Creating positive customer experiences with customer experience management

What is Customer Experience Management (CXM)?

Customer Experience Management is a holistic approach used for the complete management of the customer experience (CX).

This is about strengthening the emotional relationship between the customer and the company at every possible interaction point (touchpoint) of the entire customer journey through positive experiences. 

To achieve this, companies need to know how their customers’ journey unfolds, which phases they go through, which direct as well as indirect contact points are located on this journey, and which expectations and wishes customers have at each individual contact point. 

Only with this information can strategies be developed and optimization carried out to positively influence the customer journey by increasing customer satisfaction and long-term loyalty to the company.

What is the goal and main task of Customer Experience Management?

The goal of CXM is to create a permanently positive customer experience along the customer journey by permanently optimizing all direct and indirect interaction points in order to maintain customer satisfaction and strengthen customer loyalty in the long term.

To achieve this, various tasks must be performed by those responsible in order to optimize and positively shape the touchpoints:

1. Identify weak points in the customer journey

The basis of every optimization is the identification of problems and weak points. 

So, in order to optimize the customer journey, individual contained CX touchpoints must be measured and analyzed to identify the weak points and problems along the customer journey.

2. Identifying customer needs

Creating a positive customer experience is only possible with the help of those who live through the customer journey, and these are the customers. It therefore makes sense to enter into dialog with customers and ask for their feedback through surveys.

It is important to ask not only whether they are satisfied or dissatisfied with the respective touchpoint, but also what their expectations and wishes are at the respective point of contact. 

This is the only way to find improvements to enhance the customer experience.

3. Planning of measures

Based on the identification of weaknesses and needs, suitable measures for optimizing the customer experience are defined and planned.

The following questions play an important role and should be answered when planning the respective measure:

• What is to be improved?
• Where should the improvement of the CX take place?
• What should the measure look like?  
• Who is involved in planning and implementing the measure?
• When is the measure to be implemented?

4. Check measure for cost-benefit analysis

Before going into implementation, however, each measure to be implemented must be checked for cost-effectiveness by means of a cost-benefit analysis. 

5. Implementation of the measure

After the measure has been successfully checked for cost-effectiveness, the CX team can implement the previously planned action accordingly.

6. Evaluation of the implemented measure

Any action that is intended to improve the customer experience must be subsequently tested through regular measurement and analysis. 

If there is a deterioration, you should first consider why the new measure is not working before replacing it with a new one. Sometimes it is just a small thing that needs to be adjusted. 

If one of your implemented measures leads to an improvement, don’t rest on it. Expectations change over time. Permanent optimization is important over time.

Why is customer experience management important?

Positive customer experiences lead to a positive experience and an increase in satisfaction.

And the better the customer experience along the customer journey, the easier it is to win and retain customers. 

Particularly in the face of increasing competition, the customer’s experience is a decisive factor in their purchase decision. If they have a good experience, they are willing to buy or stay; if, on the other hand, the customer experience is poor, they will break off the relationship and look for an alternative.

And this is where customer experience management plays a crucial role.

Customer experience management helps you to:

• create a positive and exceptional customer experience along the customer journey;
• increase customer satisfaction and loyalty;
• generate more revenue;
• reduce the churn rate;
• receive a positive recommendation through word of mouth and reviews.

6 steps for a functioning Customer Experience Management

Customer Experience Management, like other management processes, is based on the simple logic: understand, plan, decide, execute, measure and evaluate.  

Because even with CXM, measures to improve the customer experience can only be planned and taken if you first have an understanding of the goal of it all.

Without this understanding, planning, deciding and implementing measures to achieve the goal is difficult. 

The subsequent measurement and evaluation of implemented measures is also an important part of the CXM process. Without checking for goal achievement, CXM and its goal are worthless. 

To ensure that customer experience management and the management process described above are successful in your company, we have outlined 6 steps for a functioning CXM:

1. Define the goals of your CXM

For a well-functioning CXM, the first step should be to define clear, binding and measurable goals.

After all, the purpose of customer experience management is to increase revenue and reduce costs.

But not only economic goals should be included, but also behavioral ones, such as increasing willingness to buy, boosting customer loyalty, or strengthening referrals.

No matter what goals you have set for CXM, these goals are also always the basis for measuring and evaluating your strategies.

2. Understand customers and collect experiences

Once the goals for customer experience management have been set, the next step is to understand the customer and their expectations and desires.

In doing so, we should not only gather information focused on his demographics, but also go beyond that. Information on buying and consumer behavior, his needs, expectations and desires, and his emotions round it all out. 

To help you obtain this and other information, a target group/customer analysis via online questionnaire is suitable.

Once you have obtained all the information you need via the online questionnaire, the next step is to define your customer’s ideal experience along the customer journey based on the information collected.

3. Define customer experience

The next step is to clarify and define the experiences that customers should ideally have with your company along the customer journey and the respective direct and indirect touchpoints.

This step is not straightforward and is best discussed with several internal as well as external people/departments/functions that have direct or indirect contact with customers. 

The goal of this step is to get an overview of which possible structures and capabilities are needed to implement the customer experience management approach in one’s own company.

If you don’t have this information, you’re poking around in the dark and the house of cards will collapse during implementation at the latest.

But once you have mastered this step, you can then move on to planning and implementing structures and capabilities to carry out customer experience management.

4. Create structures & capabilities

When planning a CXM, it helps to have an internal roadmap that describes what is needed and what needs to be developed or changed to satisfy or even exceed customer expectations and desires. 

In addition, the roadmap also describes processes for execution, required knowledge and skills of employees, technologies used and more.

5. Implement CXM

Consequently, once the previously described roadmap is in place, everything needs to be implemented so that the next step is to move into the implementation of customer experience management.

6. Measure & optimize

The final step should be to define measurable metrics.

Successful customer experience management is characterized by the fact that the goals set are also achieved.

After each optimization, it must be checked whether the goals have improved or deteriorated. Based on this, adjustments of existing or new measures are derived.   

As you have now read, it takes a lot before you can establish a functioning CXM in your company.

However, if you are already running customer experience management in your company, you might want to take another look at the following listed steps to conclude this chapter and consider whether you can improve your CXM.   

The 6 steps to making CXM work: 

1. Define your CXM goals
2. Understand customers and collect experiences
3. Define customer experience
4. Create structures & capabilities
5. Implement CXM
6. Measure & optimize

3 examples of good customer experience management

So, now you’ve gotten a lot of basic knowledge about Customer Experience Management throughout this post, but what you’re missing now are examples of companies that are already successfully practicing Customer Experience Management. 

So now let’s take a look at some examples of good CXM:

1. About You

The german online fashion retailer About You is constantly working to improve the customer experience when shopping online. 

Users are suggested items that match their style based on their search behavior and orders. This is done by automatically adjusting product pages to give users inspiration on possible outfits. 

Even after logging in, the home page is displayed to the user in a personalized way.

2. Decathlon

Decathlon, a manufacturer and retailer of sports equipment and clothing, used virtual reality to demonstrate camping tents in various stores via virtual reality glasses. 

The advantage, the tents did not have to be unpacked and set up, but one could view the tents virtually and compare the different models. 

In the end, one could even purchase the tent directly via the self-service checkout.

3. McDonalds

If you’ve been to McDonald’s lately, you’ve noticed that orders are no longer placed at the cash register, but at touchscreens in front of the registers. 

That’s because the Easy Order terminals are designed to make the ordering and payment process not only more convenient, but also faster. In addition, customers can individualize their burgers.

Customer Experience Management with a tool/software

You would like to successfully apply CXM in your company?

Then there are various possibilities.

Basically, however, it always depends on how much budget and resources you have available.

Sure, a large company that has a dedicated department for customer experience optimization will probably go for an expensive all-in-one customer experience solution. 

But especially for companies that don’t have a high budget and are rather more limited in terms of resources, such all-in-one solutions don’t make sense. On the one hand, they are too complex and, on the other, too expensive in terms of usage intensity. But there are alternatives to these systems. 

For example, you can already positively influence the customer journey with the help of simple surveys at the respective interaction points. 

Let's take an example:
You want to ask about the customer experience after every e-mail or after every telephone contact with your support. To do this, you can send a survey to customers in the form of a satisfaction survey (CSAT survey). 

Evaluate the feedback you receive and think about how you can improve the experience in terms of satisfaction. 

After you have implemented the measure, you can measure and evaluate it again with surveys. 

Even though a survey tool like easyfeedback cannot take over the management of the entire customer experience, it can still help you optimize customer satisfaction along the customer journey, even with a small budget and few resources.

Online surveys with easyfeedback are inexpensive, comply with data protection regulations, and you gain important insights through the use of targeted surveys.

And as described in the example above, customer feedback at various touchpoints along the customer journey can provide you with valuable information for developing measures based on the responses and testing them for effectiveness after implementation.

Try it out with easyfeedback!