CXM: The Key to Good Relationships & Reputations

The Customer Relationship is Key

The foundation of any client-facing organization’s tech stack is, of course, its CRM platform. CRM stands for “Customer Relationship Management,” and it was developed primarily to provide a system of record for sales, business development, and account management teams. It is a system for sales execution, which is not all of what CX workers need. Integrated with ticketing and email, they can often tell you what happened, but often fail to tell you why, or what to do from there.

Ticketing systems are simple - an issue at a point in time gets created on the customer’s end, and that is routed to a knowledge worker, whose responsibility is working toward finding a solution to the issue at hand, and providing that solution to the customer. These tickets are devoid of any context surrounding that customer - the products they use, their prior interactions with the company, and any third parties they might be working with. This results in time-consuming channel-switching in which the knowledge worker is left to scramble to find an answer while the customer waits. The relationship becomes imperiled by a negative customer experience. 

Customer Experience is the Key to the Relationship

Customer Experience Management (CXM) is about putting your customer at the center of your business. This means you make the quality of your customer’s experience a high strategic priority. And why not? Customer interactions with your company and your products drive your revenue. Unfortunately, many companies simply measure the quality of customer interactions through surveys and research. If you’re measuring the quality of interactions after the fact, you’re doing it wrong.

CXM means actively owning responsibility for delivering a comprehensive high-quality outcome for customers across their entire Customer Journey. Customer Journeys are a combination of customer interactions with your company as they move through a cycle. The Sales Journey, for example, consists of the entire journey from discovery through solutioning to closed sale. Ownership and orchestration of that journey indicates that you understand the experience of your company from a customer’s point of view. Delivering excellent customer experiences demonstrates that ownership – and customers will respond with loyalty to and evangelism toward your company as a result.

Reputations & the Long Run

Any organization that values long term viability and profitability should care about how their customers are interacting with their teams and brand. Even one negative experience can seriously imperil a company’s reputation and ability to present themselves as leaders in their field, and in the marketplace. Diminished customer trust in any brand will result not only in churn, but a decrease in new business. That should be enough to rattle the cage of any industry leader who thinks that processes that are anything less than cutting edge are going to cut it.