loyalty Pays…”, positive CXM will grow your number of loyal customers and effectively improve your bottom line, with studies indicating that a 5% increase in customer retention can result in a 25-75% increase in profit. 
   
• Increased Spending: As per American Express, almost 86% of customers are ready to pay more for a positive experience. Moreover, customers who receive a great customer experience are willing to spend from 13 to 18 percent more on average.  
   
• Customer Retention: CXM improvement should never get out of your focus as you can only keep the customers you already have if you continue to ensure their experience with your business, be it customer service, returns, or new transactions, continues to be positive.  

Do you know? 
1 in 3 customers will leave a brand they love after just one bad experience. 

Results of Positive Customer Experience 

For these reasons, a great CXM approach can easily take any business to greater heights. But fear not, CXM is getting easier due to recent advances in SaaS-based software along with AI data analysis that helps you gain even deeper customer insights.  

Some Starting Points for Your CXM Strategy

A strong CXM strategy is important because it considers every time customers come into contact with your business. Managing customer experience can seem challenging, however; this doesn’t need to be the case. 

Efficient CXM Strategies aim at improving the customer journey through the following 4 techniques: 

• Customer Segmentation 
• Personalizing Experience and Fostering Emotional Connection  
• Omnichannel Communication Consistency  
• Enhancing and Actualizing Customer Feedback  

Let’s go through each of these and uncover what a holistic CXM strategy might look like for your company.  

Customer Segmentation

Picking up the concept of the customer experience gap – we can’t enhance our CX unless we understand our customers better. We can begin the understanding process by ‘segmenting’, aka grouping, our customers by age, spending habits, etc., and determining the greatest needs of each group.  

Segmenting your customers by cohort enables you to have a holistic view of their problem points along with their journey to prevent churn and improve CX going forward.  

However, while grouping customers by ‘pain’ or ‘problem’ points in their journey helps improve your UX or product, we can push our segmentation strategy further by creating a unique and personalized ‘customer profile’ for each customer.  

A smart CXM approach then utilizes these customer profiles to fragment more cohorts based on this demographic data (our profile categories: age, location, etc.) 

Personalizing Experience and Fostering Emotional Connection

Emotionally invested customers will be advocates for your brand but getting customers to buy in takes a personalized approach to each customer.  

To create an accurate ‘customer profile’ (see above on segmentation) – you need to analyze your customers’ demographic data and the context in which they function. The following are some examples: 

Are they corporate buyers?  

Buying for their home?  

Buying as a luxury? Etc. 

The aim is to know about your customers so you can mold their journey and have a made-and-ready customer persona that can support customer service and other customer-facing teams if an issue arises.  

The goal of all personalization is to foster an emotional connection between your brand and customers, which you can calculate by analyzing brand sentiment (also known as brand health). Emotionally invested customers tend to remain loyal and even promote your product unprompted – and who doesn’t like free advertising? It’s a win-win for both the business and the customer.  

Omnichannel Communication Consistency

A CXM approach is only as good as the internal communication of the teams providing it. 

With multiple teams receiving customer data, the problem of inter-departmental silos always exists.  It becomes important to store all customer interactions in one place and make it accessible across various teams to guide future personalization. 

While doing so, focusing and synchronizing the different aspects of customer data so that your teams can effectively communicate with each other is key.  

With every team using the same terms and understanding each other’s goals and contributions, you will be able to offer a unified brand persona for every customer. And, most importantly, offer a consistent omnichannel experience, no matter how your customers get in touch with you. 

Enhancing and Actualizing Customer Feedback

As they say, listening is key to any relationship, and improving how you listen to your customer feedback is key to productive CX management. 

Listening to customer feedback needs attention to feedback coming from multiple sources and analyzing that feedback to improve future results.  

Many companies will have to adopt a comprehensive overhaul of their VoC (Voice of Customer) programs aiming to implement a much more effective ‘listening approach.’ 

Automating your customer feedback system with intuitive tools can quickly bring your feedback listening up to speed.  

Elevating Success with the Customer Experience Platform

The customer experience platform is the linchpin that separates the winners from the also-rans in today’s business arena. It’s a multifaceted tool that not only enhances the customer journey but also strengthens brand loyalty, fosters personalization, and keeps businesses agile.

Hopefully, this blog was able to help you better understand the concept of CXM. As observed globally, it is rising to the forefront of most business strategies. In the coming years, the importance of CXM for keeping brands afloat cannot be understated. 

CXM might seem like a complex topic, but it is easy to think of it as the process of making sure that every customer-facing part of your business is offering a pleasant experience so that customers always feel cared for and important. 

Want to see how FCI can improve customer experience management? Schedule a free demo today.