The customer needs more experience. To create ambassadors, companies must deliver their promise and preferable act proactively to create a great customer experience: ‘share of mind’ leads to ‘share of wallet’. Make your brand promise come true and involve your customer wishes. Emotional en authentic interactions are the key to CEM, especially at social media.
Customer experience management is defined as providing an intentional, differentiated and valuable experience. In the orientation, purchase and service process customers use several channels and expect consistency. It is important to develop a multichannel integration, focussing on online (including social media) and offline.
Customer experience management maturity model, Gartner 2016
Gartner distincts 5 different phases in customer experience and provides as a path for companies to follow. In the first two phases companies have not yet articulated a clear strategy but have understood the need for a strategy. Circa 90% of the organizations are still in phase 1 and 2.
In the third phase the company will have created a clear strategy and set medium and long-term-goals. The management as well as the rest of the organization is convinced of putting the customer first. Most companies never reach this phase, they try to survive or are not really prepared to redesign their processes and organization.
In phase 4 the company realized that employees play a major role in determining the customer's experience. The organization is ready to empower employees. They give them freedom and the responsibility to create the best customer experience.
The last phase has integrated customer centric thinking and trading in processes, organization and culture. With the development of products customer experience is leading.
The role the brand plays is often forgotten, but is very important. The customer experience must connect with the brand. People expect less service with a cheap airline like Ryanair. The brand also plays an important role in internal branding. It acts like a compass for the internal organization. Employees must make the brand promise come true.
Customer relationship management (CRM) is not that popular as customer experience. Though it is very important to first optimize your CRM-system before you invest in customer experience. With one good system, customer service is able to act quickly in a user friendly way. Organizations that support their CRM, take customers seriously and have a high customer experience at significantly low costs.
Improving your customer experience can lead to increasing your loyalty, increasing customer satisfaction and word-of-mouth marketing. Did you get stuck in the first two phases of customer experience and need support? Please don’t hesitate to contact us by mail or phone +31(0)10 22989 50.
Bron: Beeckestijn