Customer Experience

Manage your customer data with Podium

What Is Customer Experience Management and Why Choose a CXM Software?

Want to see the impact of Podium on your business? Start a free 14-day trial today.

Try Podium for Free

Start your 14-day free trial with Podium today. No credit card required.

Ready to grow?

Grow your business with Podium

What Is Customer Experience Management & How to Master It

Customer experience management is a crucial aspect of running any business. This is the most effective way to ensure that your customers have a positive experience.
While there are many ways to ensure that customers enjoy interacting with your business, using software and solutions is one of the most effective methods. This guide can help refresh your memory on the details of customer experience management, including why it is important. Then.. we examine the top customer experience software to help you choose among the options.
<h2>What is customer experience management?</h2>
Customer experience management (CXM or CEM) refers to the marketing strategies and tools that are designed to improve the customer experience along with customer satisfaction and engagement.
When talking about “what is customer experience management,” you should know that while tools and software can help, these are not the only things you need to integrate into your workflow. You also need to prioritize the customer and take a customer-centric approach to customer service.
Having the right mindset for customer experience management will prioritize personalizing the entire<a href="https://www.podium.com/article/digital-customer-experience/"> customer experience.</a> It also allows you to scale that experience across channels.
<h2>CRM vs. CXM: Key Differences</h2>
When talking about a customer experience management solution, it’s common to wonder about the difference between CRM (customer relationship management) and CXM (customer experience management). While the two are related, they are distinct.
Put simply, CRM provides more information on how a customer looks to you as the company. Meanwhile, CXM provides information on how your company looks to your customers. With CEM, all business strategies, including sales, marketing, social media, and customer support, are centered around the customer and their needs.
Since CXM is all about the customer, many CXM strategies also rely on voice of the customer tools. These tools help businesses accurately measure customer feedback and sentiment, making it easier to identify weak spots in the customer experience. This way, it becomes easier to ensure your customers enjoy interacting with your business. 
By contrast, CRM strategies work toward the goal of increasing revenue. As such, it looks at outreach and sales. This sales-oriented system is commonly integrated with customer support and service systems.
<h2>Why is customer experience management important?</h2>
CXM is a crucial differentiator that every business should consider. Overall, businesses focused on these strategies see an improvement in long-term brand customer loyalty, lead generation, and conversion rates. The following are just some of the most important benefits of incorporating CEM marketing into your workflow.
<h3>1. Provides Insights Into Customer Behavior</h3>
Your CXM strategy gives you a better view of customers’ preferences and behaviors across all touchpoints. This information gives you crucial information, so you can tailor the customer experience to meet those preferences and increase customer loyalty.
You can also use those customer insights to better segment your audience. From there, use segmentation and customer journey mapping to deliver highly<a href="https://www.podium.com/article/types-of-customers/"> personalized experiences.</a> This can help boost conversion rates and overall profitability.
<h3>2. Improves Loyalty and Retention Rates</h3>
Customer experience management lets you improve the customer experience via a seamless customer journey and personalized experiences.
When customers have a better experience, they will form deeper, longer-lasting relationships with your brand. Thanks to the insights from a customer experience management solution, you can do this by delivering things like loyalty incentives, product recommendations, and intelligent services.
Your improved customer retention and loyalty efforts, combined with improved customer satisfaction from CXM, also reduce customer churn.
<h3>3. Makes You Stand Out from the Competition</h3>
One of the most effective ways to stand out from your competitors is to provide a positive customer experience. With the vast majority of consumers reporting switching to another brand after receiving a poor customer experience, it’s even more crucial to refine CXM strategies. Satisfied customers will continue giving your business and they’ll even convince others to choose your brand.
<h3>4. Tracks and Measures Campaigns and Strategies</h3>
The data that comes from CXM is yet another advantage. You can gather and analyze this data so you can make more informed, customer-centric business decisions. You get more accurate data on engagement success and customer actions and preferences so you can create more effective strategies.
<h2>4 Top Customer Experience Management Software</h2>
Customer experience software is an incredibly useful tool to make CXM easier. To help you choose the best platform for your business, we’ve gathered the top options.
<h3>1. <a href="https://www.podium.com/">Podium</a></h3>
Podium serves as a customer experience platform while also offering many of the features you would get from a customer relationship management program.
On the CXM side, Podium’s communication tools are particularly useful. Inbox<a href="https://www.podium.com/inbox/"> makes customer communication faster and easier</a>. Easier communication ensures that your customers feel valued and have a positive experience with your company. The software puts all of your messages in a single location, so you can respond to Facebook messages, emails, phone calls, text messages, and more from a single platform.
This centralized Inbox also makes it easier for your team to respond to customers. It ensures that your team has all the relevant information they need when talking to a customer, such as past purchases and other interactions. The platform even works well with artificial intelligence such as chatbots to help ease your workflow.
The Reviews feature also ties into CXM, as it lets you manage the impression that your company makes on potential customers. Use Podium’s Review function to encourage your satisfied customers to leave reviews, boosting your online reputation. These factors can help your salesforce increase the bottom line by offering better customer service.
Podium also adds value by combining all the features you need in a single platform. In addition to the CXM and CRM features, you also get payment integration, phones, and more.
<h3>2. LiveAgent</h3>
LiveAgent is cloud-based and delivers multi-channel support. It gives you features to manage a knowledge base and help desk. Use it to automatically assign support tickets from live chat, email, or phone, all of which are managed in a shared team inbox. Automations are also available for prompt follow-up messages.
In addition to the knowledge base, you can use LiveAgent to create a customer forum and gather<a href="https://www.podium.com/article/customer-feedback-examples/"> customer feedback.</a> There is also support for numerous languages and plenty of integrations, including Shopify, Gmail, Slack, and Jira. This system costs $9 per month per user.
<h3>3. SurveySparrow</h3>
You can easily monitor customer employee satisfaction and customer trends through the NPS survey tool SurveySparrow is known for. Customers easily help promote with the omnichannel approach this platform allows. The software utilizes chatbots and other sources of artificial intelligence to help you collect and analyze your customer data.
<h3>4. Jotform Enterprise</h3>
Another cloud-based program that allows for automated services is Jotform. Through this tool, B2B organizations can share forms that look professional as well as analyze and record customer responses. This software aids marketing and sales teams with payments and<a href="https://www.podium.com/article/customer-experience-strategy/"> lead generation</a> and enables customer surveys. With these surveys, a business can get actionable insights that are based on customer experiences.
The software offers a wide selection of templates, such as thank-you page templates and customizations, experience surveys, and even smart PDFs that use conditional logic. These are all mobile-optimized forms. Their technology is mobile-first, making it look good on all devices. Users will find mobile management a breeze.
Advanced options such as automation and multilingual support help ensure that you can create the exact survey you want. You also have the option for offline form creation.
<h2>6 Features to Look for in a Customer Experience Management Platform</h2>
Looking for the right customer experience management platform can take some time and research. When you are comparing different management systems, here are a few key factors to look for.
<h3>1. Integrations</h3>
Your organization likely has multiple types of data, such as finance data, HR data, as well as website analytics. Many also have APIs that allow for other data to be transferred between different systems. When your CX platform integrates these information channels, it creates a complete, seamless vision of the customer experience and how it affects your business.
<h3>2. Omnichannel Communications</h3>
When you have the right software, you can take advantage of multiple ways to communicate and listen to your customers. This will help you better understand what makes a great customer experience.
Whether you are using your social media accounts, your website, apps, or physical locations, your software should allow for interaction. Your software should seamlessly integrate live chat, SMS surveys, web surveys, and interactive voice responses. All your feedback channels need to track back to a centralized system for meaningful insights into your customer lifecycle and their brand experience.  
<h3>3. Customer Data Management</h3>
Your software should manage your customer data from several different angles. It should build thorough customer profiles capable of offering data from the beginning of the buying journey through the end of the brand experience. These profiles will provide valuable information that can help you understand who your ideal client is and how to interact with your customers better. It will offer a superior understanding of your customers’ needs and indicate the best touch points as well.
Today, you need an omnichannel approach to collecting this data. You should give the same weight to an email, customer support calls, emails, and tweets. You should get a solid understanding of what your customers are talking about, whether they’re talking about you, and what stage of the customer journey they’re doing so. This constant monitoring will keep you in tune with changes that need implementing.
<h3>4. Ease of Use</h3>
The best customer experience management software is easy to use. You should be able to get an idea of customer engagement and have access to an intuitive dashboard. The data should be stored in a centralized, easy-to-access location that prevents data silos. You should be readily able to see interactions with your customers and their history. You should be able to see behavior such as contacts and purchases as well as how they felt such as their feedback. Interactions should be seamless across a range of different areas.
You should have either a real-time view of trends or your NPS score displayed on your dashboard. With an advanced system, you can customize your dashboard to get the most out of your data.
<h3>5. Functionality</h3>
Your software system should be highly functional with the ability to analyze statistical data easily and intuitively. These statistics will help you understand<a href="https://www.podium.com/article/types-of-customers/"> your customers</a> and their behavior better.
Your software should also be able to analyze open-text responses with AI. The software should automatically sort these so you don’t have to spend time checking each response. Make sure to check what is offered here because different types of tools may offer varying levels of analysis, from identifying topics to analyzing customer sentiment.
Finally, your software system should analyze what key factors drive customer relationships. This is done by closely monitoring a key metric such as revenue or NPS so you can easily see what your strengths are and what areas need help. This data will also help you get a better understanding of your customer’s motivation and how to convert new clients.
<h3>6. Customer Support</h3>
The CXM software you choose should also have plenty of customer support resources. Aside from a toll-free number and live chat support, the platform should offer self-service options like blogs and knowledge bases. These resources ensure that you can quickly find solutions to the issues you encounter.
<h2>Improve Your Customer Experience with Podium</h2>
Podium offers an all-in-one solution for improved customer communication while simultaneously driving revenue through growth. We can help you understand how getting<a href="https://www.podium.com/reviews/"> more reviews means more business for you</a> as well as get you started with a free Google Review link generator so you can start collecting feedback.
We can show you how to<a href="https://www.podium.com/webchat/"> make your website a conversation starter</a> by integrating our different tools. We will also get you started with<a href="https://www.podium.com/webchat-in-action/"> Webchat</a> and make the most of it to boost conversion.
In addition, Podium offers help creating highly<a href="https://www.podium.com/text-marketing/"> useful texts</a> and has<a href="https://www.podium.com/texting-templates/"> hundreds of texting templates</a> that are ready to use.
<h2>Customer Experience Management FAQs</h2>
Below we’ve answered some frequently asked questions about customer experience management:
<h3>1. What are the key areas of customer experience management?</h3>
Important areas to pay attention to when it comes to customer experience management include identifying customer needs as well as qualifying touch points for the best customer experience. You will also need to collect data from several stages of the customer experience and analyze it to create more effective business strategies.
While doing this, you should work to develop a customer-centric brand that puts the client’s needs first. Once this system is set up, continuously refine your process while regularly setting goals.
<h3>2. What are the 4 components of customer experience?</h3>
There are four main components of customer experience include a customer-centric culture, consistent, high-quality service, optimized touch points, and customer satisfaction. When you focus on these four components, you can anticipate customer needs and direct your efforts toward improving the quality of customer interactions. You must always consider these components as you optimize your CXM strategies.
<h3>3. How to improve customer experience?</h3>
One of the simplest ways of improving customer experience is to improve communications with your customers.  Make it easy for your customers to provide feedback and interact with your business. Make a regular habit of checking in with your clients to see what can be improved and what they appreciate about your customer service.

What Is Customer Experience Management and Why Choose a CXM Software?

Get started now