What Is Customer Experience Management? Steps to Build an Effective Strategy

Vu Khoi

Author at Wotech Electronics Blog

Customer experience is always a critical factor in a business's operations. Ensuring an optimized customer experience is a top-priority task. That is why businesses need to manage customer experience effectively. Join SimERP as we explore the definition, process, and strategy of customer experience management in this article!

What Is Customer Experience Management?

First, we need to understand the concept: what is "customer experience"? It covers all interactions between customers and a business — direct and indirect — from the moment customers first hear the company's name through their searching, purchasing, post-purchase activities, and subsequent purchases.

Customer experience management, then, means gathering information about and controlling the customer's entire buying journey, stretching from the past into the future. Done effectively, it helps a business better understand customers' needs, attitudes, and thoughts, while also capturing their activities and behaviors toward the products and services the business provides. From there, it can develop effective plans and strategies to meet the demands customers raise.

So what does it take to manage customer experience effectively? The first thing a business must do is build the customer experience — or, more fully, build a customer journey experience map. What does it take to complete this first step successfully? SimERP will answer that right below.

Steps to Build a Complete Customer Experience Map

Define the Goals Your Business Needs to Achieve

Building a customer experience map involves many different people, so before starting, management needs to set out the goals and overall direction for the whole team: How long will it take to build this map? What is the final objective to be achieved? At the same time, this is also the stage where management needs to lay out the roadmap and specific phases for creating the customer experience map. This is the foundation that keeps customer experience management moving in a positive and accurate direction.

Assign Specific Tasks to Each Member

Once the plan is laid out, management assigns tasks to members according to their strengths. For example, employees skilled in IT will handle entering data into the software, while those with strong communication skills will collect information directly from customers, and so on.

Identify the Basic Touchpoints

A touchpoint is any point of interaction between the customer and the business, whether direct or indirect. A direct touchpoint is face-to-face communication between the customer and a customer service employee without going through channels such as phone, email, or the website. This touchpoint requires employees to be flexible and tactful so they can both handle the situations customers raise and make an effort to remember their behavior and attitudes. Indirect touchpoints are activities conducted through tools and channels such as the website, text messaging, brochures, and so on. All of these activities are evaluated and felt by customers. They will feel respected and well disposed toward the business if it does this well; otherwise, customers sense indifference from the company. Once you identify the touchpoints, you know exactly where you need to act.

Design the Customer Experience

There are 3 basic formats for designing and building a customer experience map:

• Current state

Translated literally, this is the present situation. More specifically, this type of map describes the actions, emotions, behaviors, and thoughts customers experience when interacting with your business. It is the format most businesses choose, because it takes little time and money, and the information to be collected is not overly complex.

• Day in the life

Unlike the current state format, a day in the life map records a customer's entire day, detailing their schedule and daily routines, whether or not those include interactions with your business.

• Future state

This is built on the business's subjective view of its customers. Through processing and analyzing information, the business predicts and anticipates customers' future actions, responses, and attitudes.

Overall, this is a crucial step in building the customer journey experience map, because it helps you determine which format you will use to manage the customer experience.

Map the Customer Journey

Once you've chosen the type of map your business needs to draw, this is the step where you fill in the customer experience information. This information must be filled in to match the type of map your business has chosen. For example, if the business chooses the current state format, the information employees need to enter includes when the customer bought the product, what the customer's attitude was, and so on. In the day in the life case, the customer journey includes the customer's preferences — for example, liking the color red, disliking yellow — as well as daily activities such as commuting to work, reading the news, and more.

Satisfy the Customer Journey

Once you've grasped the information and the customer's journey, the business needs to understand and recognize who the potential customers are and focus on them. At the same time, it should flexibly adjust policies and production methods to meet the needs of this type of customer. Alongside that, the business should avoid focusing on customer types poorly matched to its services and products, to prevent wasting money and time.

The benefits of building a customer journey experience map are enormous for a business. It helps the company understand customers better, discover potential customers, and limit spending on customers whose needs don't yet match the products and services the business provides.

In addition, to manage the customer journey effectively, a business also needs clear, specific customer experience strategies. Below, SimERP presents the most effective strategies.

Customer Experience Strategies

Take It One Careful Step at a Time

With customer experience management in particular and business activities in general, you know that customers can reach your products and services through any information channel. So pay close attention to every detail — from advertising and flyers to website design and employee attitude when customers complain. If a customer loses their cool and an employee cannot listen patiently and an argument breaks out, the business will suffer badly from rumors and bad word of mouth.

Listen to Employee Feedback

Managers are the ones who set strategies and specific direction, but they are not the ones interacting directly with customers, so they can't fully understand the difficulties employees face. Therefore, leadership needs to listen to and take in the feedback and challenges employees raise, and try to adjust in order to make the workflow more effective.

Measure and Review the Work Process

After each phase of customer experience management, the business needs to look back at past activities to see which successes it achieved and which goals remain unmet. At the same time, continue building on the strengths the business already has and improve the weaknesses that still persist.

Bring Objective Information to Potential Customers

According to data from BrightLocal's online marketing tools consumer survey, around 84% of website visitors trust online reviews as well as recommendations from people they know. All of these reviews are published on the business's website to deliver valuable information about the company to potential customers. Reviewers share details, specifics about the products and services the business provides from the perspective of actual users, easily earning the trust of new customers.

The important thing here is to display reviews in a format that is easy to see and easy to find. When customers visit the business's website, they want to know whether your product/service fits their current needs. At that point, comments from other customers give them information in a friendlier, far more trustworthy format than sales pages. This also ensures the necessary information about the business actually reaches the customer.

Conclusion

Above, SimERP has shown you how to manage the customer experience effectively, including explaining the concept, outlining the steps to build a customer experience model, and the strategies within the customer experience process. We hope this article helps your business gain knowledge about customer experience management and, in the future, achieve higher revenue through this activity.

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