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Experience management (XM) software, also known as customer experience (CX) or customer experience management (CEM or CXM) software, refers to technology that helps manage an organization’s interactions with its customers across all channels and touchpoints in the customer journey. CXM software enables businesses to collect, consolidate, and analyze customer feedback, providing actionable insights throughout the customer journey and lifecycle. With real-time, advanced analytics, experience management tools help companies understand how feedback relates to their business metrics. With these products, the most successful businesses are able to use predictive analytics to act on potential issues before they arise. Experience management software also provides tools for closed-loop actions, meaning employees are empowered to take action on optimization of customer experiences by responding to customers or prioritizing product roadmaps based on feedback.
All experience management solutions offer the same basic functionality. The most common use case is CX; however, some products are able to target other types of audiences for feedback concerning product experience, brand experience, and even market research. Some experience management platforms also offer features for gauging employee experiences.
Experience management platforms help businesses bridge the gap between the experiences they believe they are delivering to customers and the experiences customers are actually receiving. Below are a few benefits of the software:
Any business with a vested interest in promoting positive customer experiences benefits from experience management software. These platforms are leveraged by organizations across many different industries, including retail, healthcare, technology, financial services, hospitality, and nonprofit.
Customer service: Customer support and customer success teams are some of the heaviest users of experience management software. These departments work closely with business customers and play a major role in managing customer experiences. Customer service teams use experience management software to track CX metrics with surveys that measure NPS, CSAT, and CES. These metrics help businesses understand where they are falling short and how they can improve to meet the expectations of their customers. Experience management solutions flag negative customer feedback and provide teams with tools to follow up with those customers, turning negative experiences into positive interactions. Feedback collected through experience management tools is routed directly to a company’s contact center, where agents follow up with dissatisfied customers.
Marketing: Most consumers rely on reviews from their peers when they make purchasing decisions. As a result, positive customer experiences are a powerful tool for promoting a company’s products and services. Experience management software allows marketing teams to capture positive reviews and feedback that are shared on social media, added to marketing materials, or used as case studies.
Product development: Experience management software helps inform decision making around product updates and new product development. Text analytics and advanced reporting features allow product teams to identify pain points in the user experience. With these insights, product teams are able to add functionality or introduce new features that will improve customers’ experiences with the product.
For small businesses aiming to enhance customer satisfaction and gather actionable feedback, top small business experience management platforms include:
For SaaS companies seeking to optimize user experience and gather product feedback, leading experience management platforms on G2 include:
For large enterprises aiming to manage complex customer journeys and gather comprehensive feedback, leading enterprise-level experience management platforms include:
Enterprise feedback management software: Enterprise feedback management solutions offer similar functionality to that of experience management software. These tools enable businesses to collect, analyze, and distribute customer feedback. Businesses may use these products instead of experience management solutions if closing the loop on feedback is unnecessary or if they use another platform to follow up with customers.
Survey software: Survey features serve as the foundation of experience management software. Businesses, as well as non-business entities, use survey software to create and share online surveys, quizzes, polls, and web forms.
User research software: User experience (UX) and product development teams may prefer user research software over experience management tools. User research platforms enable businesses to target customers or outside audiences for in-the-moment feedback on a product or brand. User research may be conducted through surveys, interviews, and focus groups.
Employee engagement software: Organizations dedicated to improving the health of their business understand that it’s important to gauge employee satisfaction as well as customer satisfaction. While experience management software helps businesses collect external customer feedback, employee engagement software may be used to conduct pulse surveys and track employee feedback.
Lack of adoption: Experience management software is designed to support robust customer service programs and cross-department collaboration. If a business does not already have plans and processes in place for experience management, it may be difficult for teams within the organization to adopt such a platform. Before implementing an experience management solution, executives should examine their current processes and consider whether employee training is needed to ensure the product is adopted across the company.
The complexity of an experience management solution depends on the size of the business and what a business wants to accomplish. The software can be simplified with basic features for communicating with customers or have comprehensive features that would integrate with existing platforms or software products. However, the overall reason for a business to invest in customer experience management software is to achieve better customer experience and brand loyalty. Factors that businesses should consider include:
Business size capability: Small and mid-sized companies can opt for CEM software that focuses on customer interactions and highlights the internal problems that might impact customer experience, such as monitoring live chat. However, larger enterprises can opt for a robust comprehensive software that helps in managing the complexities of various departments like marketing, sales, etc.
Communication integration: CEM needs to integrate well with various communication methods, such as social media, emails, etc.
Data integration: CEM also needs to integrate with existing platforms like customer databases, customer relationship management (CRM) software, etc.