What is Customer Experience Management?

Standout customer experiences don’t just happen by accident—you have to design them! 

Consistently good customer experience management takes planning, strategy, and care, along with the right technology to keep everything running smoothly.

What is customer experience management? 

Customer experience management (or CEM) is a system of brand strategies and technologies used to improve and optimize the customer experience, improve customer satisfaction, and increase brand engagement.

CEM is a proactive digital approach to shaping the kind of experiences  you’d like your customers to have with your business. You might choose to incorporate IVR technology that automates calls and allows customers to self-direct to find answers, for example, or you might invest in something like virtual agents who respond to simple customer queries, thus streamlining the time it takes for customers to get solutions. 

In every case where you’re working to provide a good experience for your clients, you’re participating in customer experience management. 

Why does customer experience management matter? 

Customer experience has become a massively important differentiator between brands working in a competitive global marketplace. Any brand can build and ship a product. The brand that can build a great product and give customers exceptional and easily accessible service is a brand they’re going to shop with again and again. 

Not only does exceptional customer experience lead to higher conversions, greater profits, and long-term growth, but it’s the glue that builds and strengthens relationships between brands and customers – and creates lifelong loyalty.

Good customer experience management makes these outcomes more achievable by providing unified and personalized experiences across all channels.

The benefits of proactive customer experience management

Innovative CEM solutions exist that can help automate much of the support process and increase the quality of service a brand’s representatives provide across every touchpoint.

CEM technology enables brand leaders to access rich context about customer preferences and behavior that drive individualized experiences and help agents understand customers better. 

They can create seamless and intelligent automated user experiences across brand websites, SMS, email, live chat, voice, and social channels that decrease hold times and increase first-call solutions.

High-quality CEM platforms can also:

• Connect with customers in deep and powerful ways that build loyalty and trust
• Gather data that can be analyzed and used to measure company success and improve customer service
• Give representatives greater bandwidth to provide better service
• Improve employee retention rates and decrease the costs associated with onboarding new hires 

Good CEM starts and ends with the right software powerful enough to do it all. 

What to look for in a good CEM platform 

Brands looking to manage their customer experiences through CEM software should look for scalable platforms that:

• Unify transactional, personal, and behavioral customer data from disparate locations, providing agents with unique and specific insight to improve the customer experience
• Integrate well with their current support ecosystem 
• Maintain customer context across channels
• Incorporate intelligent technology that automates tedious or simple tasks and processes
• Offer robust data protection capabilities so that customer and agent information remains private
• Scale with the evolving needs of your business rather than staying stagnant or limited

With these capabilities, brands can effectively prioritize and shape their customer experience to the needs of every individual without sacrificing time, customer satisfaction, or the bandwidth of their agents. 

Learn more tips for effective customer experience management by watching our recent webinar: 3 Contact Center Decisions that Drive a Profitable Customer Experience.