What Is Customer Experience Management and Why Choose a CXM Software?

Your customer experience management strategy is among the most important of any strategies you use in business. It is the most effective way to ensure that your customers have a positive experience with your brand and remain loyal to it in the future.

Using software and solutions is key for handling customer experience management, particularly as your business grows and has a larger customer base to manage. That’s why you should look at this list of top customer experience software to help you choose the one that’s right for you.

What is customer experience management?

Customer experience management (CXM or CEM) refers to the marketing strategies and tools that are designed to improve the customer experience along with customer satisfaction and engagement.

When talking about customer experience management, you should know that while tools and software can help, these are not the only things you need to integrate into your workflow. You also need to prioritize the customer and take a customer-centric approach to customer service.

The right mindset for customer experience management will help you prioritize personalizing the entire customer experience. It also allows you to scale that experience across channels.

This is where Podium comes in. Speed to lead is critical in today’s fast-paced market, and Podium offers an unparalleled advantage by ensuring businesses engage with leads within minutes—guaranteed. A big part of customer experience is to have unparalleled and efficient response times, that’s why Podium’s conversational AI is the service you need! It is outcome-driven—it doesn’t just respond to inbound leads it guides conversations toward a specific goal, such as a sale or booking. Unlike other AI systems that focus on providing correct responses, Podium aims to drive specific customer actions to grow your business.

Transform your business with Podium’s AI Employee. Get a Demo Today.

What’s the difference between CRM and CXM?

It’s common to wonder about the difference between CRM (customer relationship management) and CXM (customer experience management). While the two are related, they have distinct differences.

Put simply, a CRM provides more information on how a customer looks to you as the company. Meanwhile, a CXM provides information on how your company looks to your customers. With a CXM or CEM, all business strategies, including sales, marketing, social media, and customer support, are centered around the customer and their needs.

Since CXM is all about the customer, many CXM strategies also rely on voice of the customer tools. These tools help businesses accurately measure customer feedback and sentiment, making it easier to identify weak spots in the customer experience. This way, it becomes easier to ensure your customers enjoy interacting with your business.

By contrast, CRM strategies work toward the goal of increasing revenue. They look at outreach and sales. This sales-oriented system is commonly integrated with customer support and service systems.

Why is customer experience management important?

CXM is a crucial differentiator that every business should consider. Overall, businesses focused on these strategies see an improvement in long-term brand customer loyalty, lead generation, and conversion rates. The following are just some of the most important benefits of incorporating CXM or CEM marketing into your workflow.

1. Provides Insights Into Customer Behavior

Your CXM strategy gives you a better view of customers’ preferences and behaviors across all touchpoints. This information gives you crucial information, so you can tailor the customer experience to meet those preferences and increase customer loyalty.

You can also use those customer insights to better segment your audience. From there, use segmentation and customer journey mapping to deliver highly personalized experiences. This can help boost conversion rates and overall profitability.

2. Improves Loyalty and Retention Rates

Customer experience management lets you improve the customer experience via a seamless customer journey and personalized experiences.

When customers have a better experience, they will form deeper, longer-lasting relationships with your brand. Thanks to the insights from a customer experience management solution, you can do this by delivering things like loyalty incentives, product recommendations, and other services.

Your improved customer retention and loyalty efforts, combined with improved customer satisfaction from CXM, also reduce customer churn.

3. Makes You Stand Out from the Competition

One of the most effective ways to stand out from your competitors is to provide a positive customer experience. With the vast majority of consumers reporting switching to another brand after receiving a poor customer experience, it’s even more crucial to refine CXM strategies. Satisfied customers will continue giving your business and they’ll even convince others to choose your brand.

4. Tracks and Measures Campaigns and Strategies

The data that comes from CXM is yet another advantage. You can gather and analyze this data so you can make more informed, customer-centric business decisions. You get more accurate data on engagement success and customer actions and preferences so you can create more effective strategies.

4 Top Customer Experience Management Software

Customer experience software is an incredibly useful tool used to make CXM easier. To help you choose the best platform for your business, we’ve gathered the top options.

1. Podium

Podium serves as a customer experience platform while also offering many of the features you would get from a customer relationship management program.

On the CXM side, Podium’s communication tools help you build a better brand experience. Inbox makes customer communication faster and easier. Easier communication ensures that your customers feel valued and have a positive experience with your company. Podium routes all of your messages in a single location, so you can respond to Facebook messages, emails, phone calls, text messages, website chats, and more from a single platform.

This centralized Inbox also makes it easier for your team to respond to customers. It ensures that your employees have all the relevant information they need when talking to a customer, such as past purchases and any conversations. The platform even works well with artificial intelligence, such as chatbots, to help ease your workflow.

With Podium Reviews, you can manage your online reputations. Podium makes it easy to encourage satisfied customers to leave reviews, boosting your online search ranking. These factors can help your salesforce increase the bottom line by offering better customer service.

Plus, with Podium’s AI Employee, you can engage with leads and customers within minutes—during peak hours, off hours, and every hour in between. Podium’s AI Employee manages each conversation and can respond intelligently—offering answers on inventory, scheduling, FAQs, and more.

Podium adds value by combining all the features you need in a single platform. In addition to the CXM and CRM features, you also get payment integration, phones, and more.

2. LiveAgent

LiveAgent is cloud-based and delivers multi-channel support. It gives you features to manage a knowledge base and help desk. Use it to automatically assign support tickets from live chat, email, or phone, all of which are managed in a shared team inbox. Automations are also available for prompt follow-up messages.

In addition to the knowledge base, you can use LiveAgent to create a customer forum and gather customer feedback. There is also support for numerous languages and plenty of integrations, including Shopify, Gmail, Slack, and Jira. This system costs $9 per month per user.

3. SurveySparrow

You can easily monitor customer employee satisfaction and customer trends through the NPS survey tool from SurveySparrow. Customers easily help promote your business with the omnichannel approach this platform allows. The software utilizes chatbots and other sources of artificial intelligence to help you collect and analyze your customer data.

4. Jotform Enterprise

Another cloud-based program that allows for automated services is Jotform. Through this tool, B2B organizations can share forms that look professional as well as analyze and record customer responses. This software aids marketing and sales teams with payments and lead generation and enables customer surveys. With these surveys, a business can get actionable insights that are based on customer experiences.

The software offers a wide selection of templates, such as thank-you page templates and customizations, experience surveys, and even smart PDFs that use conditional logic. These are all mobile-optimized forms. Their technology is mobile-first, making it look good on all devices.

Advanced options such as automation and multilingual support help ensure that you can create the exact survey you want. You also have the option for offline form creation.

How To Create a Good Customer Experience

It’s not difficult to create a positive customer experience. Some ways your company can make a good impression on customers along their journeys include:

• Taking the time to understand your customers. Develop customer profiles and learn how to target key customer segments to personalize their experiences with you.
• Creating a customer journey map to identify the different touchpoints customers might come into contact with and how they interact with your product or service.
• Listening to customer feedback. Keep updated on customer feedback, and don’t be afraid to implement changes when customers mention ways their experiences could be better.
• Creating a brand personality that builds an emotional connection with your target audiences. When your brand builds a strong connection, customers are more likely to remain loyal to it.

6 Features to Look for in a Customer Experience Management Platform

Looking for the right customer experience management platform can take some time and research. When you are comparing different management systems, here are a few key factors to look for:

1. Integrations

Your organization likely has multiple types of data, such as finance data, HR data, as well as website analytics. Many also have APIs that allow for other data to be transferred between different systems. When your CX platform integrates these information channels, it creates a complete, seamless vision of the customer experience and how it affects your business.

2. Omnichannel Communications

When you have the right software, you can take advantage of multiple ways to communicate and listen to your customers. This will help you better understand what makes a great customer experience.

Whether you are using your social media accounts, your website, apps, or physical locations, your software should allow for interaction. Your software should seamlessly integrate live chat, SMS surveys, web surveys, and interactive voice responses. All your feedback channels need to track back to a centralized system for meaningful insights into your customer lifecycle and their brand experience.

3. Customer Data Management

Your software should manage your customer data and build thorough customer profiles capable from the beginning of the buying journey through the end of the brand experience. These profiles will provide valuable information that can help you understand who your ideal client is and how to interact with your customers better. It will offer a superior understanding of your customers’ needs and indicate the best touch points as well.

Today, you need an omnichannel approach to collecting this data. Give the same weight to an email, customer support calls, emails, and tweets. Get a solid understanding of what your customers are talking about, whether they’re talking about you, and during what stage of the customer journey they’re making comments. This constant monitoring will keep you in tune with changes that need implementing.

4. Ease of Use

The best customer experience management software is easy to use. With it, you’re able to get see how engaged your customers are and have access to an intuitive dashboard. The data should be stored in a centralized, easy-to-access location that prevents data silos. See interactions with your customers and their history. You should be able to see behavior such as contacts and purchases as well as how they felt such as their feedback. Interactions should be seamless across a range of different areas.

You should have either a real-time view of trends or your NPS score displayed on your dashboard. With an advanced system, you can customize your dashboard to get the most out of your data.

5. Functionality

Your software system should be highly functional with the ability to analyze statistical data easily and intuitively. These statistics will help you understand your customers and their behavior better.

Your software should also be able to analyze open-text responses with AI. The software should automatically sort these so you don’t have to spend time checking each response. Make sure to check what is offered here because different types of tools may offer varying levels of analysis, from identifying topics to analyzing customer sentiment.

Finally, your software system should analyze what key factors drive customer relationships. This is done by closely monitoring a key metric such as revenue or NPS so you can easily see what your strengths are and what areas need help. This data will also help you get a better understanding of your customer’s motivation and how to convert new clients.

6. Customer Support

The CXM software you choose should also have plenty of customer support resources. Aside from a toll-free number and live chat support, the platform should offer self-service options like blogs and knowledge bases. These resources ensure that you can quickly find solutions to the issues you encounter.

The Consumer Experience Journey

The customer experience journey map tells you how customers interact with your brand. Your map should include at least four sections to review how they’ll come across your company, products, and services. These sections will:

• Look at customer research and how the customer discovers your company.
• Investigate customer comparisons (such as your competitors) and how your customer learns more about them and any competing products.
• Look at purchasing, which is the first stage of the customer retention process and the moment when they make a purchase from your company.
• Focus on customer support. Determine which teams (such as your customer support and service teams) interact with your customers during and after a purchase.

Each of those four sections is one of your customers’ potential touchpoints. You want to create as many sections as you need to get a view of the entire customer journey from start to finish, allowing you to create a more comprehensive, satisfying experience for your customers.

Improve Your Customer Experience with Podium

Podium offers an all-in-one solution to help you connect with prospects and customers through texting and Webchat, request reviews to boost your online search ranking, accept payments via text and in person, and use AI to keep leads warm, send personalized marketing campaigns, and so much more.

Check out Podium’s free tools to get started—a free Google Review link generator and hundreds of texting templates that are ready to use.

To see how Podium can help you drive even more revenue and growth for your business—watch a free demo.

Improve customer communication while simultaneously driving revenue through growth. Podium can help you understand how getting more reviews means more business for you. Podium also has a free Google Review link generator so you can start collecting feedback.

Let Podium you how to make your website a conversation starter by integrating different tools. Get started with Webchat and make the most of it to boost conversion while focusing on customer centricity.

In addition, Podium offers help creating highly useful texts and has hundreds of texting templates that are ready to use.

Customer Experience Management FAQs

Below, we’ve answered some frequently asked questions about customer experience management:

1. What are the key areas of customer experience management?

Important areas to pay attention to when it comes to customer experience management include identifying customer needs as well as qualifying touch points for the best customer experience. You will also need to collect data from several stages of the customer experience and analyze it to create more effective business strategies. While doing this, you should work to develop a customer-centric brand that puts the client’s needs first. Once this system is set up, refine your process while regularly setting goals.

2. What are the 4 components of customer experience?

There are four main components of customer experience including a customer-centric culture, high-quality service, optimized touchpoints, and customer satisfaction. When you focus on these four components, you can anticipate customer needs and direct your efforts toward improving the quality of customer interactions. You must always consider these components as you optimize your CXM strategies.

3. How to improve customer experience?

One of the simplest ways of improving customer experience is to improve communications with your customers. Make it easy for your customers to provide feedback and interact with your business. Make a regular habit of checking in with your clients to see what can be improved and what they appreciate about your customer service.