What is customer experience management? Well, there are a couple answers to this, and it’s probably best to get the shorter ones out of the way first. One answer you should be prepared for right now is “one of the most difficult positions within most companies”. And, that’s true. This is a difficult role, and one with a lot of pressure and a demand for a ton of skills, some soft some not. It’s one of those fields that’s not for everyone, and only the toughest, most cunning dare attempt it.
But, that’s not the answer to “what is customer experience management?” which bears real discussion. That’s more of a caveat for the passingly interested really.
Customer experience management is a position handling the sum collection of all processes and interactions between a customer and a company through the length of a customer lifecycle. The goal is to optimize these from the perspective of the customer, and through this, to garner customer loyalty for an extended period of time.
Like I said, it’s not an easy position to work with! So, let’s look at what this all means in a little more detail.
What’s a Customer Lifecycle?
This isn’t how long a customer lives, at least here’s hoping for their sake! Actually, a customer lifecycle, in this context, is the duration of a customer’s encounter through discovery, research and a single time use of the company’s product or service, as well as the possible interactions with customer service or support that may follow it.
A returning customer has multiple customer lifecycles, one for every time they weight heir options, choose to use the product or service again, and so forth. So, a monthly subscription customer to a service, if subscribed for twelve months that year, has gone through twelve customer lifecycles.
What Interactions Does This Entail?
This includes traditional channels such as customer support, marketing strategies far and wide, as well as newer channels. Such new channels include the website of the company (including the storefront aspect too), social media presence, call center communications, and affiliate strategies through blog literature and SEO practices as well.
A customer experience management professional also works closely with product management (another grueling discipline) to ensure that the experience with the financial transactions and shopping goes smoothly, as well as the application of user input from customer service and other feedback channels is metered, analyzed and applied where practical, to improve the product and the experience surrounding it.
So, what is customer experience management? It’s doing everything in your power to attract customers, give them a positive experience, resolve things happily when this fails, and through all of these, hopefully garner a return of this customer in the future. Do you have what it takes to work in this challenging, stressful field? It might be a difficult craft, but it’s a rewarding one, and it will put you at the forefront of the sociological aspect of commerce and business, where the real excitement happens. Now that you understand what you’re getting yourself into, take a look at our backlog of customer experience literature and gain some insight into what makes a good strategy and design with this, and where the biggest mistakes are made, so you can be ahead of the game by avoiding them!.
