What is a Customer Experience Management Software?

Mahatma Gandhi once gave a very famous quote on customer service. He said that, customer is the most important visitor to any businessman and that the customer was doing a favor on the businessman by giving him an opportunity to serve the customer, not the other way round. Gandhi’s quote is becoming even more relevant these days. The 21^st century has seen a drastic shift from a profit-oriented business model to customer-centric business model. Free market economy has ensured that new players enter and keep competing in the market. The concept of monopoly or duopoly is almost irrelevant. This has made companies realize that they need to hold on to their customers, else competitors may try to woo them with their service or product. This continuous tussle between competing players gave rise to the idea of taking feedback from customers regarding their experience from using the company’s service. Companies started collecting feedback from their customers about their experience from using the company’s service, so that they could use it as a pointer to improve and upgrade their service. When this idea of feedback hit the software industry, the concept of a customer experience management software was conceived.

What is a Customer Experience Management Software?

Microsoft defines customer experience management (CXM or CEM) as a marketing strategy that aims to collectively enrich customer engagement, satisfaction, and experience. Consequently, customer experience management software provides mechanisms and tools to implement and execute this marketing strategy. In short, CXM is an application that is used for tracking, gathering, processing, managing, and responding to customers’ feedback. The software helps an organization in analyzing the requirements of its current and potential customers and gives business insights accordingly.

Features of Customer Experience Management Software

Customer experience management software basically makes use of marketing strategy, technology, and resources to ameliorate customers’ perception about the organization in which it is used. For this:

• It helps the organization in managing its customer database in a better way.
• It creates an inventory of the products and services offered by the organization and updates it according to the status of the inventory.
• It helps in collaboration between different stakeholders and secures their cooperation to deliver an improved customer experience.
• It develops a quick response system so that queries and grievances of the customers are addressed speedily.
• It ensures integration with existing business strategies and systems so as to avoid duplication of work.

Difference Between Customer Experience Management and Customer Relationship Management

Though superficially both the terms look interchangeable, there is a vast difference between the two. The basic difference in the outlook of these two concepts. While customer experience management is about how a customer thinks about a certain company, customer relationship management (CRM) is about how a company thinks about a certain customer. Hence, CRM involves more quantitative analysis while CXM involves more qualitative analysis. As a result, customer relationship management engages in a more traditional approach of data analysis and business trends. On the other hand, customer experience management adopts a more holistic approach to manage and arrange for a more customer-centric approach.

Popular Customer Experience Management Software

While customer experience management is extremely crucial for an organization, equally important is choosing the right customer experience management software. Today, there are numerous such applications which provide CXM, but only few have been able to master this art. Some of these software are:

• Acoustic
• Adobe Experience Manager
• Clarabridge
• Zendesk
• SAS Customer Intelligence 360

Today, customer experience management software is used in almost all sectors ranging from healthcare to energy, from IT companies to non-profit organizations. As a result, in 2021-2028 timeframe, the global customer experience management software market is expected to grow at a noteworthy CAGR of 17.7%. However, some of the customer experience management software still have issues regarding poor internal communication links within the organization or late response to customer queries. Overcoming these issues has become the main area of focus for these software companies. At the same time, many CXM software are undergoing evolution and are going beyond simple collection and analysis of customer data; a closed-loop feedback mechanism is being devised by these software so as to respond to customers’ grievances in a better way. Free market economy and the concept of competition associated with it may have some disadvantages, but the evolution of customer experience management software isn’t one of those.

About the Author(s)

Princy A. J

Princy holds a bachelor’s degree in Civil Engineering from the prestigious Tamil Nadu Dr. M.G.R. University at Chennai, India. After a successful academic record, she pursued her passion for writing. A thorough professional and enthusiastic writer, she enjoys writing on various categories and advancements in the global industries. She plays an instrumental role in writing about current updates, news, blogs, and trends.