Real-World Business

Customer Experience Management vs Customer Experience Measurement

Misleading Phrasing 

There are plenty of software products on the market for companies to choose from when they’re looking to take control of how they manage their customers’ experience. This category of software is referred to as “Customer Experience Management,” or, “CXM,” for short. That’s great, because prioritizing a customer’s experience should be a top concern for any organization that wants to succeed and remain viable. However, many of the platforms available should look to using another word when describing the capabilities of their platforms - and that word is measurement, not management.

Measuring all the Wrong Things

Most CXM platforms (but not all) pack their platforms with powerful analytical capabilities for measuring customer satisfaction during and after an interaction or event. They will often leverage and integrate with AI tools that can measure all kinds of sentiment, from parsing through written responses, to analyzing vocal tone during phone conversations. That’s all well and good, if after analyzing that data, your organization is able to make operational improvements to drive up customer satisfaction metrics. Unfortunately, most of these CXM platforms do not provide quality-improving solutions. They can only tell you what went wrong after the fact.

If measurements don’t lead to operational improvements, what is the point of measuring anything at all? If things went well, you don’t need to iterate or change much - if things went poorly, some action needs to be taken to turn things around. When a software platform can only tell you what went wrong, but not how to fix it, it isn’t as valuable to your organization as it purports to be - especially when it’s branding itself as a “Management” software. As a result, many organizations end up wasting money on software. They hope that these platforms will provide them with the capabilities necessary to manage their customers’ experiences, but those platforms ultimately fail to live up to the promise that their names suggest.

True Experience Management

The only way to properly manage a customer’s experience with your organization is to take control of the entire customer journey, from start to support (we won’t stay start to finish, because if a customer has finished with you, it means they have churned). The only way to do that is to orchestrate every process and flow within it, every step of the way. That means holding yourself accountable for every interaction that takes place as a result of that customer engaging with your company - including interactions that might occur with third parties (as they so often do). Finding out what went wrong at the end of, for instance, a customer onboarding process, is pointless. The customer still had an unpleasant experience, and that will be reflected in their review of your organization - even if it was a third party partner that dropped the ball.

Organizations receive either 100% of the credit, or 100% of the blame, for the quality of experience that their customers go through, so orchestrating excellent customer journeys and delivering excellent customer experiences is a top priority. This can be hard to do when the most prominent tools in the marketplace are CRMs (which are sales-focused and not suited to operational teams) and erroneously categorized CXMs that aren’t really that helpful in providing actionable solutions. Real CXM results in happier customers, increased revenue, decreased downtime, and better customer reviews - and you don’t need a high-priced, AI-powered thermometer to tell you that.

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