What is Customer Experience Management?

Customer Experience Management is the discipline of considering every customer interaction for the best experience.

Customer interactions represent a point of contact into the organisation and represent opportunities to show the success or failure in meeting the needs of the customer. Every customer interaction is an opportunity to enhance the reputation of the organisation. The customer experience is the sum of the quality of each customer contact point.

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Key Elements:

1. End-to-End Customer Journey:
   • Mapping Customer Touchpoints: Identify and map all the touchpoints where customers interact with the organization, from initial awareness to post-purchase support.
2. Customer-Centric Process Design:
   • Aligning Processes with Customer Needs: Design and optimize business processes to be customer-centric, ensuring they meet the evolving needs and expectations of customers.
3. Multichannel Integration:
   • Seamless Interaction Across Channels: Integrate and optimize processes to enable a seamless experience for customers across various channels, such as online, offline, mobile, and social media.
4. Data-Driven Insights:
   • Utilizing Customer Data: Leverage customer data to gain insights into preferences, behaviors, and pain points, allowing for personalized and targeted interactions.
5. Continuous Monitoring and Improvement:
   • Real-Time Monitoring: Implement monitoring mechanisms to track and analyze customer interactions in real-time, allowing for immediate identification of issues and opportunities for improvement.
   • Feedback Loops: Establish feedback loops to gather insights from customers, employees, and other stakeholders for continuous improvement.
6. Employee Engagement:
   • Training and Empowerment: Ensure that employees involved in customer-facing processes are well-trained, motivated, and empowered to deliver exceptional customer experiences.
   • Cross-Functional Collaboration: Foster collaboration among different departments to break down silos and create a unified approach to customer experience.
7. Technology Integration:
   • CRM and BPM Integration: Integrate Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems with BPM to ensure a seamless flow of information and enhance the efficiency of customer-related processes.
8. Measurement and Metrics:
   • Key Performance Indicators (KPIs): Define and measure KPIs related to customer experience, such as Net Promoter Score (NPS), Customer Satisfaction (CSAT), and Customer Effort Score (CES).
9. Personalization:
   • Tailoring Experiences: Implement processes that allow for personalized interactions, recognizing individual customer preferences and delivering relevant content and services.
10. Responsive and Proactive Approaches:
    • Anticipating Customer Needs: Design processes that enable organizations to anticipate customer needs and proactively address issues before they become problems.

When considering customer interactions during the design stage of process improvement, it is important to consider all the different opportunities where the customer could contact the organization. It is inefficient to optimize an order fulfilment process without considering the customer support process that facilitates resolving problems with that order. Although the order was processed smoothly, if the wrong item was shipped and the customer becomes frustrated trying to return the item, the outcome of the customer experience is not positive and repeat business is less likely.

The customer experience is dependent upon the primary business processes that directly interact with the customer and the internal support processes that indirectly influence customer experience quality. Thus, serious attention, perhaps with different issues, also must be directed to these support processes.

Further Resources of CEM:

• Business Process Management Common Body of Knowledge (BPM CBOK, 2009), The Association of Business Process Management Professionals
• Forrester’s Customer Experience Management Resources

Related Links:

• Customer cases
• The Complaint Handling Process online
• Complaint Handling: Customers’ first impressions
• Complaint handling – Five tips to establishing loyalty

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Explore more about different process improvement terms in our BPM Glossary.