Learn about Customer Experience Management Software and why it’s suddenly become vogue to use it…
About
You could say that Customer Experience Management (CEM) happens when you continuously take stock of the customer experience and act on the learning lessons to improve it, where Customer Experience is the sum of experiences that people have during the whole relationship with a given product/service. In a world where only 4% of customers trust advertising, it’s worth improving the overall experience instead. But how do you know what to improve and how to do it? These tools can help.
Customer Experience Management Software is any software that contributes to the delivery of an above and beyond customer experience.
Capabilities of an effective CEM platform
The five capabilities you should expect from a Customer Experience Management solution include the ability to:
- Harvest customer experience and sentiment insights from all channels of communications you use with customers Your insights should include your website interactions, social media conversations, customer surveys, face-to-face sales discussions, web-chat, events, search terms, transactions, and project details; anything that helps to build a complete view of the customer journey.
- Analyze and interpret actionable insights (that you can do something about), and follow that with action. CEM empowers you and your employees to create (and sustain) customer delight.
- Manage and govern customer data to create a trusted single view of data, and a repository that can maintain the currency and richness of data whilst providing systems administrators with a high level of governance.
- Improve customer segmentation, products, and processes by connecting to operations and processes, beginning to end – throughout the customer journey.
- Establish an enterprise-wide commitment to an above and beyond customer experience. Improving the customer experience encompasses every business function, not just those you might initially think of, like sales, marketing, and customer service. CEM crosses all departmental boundaries and positions, from e-commerce to marketing to billing. It should touch every employee because every employee has a role to play in improving experience throughout the customer journey. To gain this level of commitment requires systems that can report accurately on customer profitability. This demands not just revenue insights and relationship understanding, it also requires accurate cost accounting by customer.
Technology building blocks of CEM
To deliver a true Customer Experience Management Software solution, it should include:
- Customer Experience Analysis – Tooling to capture, process and make sense of customer web interactions, conversations, and feedback.
- Customer Experience Delivery – Tooling to design, test and publish content.
- Customer Data Platform – Tooling to create a clean and useful repository of customer insights representing a complete single version of the truth and govern the use (and distribution) of customer data.
- Customer Data Integration – Tooling to manage
How the definition gets used and abused
Whilst many vendors claim to support the entire CEM journey, in practice, the greater focus of solutions of late has been on capturing web-experience, sentiment, and social interaction analysis. Very few solutions combine these capabilities with Customer Data Platform and Action Management systems to equip organizations to learn, apply and act.
Perform some rudimentary desktop research and it becomes obvious that not all software described as Customer Experience Management (CEM) Software covers the broad gamut of capabilities required to deliver a consistent, high-quality customer experience. The definition is so broad in fact that it can be unhelpful. Leading software companies like Adobe, Hubspot, and Oracle only deliver parts of the complete toolkit that any company will need. Rightly or wrongly, the sorts of software you can expect to see included under the banner of Customer Experience Management Software include:
- Self-help center ‘customer ticketing’ software like Zendesk that gives your customer the ability to raise and manage support tickets and serve themselves.
- Customer web visitor experience, sentiment and social interaction analysis platforms like Gemius, Medallia, Userzoom, SAS, ResponseTek, IBM Tealeaf, Kana, Clarabridge that help businesses to learn how users interact with your mobile sites or apps. Interestingly, software applications like Clarabridge use Natural Language Processing to capture, structure and make sense of customer feedback and interactions.
- Heat mapping software like ClickTale that visualizes click trails on websites.
- Content creation and publishing software like Adobe Experience Manager that also includes web analytics paid advertising management and the ability to perform A/B testing of digital content.
- Multi-variant testing software applications like Maxymiser.
Benefits
The right CEM technology implemented well can become the pivotal system of any business in the digital age, where customer experience is everything. But disappointingly, few organizations achieve that level of performance.
About Encanvas
Encanvas is an enterprise software company that specializes in customer experience management software and helping businesses to create above and beyond customer experiences.
From Low Code to Codeless. Better than code-lite and low-code, we created the first no-code (codeless) enterprise application platform to release creative minds from the torture of having to code or script applications.
Use Encanvas in your software development lifecycle to remove the barrier between IT and the business. Coding and scripting is the biggest reason why software development has been traditionally unpredictable, costly and unable to produce best-fit software results. Encanvas uniquely automates coding and scripting. Our live wireframing approach means that business analysts can create the apps you need in workshops, working across the desk with users and stakeholders.
When it comes to creating apps to create a data culture and orchestrate your business model, there’s no simpler way to install and operate your enterprise software platform than AppFabric. Every application you create on AppFabric adds yet more data to your single-version-of-the-truth data insights. That’s because, we’ve designed AppFabric to create awesome enterprise apps that use a common data management substrate, so you can architect and implement an enterprise master data management plan.
Encanvas supplies a private-cloud Customer Data Platform that equips businesses with the means to harvest their customer and commercial data from all sources, cleanse and organize it, and provide tooling to leverage its fullest value in a secure, regulated way. We provide a retrofittable solution that bridges across existing data repositories and cleanses and organizes data to present a useful data source. Then it goes on to make data available 24×7 in a regulated way to authorized internal stakeholders and third parties to ensure adherence to data protection and FCA regulatory standards.
Encanvas Secure and Live (‘Secure&Live’) is a High-Productivity application Platform-as-a-Service. It’s an enterprise applications software platform that equips businesses with the tools they need to design, deploy applications at low cost. It achieves this by removing coding and scripting tasks and the overheads of programming applications. Unlike its rivals, Encanvas Secure&Live is completely codeless (not just Low-Code), so it removes the barriers between IT and the business. Today, you just need to know that it’s the fastest (and safest) way to design, deploy and operate enterprise applications.
Learn more by visiting www.encanvas.com.
The Author
Erica Tomlin is a senior consultant specializing in helping organizational leadership teams to grow by implementing enterprise software platforms that improve data visibility, process agility; and organizational learning – creating an enterprise that learns and adapts faster. She writes on subjects of change management, organizational design, rapid development applications software, and data science. She can be contacted via her LinkedIn profile.
Further Reading
Net Promoter scoring and why it matters
Gartner definition and further reading on Customer Experience Management (CEM).
What Wikipedia has to say on the subject.
Scholarly article on CEM.
Forbes article – 100 facts on digital transformation and customer experience
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