Transformation - also in customer relations
Today, a good or inexpensive product is often no longer sufficient as the sole argument for buying. Because through digitalization and globalization, the alternative for customers is only a mouse click away. The key to sustainable success lies in creating customer experiences and binding customers emotionally. Customer Experience Management helps with such a transformation of customer relationships.
Consumers today can choose between numerous providers around the world - and select those that best suit their needs. This has two consequences. First, companies need to know their customers and their needs better than ever before. Second, because of the wide range of offerings, customer loyalty is no longer guaranteed. Inspiring customers and building an emotional relationship with them is becoming the deciding factor for the company's long-term success. That's why positive experiences are the basis for turning satisfied customers into emotionally loyal ones. Only if their expectations are exceeded several times do customers develop into fans of the company, recommend it to others and even forgive the occasional mistake. Turning regular customers into enthusiastic ambassadors therefore requires a transformation of the customer relationship. This can be achieved with Customer Experience Management (CEM).
Opportunities of the CEM
The goal of CEM is to positively shape the customer experience with a company's employees, technologies, systems and processes. The crux of the matter: the countless touchpoints. Because today, customers encounter the company in very different places - online and offline. Customer experience management means creating a good and consistent customer experience across the various touchpoints. It's not an easy endeavor, but it's a worthwhile one. After all, managing the customer experience offers a company at least five opportunities:
- Individualization: Customer experience management requires knowing the needs, wishes and behavior of customers and using this knowledge consistently. This allows companies to better segment customers and develop campaigns and product or service offerings that are right for them.
- Differentiation: Those who create good experiences become unique. Customer knowledge, individual service and tailor-made offers cannot be copied, but only worked out.
- Customer value: Positive experiences arouse positive emotions. They pave the way to a long, profitable customer relationship and high customer value.
- Recommendations: Enthusiastic customers function as multipliers. This has a positive effect on image and success.
- Crisis resistance: Companies with CEM look ahead, adapt quickly to trends and are more resistant to crises.
Differences to CRM
Customer Relationship Management (CRM), which is already strongly anchored in most companies, is also about building and maintaining long-term customer relationships. Here, however, the organization acts from an internal perspective. The focus of CRM is on the handling of customer data and the technical solution for this. With customer experience management, on the other hand, the company switches perspectives, analyzes the subjective wishes of customers, optimizes the overall experience from their point of view, and thus creates a positive customer experience.
Customer Journey as a basis
A good basis for tracking the customer experience is the customer journey. It depicts all possible interactions between the customer and the company - from the first contact to the purchase to an after-sales contact with customer service. Customer Experience Management supplements such a representation with the experiences that the customer has along his customer journey, i.e. it shows the actual state. In doing so, it also identifies problems or needs that have not yet been addressed sufficiently. Based on the customer needs, the target state is then created, the vision of the perfect experience.
Finally, the company determines where action is needed to improve the customer experience with concrete measures. To do this, it evaluates data on user experiences. In this way, the customer journey can be enriched with an emotion curve that visualizes how the customer feels during the individual steps. The data required for this comes from customer surveys, satisfaction analyses, analyses of customer contacts, complaints or cancellations, as well as web tracking that shows the online behavior of customers.
Measure emotions
Another way to gain valuable insights: Methods from emotion and behavioral research can be combined with instruments from psychology. For example, companies can examine the effect of an advertising message by observing some people from the target group reading it. Using wiring, the emotions are measured, which are expressed in bodily reactions such as heart palpitations or sweating. In order to understand the behavior holistically, experts also conduct interviews with the test subjects. This allows them to report on what they have experienced. The company recognizes attitudes, interpretations, needs and desires of its customers.
