What Is Customer Experience Management? And Why Does It Matter?

The best marketing doesn’t come from the marketing department; it comes from loyal and enthusiastic customers. And the key to creating passionately loyal customers is great Customer Experience (CX)—it’s just as important as what you sell.

Customer Experience Management (CXM) is the art of understanding and anticipating customer behavior to create the best customer experiences. Good CXM strategies provide personal, scalable CX that can be refined in real time. Sounds like a tall order, right? With the right tools and processes, however, it’s possible to deploy CXM strategies that drive stellar experiences. Here’s how.

Why Does Customer Experience Management matter?

CX Management Gives Brands Control

Regardless of what you sell and how you sell it, your customer experience is part of what your customers are buying. Managing that experience gives your brand the ability to shape and refine its CX to keep loyal customers and bring on new ones. CX is fluid, omnichannel, and overlapping; without management you run the risk of pushing stale messaging and alienating customers.  

Good CXM Creates Raving Fans

Good CX generates its own good press via word of mouth, product reviews, and social media brand advocacy to bring in new business and help retain loyal customers. If customers feel understood, listened to, and personally relevant, they are much more likely to spread the word about your brand. And nearly every brand has some sort of rating system—often more than one—and customers expect their feedback to matter. Good CXM strategies incorporate customer feedback and tailor the customer experience to the individual.

Solving CXM Challenges with Data

Customer experience includes any contact a customer has with your brand, from first touch to ongoing customer support. Consistently positive CX doesn’t happen by accident; it’s a direct result of CXM-related data collection and analysis.

CX management strategies must be flexible, scalable, and provide personalized customer experiences. To accomplish this, CXM strategies should incorporate feedback, engagement, and purchasing behavior in near real time. At the same time, a well-defined CXM strategy uses data to create reliable predictive models that keep customers loyal and increase customer lifetime value.

Successful CX management starts with data management. It’s simply not possible to manage individual customer experiences without an intelligent data solution that can consolidate hundreds of data streams into a single source of truth and then provide actionable insights.

For example, the following common challenges can be addressed with the right processes and data management solutions.

Challenge: Consolidating Customer Data

Customer journeys are omnichannel, fluid, and personal. Many businesses have a large amount of data but no way to bring it together for accurate analysis. Privacy and security concerns also complicate attempts to consolidate data into a single customer profile. Qualitative customer data such as free text fields in surveys, social media engagement or brand advocacy can be particularly challenging to take into account. Without understanding the complete customer journey, inaccurate or conflicting data can’t be flagged and certain customer interactions can be invisible.

Solution: Customer Data Platform

Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) are powerful tools that collect and manage customer data. The first step is to stitch together all the different data sources and create a consolidated, shared data pool. The next step is to generate Single Customer Views (SCV). SCVs consolidate each piece of customer data into a single, unique record and include:

• Updated, blended, and validated first- and third-party demographic data
• Purchasing history both online and in-store
• Loyalty program and promotional participation
• Engagement with social media, websites, and direct messaging
• Reviews and customer feedback
• Privacy and contact preferences

SCVs are only as good as their data and have to be evaluated and refined in real time to track changes and update preferences. CDPs help keep them up to date and valid.

Challenge: Generating Actionable Insights

Even with consolidated data, full-funnel visibility and actionable insights are a major challenge for any CXM strategy. It’s difficult to determine how to marry qualitative and quantitative data in order to understand the individual customer. Customer behavior changes very quickly, and it can be hard to determine if insights are still relevant. Actionable insights that lead to future success can be hard to find and difficult to measure.

Solution: Real-time Data Analysis for CXM

With a single customer view established, CDPs generate accurate and timely data insights. Because the data is consolidated in near-real time and available company wide, analytics can be run at every level of the business, allowing each segment to work from reliable data. For example, CDP analytics can inform marketing initiatives and reduce resource waste. The power of real-time CDP analytics only grows over time as more and more data is folded into the SCV of each customer.

Challenge: Deploying at Scale

Without the proper tools to act on insights, no amount of data analysis is going to be useful. Though customers require omnichannel, personal, and seamless CX, it has to be deployed at scale. Your CXM has to grow as the brand grows to keep up with customer needs. This can only be accomplished with the right tools.

Solution: Enterprise Technology that Grows with You

Treasure Data’s enterprise CDP solution unifies customer data from all sources including social media, website, and app customer engagement and is constantly refined and updated in real time. PARCO, a Japanese retail giant, is able to use insights gained from customer data to truly personalize CX, create loyal customers, and attract new ones. Its CXM keeps the PARCO experience unique and seamless for every customer.

Positive CX Starts With CXM

Customer data is constantly pouring in from hundreds of touch points. The needs and desires of customers change fast and frequently. Customer Experience Management sets the framework for personalized, positive experiences, and proactive messaging, even as customer’s wants and needs evolve.

Advanced marketing technology, like an enterprise CDP, harnesses customer data and provides actionable insights to guide your CXM strategy. To find out how Treasure Data can help improve your CXM strategy and put your data to work for you, schedule a demo today.

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