How to Select the Best Customer Experience Management Software
Customer experience management (CEM) involves overseeing and improving the interactions between a business and its customers. The best CX management software understands and addresses customer needs, preferences, and feedback. They aims to enhance customer satisfaction and loyalty. Effective CEM strategies can lead to increased customer retention and positive brand perception.
Did you know that 92% of CEOs agree that customer experience (CX) improvements have a direct impact on their bottom line? It’s clear that a customer experience program is no longer a luxury, but a necessity.
The process of choosing the best customer experience management software can be tricky and extensive, so there are some things you need to keep in mind as to find the perfect CX partner for your business.
Benefits of Customer Experience Management Software
Delivering consistent, memorable experiences is no longer a luxury, it’s a necessity. Consumers are more likely to become repeat customers if they have great experiences. But, in order to achieve this, you need an actionable customer experience strategy. That is where customer experience management software comes in. Customer experience management (CXM) software offers several benefits for businesses aiming to enhance their customer interactions and satisfaction such as:
- Improved Customer Satisfaction: CXM software helps businesses understand customer needs, preferences, and expectations. By addressing these effectively, businesses can enhance overall customer satisfaction.
- Enhanced Customer Loyalty: By consistently providing positive experiences, CXM software contributes to building customer loyalty. Satisfied customers are more likely to become repeat customers and advocates for the brand.
- Reduce Customer Churn: According to research by PwC, customers are willing to pay up to 16% more for products or services from companies that offer a better customer experience. Additionally, research by Temkin Group indicates that companies that excel at customer experience have a 16.9% advantage in customer retention rates over companies that provide a poor experience.
- Personalized Interactions: CXM software allows businesses to collect and analyze customer data, enabling personalized interactions. Personalization enhances the customer experience by delivering relevant content, recommendations, and offers.
- Brand Differentiation: Providing an exceptional customer experience through CXM software can set a business apart from competitors. Positive experiences contribute to a positive image, and improved brand reputation management, which aids in differentiating your brand in the market.
- Employee Engagement: Happy and engaged employees are more likely to provide better customer service. CXM software can also contribute to employee satisfaction by providing tools and insights to enhance their ability to serve customers effectively.
How to Choose the Best Customer Experience Management Platform
Choosing the right customer experience management is a critical decision for businesses aiming to elevate their customer interactions. A robust CXM platform can significantly impact customer satisfaction, loyalty, and overall business success. But, choosing the right partner for your business is a complex process. In order to ensure you choose the right vendor, there are some preliminary steps you need to take.
Look at Third-Party Evaluations
When evaluating CXM platforms, it’s essential to consider third-party evaluations and industry reviews. Independent research firms like Forrester and Gartner provide assessments, such as the Gartner CX Magic Quadrant, that provide valuable insights into the strengths and weaknesses of different platforms, helping you make an informed decision. Look for reviews from reputable sources, industry analysts, and customer experience experts. Assessments often highlight features, scalability, integration capabilities, and overall performance. By leveraging third-party evaluations, you can gain a well-rounded perspective on the platforms you’re considering, ensuring that your choice aligns with industry standards and best practices.
Look at Customer References
Another crucial aspect of selecting a CXM platform is examining customer references. Real-world experiences from businesses similar to yours can offer unparalleled insights into the platform’s practicality and effectiveness. Focus on understanding how the platform addressed their specific needs, the level of support provided, and any challenges faced during implementation. Customer references provide a firsthand account of the platform’s performance in diverse business environments, aiding you in making a decision that aligns with your unique requirements.
For example, if you are looking for an example of how a customer experience platform helped a large organization put loads of data into one place, look no further than Foot Locker. Foot Locker utilized Pearl-Plaza’s AI technology to gather data into one place, and sort by sentiment so that customers with negative experiences could be contacted and prevented from churning.
Look at Their Integrated CX Offering
When considering a CXM platform, it is important to choose a partner that will allow you to do more than one thing. You don’t want a partner who can only do surveys or contact center optimization, you want a partner who will give you an end-to-end look into the customer journey.
That is why Integrated CX is so important. Integrated CX allows you to bring in data from multiple sources into one central location. From there, you can uncover holistic insights that lead to data-driven decisions.
10 Questions to Ask CX Companies
When in discussions with your top CX companies, it is important that you delve deeper into their specific product offerings and understand how they go about supporting their customers. You want to ensure that you have a dedicated partner that will help you reach your goals, not just a platform that you will be left in the dark with. In order to do so, make sure you ask questions that will allow you to make an informed decision on a vendor that will work best for you.
1. What Percentage of Your Total Customer Base Relies on You for Enterprise CX Programs?
When you’re looking for a partner in business, you want them to be an expert in their field. This holds true for customer experience, yet some major companies only dedicate a small percentage of their resources to CX expertise. For example, some major companies claim to specialize in CX, but really the vast majority of their business is devoted to market research. For great customer experience, pick a vendor that is 100% dedicated and will not be distracted by other ventures.
2. What Percentage of Those Customers Have Been With You for Over Three Years?
Some vendors will tout big numbers of clients, but the information that really matters is how long those clients have been with the company. With a strong partner, you get what you were promised and clients are more likely to stick with them longer. Get past the smoke and mirrors and find the right vendor by asking about client longevity.
3. How Many of Those Customers Exceed 1 Million Interactions with You?
If you’re an enterprise, you want to differentiate those who say they can handle a large program with over a million responses and those who are just running a small research survey at
a big company. So how do you tell? Some companies will charge extra with “custom pricing” for responses over 1 million, which highlights their high cost of business and limited experience. You want a partner who doesn’t blink at 1 million.
4. Who Specifically Will Provide Implementation and Strategic Consulting Services?
Continuing the point from the previous question, it’s one thing to claim to be collaborative, but another to have a blueprint for partnership. Ask who specifically will be helping you implement your technology and help you map out your CX strategy to pick out the vendors who walk the walk, not just talk the talk.
5. How Often Will Those Resources Be Available to Us? At What Rates?
Strategy sessions and check-ins are vital to a healthy partnership with your CX vendor. Though they’re vital, many vendors charge extra for the bare minimum amount of sessions. It’s best to clarify that these partnership best practices are included in your contract, rather than an add-on that will cost you more than a pretty penny.
6. Will We Be Charged for Survey Responses? Why?
Some major vendors in the CX industry do not charge you as you’d expect. They don’t charge you based on the number of surveys you send or other elements, but by the number of survey responses you get. If you’re thinking this seems backwards you’d be right, especially seeing as the number of survey responses you’ll get is difficult to estimate going into a contract.
7. What Happens if We Over or Underestimate Our Responses?
When you sign a contract with a vendor who charges based on the number of survey responses, there is a high probability that you will overestimate and therefore pay more money for services you don’t need. However, these companies do not offer any refunds; in fact they charge steeply if you overestimate. Weed these vendors out to make sure you aren’t backed into a very expensive corner.
8. Are We Subject to Any Parent Company’s Policies and Contracts?
This question is especially relevant due to recent acquisitions across the CX landscape. Now more than ever, it’s important to know if you’re partnering with just the technology vendor or if you’re signing something that makes you beholden to a parent company’s interests and policies. Ask this question to clarify if your vendor is working for you or for their parent company.
9. Can We Review the 24-month Product Roadmap?
Crafting a roadmap for your initiatives is necessary to not only get the quick wins you need, but to set long-term goals. However, not even CX professionals can see the future. There will be unexpected events that may necessitate adjustments to your roadmap, yet some vendors don’t allow tweaks to the plan. Clarify this with your vendor to make sure your program is future-proofed.
10. Which Customers Can We Speak to Verify Your Responses?
Strong partners create strong advocates. It’s as simple as that. Ask prospective vendors if you can speak to current customers and the best of them will refer you to an advocate that will be more than happy to tell you about their experience.
How Customer Experience Management Started
At its simplest, customer experience management is a broad term that refers to evaluating and managing a customer’s every interaction with a brand. Though many companies have taken strides to provide great customer experiences for many years now, the idea of customer experience management as its own science or discipline really didn’t come about until the early 2000s.
That’s about when advancements in technology allowed customer experience to go from being an abstract goal to something more quantifiable. Suddenly, companies everywhere could use the internet to track site visits and other metrics, opening up a whole new dimension to the idea of caring for customers. If these elements were quantifiable, that meant they could be managed. And if they could be managed, then perhaps they could be meaningfully improved to create a bolder, more human, and more invested relationship with every customer!
Though today’s conversation focuses on customer experience management, it’s important to remember that this technology and science doesn’t ‘just’ apply to customers. Many brands also use tune experience management tools to their employee experiences. The idea with this approach is to create a better workplace culture, reduce employee churn, and create the same kinds of fundamental relationships with workers that brands aspire to build with customers.
Customer Experience Management’s Early Days
Now that they were armed with the technology needed to evaluate a lot of customer experiences in little time, companies turned their attention to the next frontier of feedback collection: digital surveys. Surveys had, of course, been around for a long time, but mailing them out or publicly soliciting customers to take them on the spot was expensive and produced inconsistent results.
Suddenly, though, these companies had access to newly developed survey deployment technologies and, before too long, tools that allowed them to build their own questionnaires. Both approaches, combined with email, suddenly made sending massive numbers of surveys directly to customers much simpler and much more cost-effective. Surveys thus became a cornerstone of customer experience management, a role they still have to this day!
Customer Experience Management’s Continued Evolution
With these new survey tools, methods, and partnerships in hand, brands rolled up their sleeves and got creative in the pursuit of feedback. Whether it was promising a free soda upon survey completion or a discount the next time customers came in, countless organizations spent the 2000s attempting to gather as much feedback as possible.
At this point, the terms “customer experience” and “customer experience management” weren’t as ubiquitous as they are now. Rather, a lot of organizations and the vendors that provided survey tools used phrases like “brand protection” to describe why it was important to adopt an approach like this. Over time, though, the term “customer experience” became a mainstay of this discipline, and terms like “customer experience management” soon followed. Because of the employee experience approach we mentioned earlier, it’s common nowadays for this science to be referred to simply as experience management (XM).
The Rise of Big Data Within Customer Experience Management
Once organizations got their feet wet building surveys, analyzing data, and figuring out how to incentivize customers and employees to respond, they had to take the next step in the customer experience management journey: making sense of feedback. No small task, especially when the field was in its infancy, but both brands and experience vendors were determined to make sense of all the feedback they were receiving.
This was about the point that the term “big data” entered the experience conversation, and it became a bylaw of experience programs throughout the late 2000s and early 2010s. Having a ton of data was suddenly all the rage, and organizations spent a great deal of time and money gathering mountains of it in pursuit of better customer experience management. Frankly, there was no tech or business problem that a lot of brands thought they couldn’t solve just by throwing data at it.
However, this is the part of the story where the customer experience management revolution ended up stalling out for a lot of brands. They’d gathered lots of data, yes, but what a lot of these brands and the vendors that partnered with them didn’t quite grasp at the time is that big data alone cannot solve your business and customer experience problems. Nonetheless, big data remained the north star of many experience programs, which, frankly, is why a large number of them failed.
Customer Experience Management Hits a Plateau
After it became apparent that simply gathering data and feedback from surveys didn’t bridge the gap to actually fixing problems, the next step for customer experience management vendors and their clients was figuring out how to, well, fix problems. These brands had business challenges, and they had big data. What did building a connection between the two end up looking like?
The truth is that, whether back in the day or right now, a lot of organizations still haven’t quite figured that out. You might say that brands should simply take a look at their data and infer solutions from there, but for many companies, their big data is literally too big to make that idea feasible. There’s simply too much noise and no easy way to find signals in it. Or at least… that was the case until relatively recently.
Going Beyond Customer Experience Management
Until the last few years, one of the biggest bywords of customer experience management was basically to gather as much data as possible and hope that brands could use it to adequately react to customer and employee complaints after the fact. This philosophy played out in the form of customer experience teams who kept their data siloed or vendors who offered entirely reaction-based and DIY solutions without much customizability or human expertise.
At Pearl-Plaza, however, we believe that the experience management story should be an Experience Improvement (XI) revolution. As you’ve seen by now, while data and metrics are certainly very important, just having a large pile of them doesn’t actually translate to solutions for business challenges, customer relationships, employee retention, or countless other experience factors. Successful customer experience management demands much more.
From Customer Experience Management to Experience Improvement
There are a few factors to bear in mind for making a difference with your customer experience management. The first is to remember that truly great experience management doesn’t start with gathering data; it starts with figuring out which tangible business goals you need your program to accomplish. We call this designing with the end in mind, and it’s a strategy that will make your data so much more manageable than older approaches aimed at gathering as much of it as possible.
This strategy will also result in much more relevant customer sentiment, which is key to understanding what they love (and don’t love) about their experiences with your brand. You can then apply this heightened understanding toward meaningful transformations within your business and its associated customer journeys, realizing that success in the form of those goals we mentioned earlier (retention, acquisition, saving costs, etc.).
That idea of being selective with your data, as well as proactively sharing the data you do gather, feeds directly into the very best elements that effective customer experience management and Experience Improvement have to offer. More accurate personas, better defined marketing segments, better touchpoint evaluation, and knowing what your customers want before they themselves do are but a few perks to this approach.
Pearl-Plaza as a CX Partner
Pearl-Plaza has best-in-class NLP capabilities and has the highest user ratings of all Voice of the Customer companies according to Gartner Peer Insights. Schedule a demo today to see what we can do for your business!
References
Dimension data. (https://www.dimensiondata.com/en-us/insights/blog/how-ai-analytics-and-cloud-can-elevate-customer-experience). Access 1/25/24.
PwC. Experience is everything. Get it right. (https://www.pwc.com/us/en/services/consulting/library/consumer-intelligence-series/future-of-customer-experience.html) Accessed 7/29/24.
REPORT
Pearl-Plaza Named a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: Text Mining And Analytics Platforms, Q2 2024
Pearl-Plaza’s platform and personnel have been recognized by Forrester as “major players in the text mining and analytics market.” With a platform proficient in text mining as a way to pull insights from customer feedback, and a team determined to add value and improve business performance, Pearl-Plaza is leading the charge in the text mining and analytics industry.
