What is customer experience management (CXM)?

Customer experience management (CXM) is the practice of designing and improving the interactions and touchpoints a customer has with a business. It involves understanding the customer's journey, their needs and pain points, and taking steps to ensure a positive, seamless experience across all interactions.

The goal of CXM is to build long-term customer loyalty and advocacy by exceeding customer expectations. Businesses that excel at CXM can differentiate themselves from competitors, increase customer retention and lifetime value, and drive business growth.

Why is customer experience management important?

In today's crowded and competitive marketplace, customer experience has become a key competitive differentiator. Customers have more choices than ever before, and they will take their business to companies that provide the best overall experience.

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. Today, customers demand a two-way omnichannel customer experience. If your customer experience fails to delight, they will check out your competitor's.

Poor customer experiences can have serious consequences for a business, including:

• Higher customer churn and reduced lifetime value
• Negative word-of-mouth and damage to brand reputation
• Lower customer satisfaction and loyalty
• Missed opportunities to upsell and cross-sell

On the other hand, companies that master CXM can enjoy significant benefits:

• Increased customer satisfaction, loyalty, and advocacy
• Higher customer retention and lifetime value
• More opportunities for upselling and cross-selling
• Competitive differentiation and stronger brand positioning
• Greater operational efficiencies and cost savings
• Profits that are 60% higher than those who fail to focus on CX

Customer-centric brands that deliver a successful omnichannel customer experience not only drive customer loyalty, but they also build advocates that will promote their brand, helping to ensure their message reaches a wider audience. 73% of customers now say CX is the number one consideration when deciding whether to purchase from a company.

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Key components of customer experience management

Effective customer experience management requires a holistic, customer-centric approach that touches on several key areas:

Customer communications management: Deliver engaging, personalized, digital-first communications across all channels and devices throughout the entire customer journey.

Customer journey mapping: Thoroughly understanding the various touchpoints, channels, and steps a customer takes when interacting with your business. This provides visibility into pain points, friction, and opportunities for improvement.

Omnichannel messaging: Ensuring a consistent, personalized experience for customers across all channels and devices, from in-person interactions to web, mobile, social media, and more.

Voice of the Customer: Continuously collecting and analyzing customer feedback, sentiments, and behavior to gain insights and inform CX improvements.

CX analytics and metrics: Measuring the success of CX initiatives through key performance indicators like customer satisfaction, net promoter score, customer effort score, and churn rate.

Employee engagement: Empowering and training frontline staff to deliver exceptional customer service and support the overall CX strategy.

Technology and tools: Leveraging the right technologies, software, and automation to enhance the customer experience and drive operational efficiency.

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Features of effective CXM solutions

An effective CXM strategy consists of a set of actions and technologies working together to create an outstanding customer experience. The CXM solution must create a customer experience that is:

Continuous: You can scale and connect many customer journeys, collect and analyze data from all sources, and continuously adapt to customer needs, making real-time adjustments.

Optimized: You can go beyond optimizing a single interaction to automatically personalize at scale, make recommendations to customers, and optimize complex operational content and processes.

Key components of a comprehensive CXM solution include:

Customer communications management (CCM): Solutions that improve customer experience through the personalization and automation of customer communications across both B2B and B2C channels.

Customer experience analytics: A scalable analytics, reporting, and data visualization platform that enables teams to design, deploy, and manage secure, interactive applications, reports, and dashboards fed by multiple data sources.

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How OpenText supports customer experience management

As a global leader in Enterprise Information Management (EIM) solutions, OpenText provides a range of products and services to help organizations optimize their customer experience management efforts:

OpenText Experience Cloud: A comprehensive platform of digital experience management tools to build, manage, optimize and deliver customer-facing websites, portals, communications, and digital assets.

OpenText Communications: Solutions for creating, managing, and delivering personalized, omnichannel customer communications like bills, statements, and correspondence.

OpenText Business Network: Secure, cloud-based B2B integration technologies to facilitate seamless, digital-first interactions and information exchange with customers, partners, and suppliers.

OpenText Analytics and Reporting: Advanced analytics capabilities to help organizations uncover customer insights, measure CX performance, and make data-driven decisions.

OpenText Managed Services: Outsourced expertise and support to design, implement, and continually improve customer experience management initiatives.

Global analyst and research firm Aspire Customer Communications Services has recognized OpenText as a leader in customer experience management. By leveraging OpenText's industry-leading EIM platform and professional services, organizations can enhance every facet of the customer experience and stay ahead of evolving customer expectations.

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FAQs about customer experience management

How do you measure the success of CXM initiatives?

• Key metrics include customer satisfaction (CSAT), net promoter score (NPS), customer effort score (CES), churn rate, and customer lifetime value (CLV).
• Tracking these metrics across different touchpoints and channels provides a holistic view of CX performance, allowing you to identify areas that need improvement.
  4 tips for tracking customer experience KPIs

How do you collect and utilize customer feedback?

• Leverage a variety of feedback channels like surveys, online reviews, social media, and support interactions to capture a diverse range of customer input.
• Analyze both structured (e.g. ratings) and unstructured (e.g. comments) feedback to identify trends, pain points, and opportunities to delight customers, then quickly act on the insights.

How do you create a seamless omnichannel customer experience?

• Ensure consistent branding, messaging, and capabilities across all customer touchpoints (website, mobile app, in-person, call center, etc.) powered by digital asset management to provide a unified experience.
• Provide a frictionless experience that allows customers to start an interaction on one channel and complete it on another, without losing context or having to repeat information.

How do you balance automation and human interaction?

• Leverage AI to help content authors create and edit customer communications for better empathy and understanding, while providing self-service tools to handle routine inquiries efficiently. This frees up your employees and agents to focus on more complex issues.
• Empower your employees and agents with the right tools and information to provide high-touch, personalized support when needed, maintaining that human touch.

How do you align your organizational culture and processes around CXM?

• Instill a customer-centric mindset across all departments, not just customer-facing roles, to ensure everyone is focused on delivering exceptional experiences.
• Redesign internal processes and incentives to prioritize the customer experience, breaking down silos and aligning the organization around a shared CX vision.

How do you use data and analytics to drive CXM strategies?

• Leverage customer data from multiple sources to build a comprehensive, 360-degree view of each customer, their behaviors, preferences, and pain points.
• Use advanced analytics to uncover insights, predict behaviors, and personalize interactions at scale, continuously testing and iterating on CXM initiatives based on data-driven performance metrics.