Customer experience management (CEM) is much more than another acronym. Rather, it is a business strategy focusing on creating and managing positive interactions with customers throughout the purchasing journey. Customer experience brings one significant point that differentiates a brand from its rivals. This makes brands who are interested in succeeding and expanding themselves invest heavily in customer experiences, especially CEM.
Many components are involved with CEM, which helps businesses understand every touch point its customer has and optimize it. Understanding customer experiences and improving them enhances customer satisfaction, and is directly linked with increased sales, customer loyalty, and overall perception of the company in the market.
What is a Customer Journey?
A customer journey is the complete process that a customer experiences through interactions when they are engaging with the company. Understanding the journey of the customer means understanding all the experiences and connections the customer has with the brand. It starts from the moment they become aware of the company, or its products and continues till the post-purchase stage. It also includes potential future interactions which all must be recorded. In Customer Experience Management (CEM), understanding and mapping this journey is a crucial aspect.
What is Feedback and Measurement?
Understanding customer journey includes gathering feedback from them through various channels like surveys, or reviews. Companies often use different metrics such as Customer Effort Score (CES), and Net Promoter Score (NPS) to measure and then access this feedback and conclude the overall satisfaction.
What is the Net Promoter Score (NPS)?
NPS is used in businesses where the companies want to know the likelihood of the customer recommending the brand or its products and services to someone else. Questions like "How likely is it that you would recommend our [product/service/company] to a friend or colleague?" are often asked to measure NPS. The customer is also asked to provide a score from 0-10 to this act of recommendation, with 0 being "Not at all likely" and 10 being "Extremely likely."
Customer Effort Score (CES)
CES is a metric used by businesses to evaluate the level of exertion in customer experience management that a customer requires to accomplish a specific goal or solution with the company. This metric measures the level of easiness that the customer feels while interacting with the business, and addressing their concerns, or problems such as completing a purchase or carrying out any complaint.
Usually, the Customer Effort Score is measured by asking questions like "How much effort did you have to put forth to resolve your issue?" to the customers. Then they provide a numerical rating, which often is on a scale of 1-7 or 1-10. Here, lower scores indicate lower efforts that the customer makes, and higher scores indicate higher efforts by them.
These are the satisfaction metrics that are used as KPIs essential key performance indicators in working out the entire customer experience process.
What is a Post-purchase Experience?
Most companies think that when a customer completes purchasing from the brand, care for them stops there. But, post-purchase experience is a real thing that affects the overall customer experience with the brand and its services. This stage usually involves using the purchased service or product to evaluate the overall experience or satisfaction. It is an essential stage that includes customer support, and onboarding processes, along with any follow-up communication. How well a business performs at this stage can easily make or break its reputation in the market. This is why it is always recommended to use multi-chain integration as it makes sure the customer can contact the brand and get a fast response. A multi-chain integration provides an uncomplicated experience across different communication channels, including social media and online platforms, along with in-store customer support.
Businesses use this Customer Experience Management as a strategy to improve sales and reputation in the market, stepping ahead of their competitors.
