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Enterprises are pushing ahead with digital transformation projects at an increased pace because they need to be customer-centric. To get there more quickly, they’ve embraced partnerships to increase the value they can offer consumers. However, this dedication to better serving their business customers can actually result in less satisfied customers who experience a broken or cumbersome customer journey. That’s where CXM comes in.
What is CXM? To level set, CXM stands for customer experience management. Sometimes referred to as CX management. We define it as optimizing the customer experience from end to end vs. optimizing specific touchpoints or functional areas. It's transforming how a customer experiences an organization across different teams, platforms and especially third-party partners or providers that fulfill parts of a customer journey like a hardware provider or core processor.
In our blog, What is the difference between CXM and CRM?, we explored how the best CXM platforms are purpose-built to give companies full control and visibility of their customer experience across the enterprise but also across their ecosystem. There's no other technology that focuses on sharing information back and forth with ecosystem partners like a CX management platform.
By eliminating those data silos so there's a view into every interaction inside and outside the organization, companies can ensure customers are being supported in the moment and handoffs are smooth between teams and different companies involved in the customer journey. Because emerging digital transformation initiatives and the growth of partnerships to meet expanding customer expectations add to CX complexity, CXM solutions are becoming table stakes for those that want to lead the competitiion and maintain customer relationships.
CRM captures the relationship. CXM optimizes it.
Digital Transformation Has Led to an Explosion in Ecosystem Growth
Nearly every enterprise, from banking to healthcare, has been driving towards digital transformation for a decade. The pace picked up as the pandemic forced consumers into digital channels. It’s been further fueled by growing expectations for highly curated and personalized interactions that address a consumer’s unique wants and needs.
Weighed down with legacy systems that don’t pivot quickly, companies are enlisting partners to provide new services at a lower cost and on a faster timeline than if they built them internally.
Banking is one obvious example. Fintechs, once viewed only as feared competitors, are pairing up with traditional financial institutions to give them a shortcut to innovation. In this ecosystem approach, enterprises may own their customer relationship, but the customer experience is shared with partners.
Enterprises may own the customer relationship, but they share the CX with partners.
Ecosystems Complicate the Customer Journey
Enterprises and their partners share customers, each fulfilling a part of the journey. What they don’t share easily is the data that accompanies that customer. That’s a growing cause for alarm, because when the enterprise can’t see the status of their customer or act on information siloed in partner systems, the customer relationship may suffer.
One global bank admitted, “We already had a fragmented customer experience, and digital transformation has only made it worse.“
The tangible effect of busted workflows and communication gaps is undeniable. Said more clearly, there is a cost to losing sight of customer information and progress in a journey. As one global bank admitted, “we already had a fragmented customer experience, and digital transformation has only made it worse.“
Broken Customer Journeys Affect the Bottom Line
As powerful and necessary as partnerships are to innovation, they come with a potential challenge - customer journeys become more fragmented when customers move between enterprise and providers.
Only 19.3% of customers who have had a bad customer experience will let the brand know about it. -Smart Insights
This complexity can drag down business outcomes, exhaust support teams and clients and challenge business line leaders who manage teams and P&L centers to resolve the resulting issues.
The most common business pain points leaders cite are:
1. High operating costs
2. Lost revenue potential
3. Low Net Promoter Scores (NPS) from employees and customers, jeopardizing retention
4. Customer churn and attrition risks
In fact, in some industries, like merchant services, research indicates 30% of merchants churn in the first 90 days. Companies that invest large dollar amounts to attract customers can’t afford to lose them over onboarding, activation or servicing hassles.
CXM Unifies the Ecosystem On One Platform
If CRM is viewed as the way to bring in customers, CXM is how enterprises keep them.
CXM is a powerful data aggregator, exposing customer information, whether it is housed in various enterprise systems or with a partner. The CXM captures it all, in a single pane of glass, empowering companies with a 360-degree view of their customer in real-time.
80% of organizations believe they are delivering a superior experience compared to just 8% of customers who believe they are receiving a great customer experience. Bain & Company
With pre-built connectors, CXM can bring together stand-alone legacy and partner systems so information can flow freely across the ecosystem to inform business decisions and CX actions.
As companies leverage a CXM platform to connect a growing number of data silos, they gain a robust picture of customer journey progress and precise insights on how to adjust journeys to reduce friction and nudge customers toward completion. The impact on performance can be profound.
Positive Business Outcomes Powered by CXM
The right CXM platform empowers companies to use operational data, available in real-time, to drive optimized CX action. By investing in a CXM platform that uses customer data to drive insights and decision-making, companies are reaping significant business outcomes:
Positive Business Outcomes from CXM:
- Increased revenue growth - one business unit, previously a cost center, became a revenue driver, generating $5 million in less than 12 months.
- Reduced customer churn and attrition - escalations dropped, customer retention increased by double digits and onboarding success grew by 50%.
- Improved operational efficiency - customer servicing costs were cut by 26% year over year.
- Higher customer and employee satisfaction - NPS scores jumped by 3x in 9 months.
CXMEngine Is The Only Platform Turning CX Action Into Profitability
Boomtown is the world leader in CXM. Our CXMEngine platform connects enterprise systems with those of ecosystem partners to ensure consumers are cared for, at every step in their journey.
Boomtown transforms broken communication and collaboration into a superhighway of insights by aggregating data across the ecosystem. Using connectors, enterprises can launch CXMEngine in as little as 30 days. Even if customer data is messy or internal resources are thin.
Once up and running, our clients experience reduced customer drop-offs and churn, increased onboarding and activation completion, soaring customer and employee satisfaction and operational efficiency.
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