Why a great customer experience management strategy matters

The success of your business is so much more than the quality of your product or your pricing. How do we know? In a recent consumer attitudes study, we found that 72% of customers say they’re very or extremely likely to shop with a company if they have a reputation for outstanding customer service. The same study revealed that 97% of customers are likely to tell their friends, family, or coworkers about a great customer experience.

So it looks like word-of-mouth is king when it comes to generating customer loyalty and profits for your business—especially because your customers don’t just talk about you in person or over the phone. They’re sharing their experiences with your business online: on social media, review sites, help forums, and more.

What can you do to ensure that you’re giving customers an awesome experience along the customer journey? SurveyMonkey makes it easy with our customer experience management (CEM) software, designed to get you the customer insights you need to manage the customer experience at every customer touchpoint.

Customer experience management, or CEM, is a system companies use to track, oversee, and respond accordingly to all customer/business interactions–so companies exceed customer expectations in order to increase customer satisfaction, loyalty, and advocacy.

Essentially, CEM accounts for a company’s awareness and understanding of their interaction with their customers at every touchpoint—whether your customer’s encountering your product or service for the first time because of an online review or seeking assistance from customer service representatives. All of these company-customer interactions form the overall customer experience (CX)—or a customer’s general impression of your brand.

When your company invests in nurturing and managing the customer experience, it benefits your business externally and internally. Of course, your external benefits come in the form of the positive word-of-mouth that generates customer loyalty (and profits).

And because your customer experience strategy spans every department and team in your organization, using a customer experience management platform encourages companywide collaboration, alignment on company objectives, and provides your business with standard metrics you can use to benchmark your progress.

Customer relationship management starts before your customers walk in the door—or find you online—and continues after they purchase your product or service. That’s because you want to make sure they think of your company when their friend, family member, or colleague asks them, “Which company would you recommend?” Here are some ways to learn more about improving the customer experience.

Find out if consumers are talking about you—and their overall impression of your business. Use branding surveys to understand whether or not you’re missing out on your target market—and where you can make changes to your overall brand strategy to attract customers.

Who better to help you develop your products and services than consumers? Send out market research surveys to collect consumer insights—so you can make sure your products and services are meeting their needs. You can even get potential and current customers to help you choose the right marketing messaging and brand pillars with concept testing surveys.

Send customers follow-up customer satisfaction surveys to see if your customer service team resolved their issue to their satisfaction. Or to find out how well their needs are being met online or in your store.

There are lots of moving parts involved when it comes to customer experience management. But with customer experience management software, you can focus on optimizing the customer experience instead of worrying about how to standardize the customer relationship management process.

Let SurveyMonkey manage the overall customer experience for you—so you can focus on giving customers the care they deserve.

Learn more about SurveyMonkey’s CEM software