Gartner, an information technology research and advisory company, defines customer experience management as “the practice of designing and reacting to customer interactions to meet or exceed customer expectations and, thus, increase customer satisfaction, loyalty and advocacy.” In simpler terms, experience management is all about personalizing and improving the customer experience.
By viewing and understanding interactions between your customers and your business, you have the power to enhance and increase the quality of their experience. The key to customer experience management is that it has to run the gamut of all interactions, covering every touch point between the business and the customer. In today’s data-driven world, there are plenty of resources and tools available to provide information about all customer experiences, including customer complaints. Unhappy customers make for expensive customers – they contact your customer service department and require your employees to expend more time and effort. Not only can a negative experience reduce your efficiency, it can also damage your relationship with those customers.
In a highly competitive market where the same product is offered by multiple companies, you’ve got to know your customers really well in order to give them a personalized, responsive and value-added experience. So how do you do that? Here are a few great ways to succeed in experience management:
Create detailed profiles of your customers.
Customer profiles, or personas, help you determine where best to focus your time and energy to attract customers and visitors to your site. These profiles can provide plans for marketing, messaging and sales follow-up, and can help drive content creation and strategies for customer acquisition and retention.
Personalize and contextualize every interaction.
Work to create customized, personalized offers that are relevant to them; this helps increase customer buying and helps you offer timely recommendations, service and advice. Follow up with customers by providing a customer satisfaction survey. This information will help you determine what worked and what didn’t during their interaction with your company. If you find out a customer was unhappy, it gives you the ability to resolve the issue. A survey can provide great feedback to improve the customer experience.
Utilize data and analytics across the customer lifecycle.
From customer support response and resolution times, to the amount of time customers actually spent on your website, there are plenty of valuable metrics you can use as a benchmark to work toward improving the customer experience. Saving a customer time is a great way to earn customer loyalty.
With each interaction and successful encounter, you will collect more data that can be used to further enhance the experience down the line. It’s time to make experience management an integral part of your strategy, across the entire customer lifecycle. The results will speak for themselves!