If you own or run an enterprise, you know that your customers are the bedrock of your business. The way they think and feel about your brand color every choice they make. Every time you design a new product, release an improved service, mock up an advertisement, write a press release, call a client, ship an order, or perform numerous other vital actions, you influence your customers’ perception of your brand. Of course, with this in mind, maintaining good relationships with your clients can start to seem monumentally overwhelming. Taking on this aspect of your business might leave you with more questions than answers. What if your customers don’t like your new website design? How would they feel if you raised your prices slightly? Why didn’t they respond to the commercial you painstakingly filmed?
Fortunately, there are twenty-first century tools you can use to answer these very questions and tackle this particular part of modern business. This is where Customer Experience Management comes into play. Today’s advanced technology can help you understand, foster relationships with, and, ultimately, profit from your customers better than ever before. Emojot’s products are at the cutting edge of this growing field. In the following blog, we introduce you to Customer Experience Management and explain our outstanding offerings in this area.
What is Customer Experience Management?
You may have heard the term “Customer Experience Management” thrown around online or at conferences, but if you don’t understand it’s full definition, then it will mean little more to you than a collection of buzzwords. Customer Experience Management actually has quite a precise meaning, as defined by Tech Target: “Customer experience management (CEM or CXM) is the collection of processes a company uses to track, oversee, and organize every interaction between a customer and the organization throughout the customer lifestyle.” Basically, CEM encompasses the methods used and data gathered from every point at which a customer comes in contact with a business. This is quite a wide field, but the nature of information collected is very specific: how a customer’s interactions went when they contacted a company or vice versa.
Why Do You Need to Manage Experiences?
As we’ve explained above, it is generally important that your customers enjoy and benefit from interacting with your company. Their experiences will shape their emotional reaction to your brand and willingness to invest in your company. You cannot control and enhance these interactions unless you understand exactly what is occurring. CEM allows you to truly take charge of your customer’s experiences by providing key metrics, comprehensive reports, crucial feedback, and, ultimately, actionable steps you can take to make your customers happier.
How do you feel about your customer experience management strategy?
This is especially vital in this digital era of business, where customer feedback is immediate, your online reputation is worth its weight in gold, and potential clients have more options than ever. As Yuri Kruman eloquently explains in his Forbes article on CEM: “Nearly every service, product, or expertise is first hive-minded, Uberized, and Yelped, then tweeted with true glee or scorn, ordered hands-free thanks to Alexa, coupon-coded, and reviewed to death. Instant vilification kills and instant gratification buoys brands — often quite quickly. Whatever room for error may have existed before our digital nativity, the times have changed.” In this fast-paced, ruthless marketplace, the very existence of your enterprise hinges on providing a positive customer experience.
Beyond this broad view of CEM’s significance, managing your customers’ experiences can be advantageous to your business in several specific respects. These include:
- Customer loyalty. Tech Target explains: “The goal of CEM is to optimize interactions from the customer’s perspective and foster customer loyalty.” The concept is that if a brand is doing right by its clients and clearly taking an interest in them, they will continue to return to the
- Especially in today’s high-tech world, every customer wants and expects to be treated as an individual. Manging customers’ experiences increasingly requires adjusting your techniques to their exact preferences. Tech Target notes that CEM can help businesses “market and sell to customers in a more personalized,
one-to-one fashion. Personalization strategies include new technologies, such as mobile marketing, location-based services, and beacons, which help companies identify where customers are and market to them in real-time.”
- Problem-solving and damage control. Often, companies use CEM tools to handle specific Investigating and discovering what caused a specific customer service catastrophe can help a company swiftly address the problem and ensure that it never occurs again. Furthermore, as Kruman notes, when you need to avoid “fallout from a screwup,” these days, you’re better served by CEM solutions than “lawyering up and adding a PR spin.” CEM instruments demonstrate to your customers that you understand you can improve and are actively working to do so.
These are just a few examples of the specific functions and features CEM can provide for your company.
Emotion and Customer Experience
On a completely logical level, you might assume that so long as customers’ needs are met, their orders fulfilled, their complaints resolved, they should have great experiences. However, this isn’t always the case. A company can appear to do everything “right” and still struggle to stay afloat? Why?
How do you feel about the emotional connection you have formed with your most valuable customers?
Kruman muses: “The journey of a customer begins in the foothills of the psyche.” Many customers make purchasing choices based on how they feel rather than what they think about a given product or service. In the Harvard Business Review article, “The Truth About Customer Experience,” authors point out that while “companies have long emphasized touchpoints – the many critical moments when customers interact with the organization and its offerings on their way to purchase and after,” this system is flawed. Rather than emphasizing specific moments of interaction, the Harvard Business Review points out that “the bigger – and more important – picture [is] the customer’s end-to-end journey,” his or her overall experience, how he or she generally feels about your business.
Fortunately, CEM has a solution to this seemingly amorphous, ambiguous metric of customer experience. Tech Target describes: “emerging technologies such as emotional analytics [help companies] gauge whether customers benefit from their interactions.” By understanding the nuances of how your customers perceive your brand, you can foster lasting emotional bonds with them, ensuring your business thrives.
How Emojot Enhances CEM
In the modern world of texting and social media, people tend to express their emotions through emojis. You’ve probably sent a laughing face in response to a friend’s joke, a heart emoji to a beloved family member, an angry face about an annoying wait, or a sad face when you get bad news. Emojot revolutionizes the world of CEM by providing the most critical data you can collect: how your customers feel about your brand and your company’s decisions.
Our voice-of-consumer Emotion Sensors™ are fun, interactive, emoji-based surveys that engage your customers’ attention and encourage them to share their authentic emotions. In addition to gathering vital information about your customers’ experiences, Emojot Emotion Sensors™ are an enjoyable experience in and of themselves. Current CEM leaders note that measuring emotion is the future of this industry. Emojot Emotion Sensors™ do just that, with entertaining whimsy backed by powerful analysis.
Ready to Learn More About Customer Experience Management with Emojot?
We’d love to tell you more about this field and show you our state-of-the-art Emotion Sensors™! Contact us today to schedule a free demo.