Consumers have long expected frictionless, personalised experiences from the businesses they transact with. This demand has only risen in recent years, as advancing technology has opened up more channels customers can use to interact with brands. In light of these realities, it’s impossible to overstate the importance of customer experience management (CXM) to modern business strategy. Companies in any industry need efficient ways to collect, analyse and act on customer feedback. Beyond enhancing customer satisfaction at the moment, effective CXM also drives loyalty and encourages business growth.
Traditional methods of managing customer feedback are no longer sufficient for companies aiming to succeed long-term. Digital customer experience platforms give companies a way to align their CXM efforts with the demands of the digital age. An effective customer experience platform allows businesses to leverage advanced technologies, such as artificial intelligence and automation, to gain deeper insights into customer behaviour and preferences. It also empowers them to take a more proactive and responsive approach to managing customer relationships.
This article will walk you through some essential features that make a CXM platform worth investing in. Your understanding of these features will, in turn, help you choose a platform that can help your business deliver exceptional customer experiences.
Omni-Channel Feedback Collection
Today’s customers interact with brands through a multitude of channels—on websites, on mobile apps, over the phone, in physical stores, and more. Businesses must gather feedback from all these touchpoints if they want to gain a truly comprehensive understanding of the customer experience and develop effective ways to improve it. Thus, an effective CXM platform needs to be omni-channel so that no customer interaction goes unnoticed.
Collecting feedback from various channels provides a comprehensive view of the customer journey. It allows your business to identify patterns and trends that you might miss when focusing on a single channel. For example, you might find customer complaints about delivery issues more in the click and collect channel than online. When you study this feedback and act on it in ways your audience can clearly perceive, you send the message that you’re listening to what they have to say about your business, wherever they might choose to say it.
Frontline Enablement
Businesses aiming to achieve top-tier CXM should always strive to “close the feedback loop.” This means that they must respond to customer feedback in ways that lead to tangible improvements. Companies envision the feedback loop as composed of two parts: the “inner loop” and the “outer loop.” The inner loop focuses on resolving individual customer concerns quickly, often by empowering frontline employees to take immediate action.
On CXM platforms, frontline enablement features are any and all tools that help employees effectively close the inner loop. These include real-time access to customer feedback, role-specific dashboards, and automated task management functions. With these resources, frontline staff can resolve issues on the spot, thereby demonstrating to customers that the company takes their concerns seriously and acts upon them promptly.
Analytics
While the inner loop addresses individual customer concerns in real time, the outer loop focuses on identifying and rectifying systemic issues that affect multiple customers. These issues often come to light by examining broader feedback patterns, and they usually lead to strategic changes across the organisation.
Advanced analytics allows businesses to analyse vast amounts of data and thereby uncover patterns and recurring issues that might not be immediately apparent. These capabilities make it an invaluable tool for closing the outer loop. For example, AI-powered text analytics can process unstructured data from surveys, social media, and other sources to reveal underlying sentiments and emerging trends. Sentiment analysis and trend identification tools help businesses detect broader issues impacting customer satisfaction. In addition, CXM platforms incorporating advanced analytics also have the ability to integrate data from multiple touchpoints for a more comprehensive view of the customer experience, which, in turn, enables businesses to make strategic, data-driven decisions.
Automated Workflows
Efficient customer experience management relies heavily on timely and effective responses to customer feedback. Automated workflows can boost responsiveness by streamlining tasks such as follow-ups and issue resolution. They ensure that you never overlook any input and that you put your business in the best position to address negative experiences promptly. Overall, automation can help you maintain a consistently high-quality customer experience, as it’s more systematic than manual work.
Because automated workflows can complete routine tasks faster, they also free up valuable resources and empower your team to prioritise more strategic initiatives instead of getting bogged down with routine tasks. Features like notifications and task management tools keep everyone aligned and ready to take swift action. Ultimately, your business can unlock new heights of agility and flexibility by leveraging automation, and these improvements are also sure to be felt on the customer end.
Integration and Customisation Options
Your business likely uses multiple systems and platforms, and an effective CXM solution should be able to integrate seamlessly with all of these. Integration capabilities make it easier and less time-consuming to incorporate this new platform into your tech infrastructure—but more than that, they’ll also give you a unified view of customer data once the platform is up and running. This means you can draw more comprehensive and nuanced insights from the information you have.
Customisation is equally important. Every business has unique needs and workflows, and a one-size-fits-all solution is rarely effective. A customisable CXM platform allows you to tailor its features and functionalities to match your specific requirements. The result is a platform that can evolve with your business, accommodate new processes where necessary, and adapt to changing customer expectations.
At the end of the day, the best customer experience platform for your business is one that will help you transform your approach to CXM for the better. Consider where your company currently stands to improve and what functionalities it might need to perform at its best. Once you make an informed choice, you can look forward to happier customers and more efficient operations.