Experience Management Software & Platforms

Customer Experience Management Software Definition: What is an Experience Management Platform?

Experience management in the business context mainly refers to the experiences that customers or business partners have with certain sales processes and products. Consequently, experience management software (XM) is mostly customer experience management software (CEM). It helps you capture, evaluate, and further process the experiences of specific interest groups during certain business processes.

The core goal here is to enhance and strengthen the relationship between companies and their stakeholders through data collection and subsequent conscious influencing. Customers can be further centered with the help of appropriate solutions. A customer experience management platform forms the basis for a detailed orchestration and personalization of the buyer's experience. The respective target group must then be served - precisely tailored to their needs - via every relevant channel.

In the center of a customer experience management tool are usually surveying tools. With the help of these features, you can collect direct feedback from customers, partners, or other stakeholders about individual procedures or products. With advanced real-time analytics, experience management tools help their users understand how the feedback affects their business metrics. Ultimately, analyses and forecasts regarding potential problems or untapped potentials can be made.

Why should companies use customer experience software?

A customer- or partner-oriented mentality is more important for you today than ever before. The product range is now huge in almost all areas. Pricing is becoming increasingly transparent and aggressive, particularly due to the Internet. This leads to stiff and constantly growing competition for more and more companies.

Customer experiences often make the crucial difference in purchasing decisions. While costs are still at the forefront, this factor is often already maxed out. Here, softer aspects such as personal contact, addressing individual challenges of concerned persons and the promotion of customer excitement (emotions) determine whether someone buys, repurchases and recommends.

A customer experience management system can greatly support achieving such sales prerequisites. With the help of such a program, absolutely authentic information about customer or partner experiences can be collected and analyzed. Ideally, the insights are not assumptions and interpretations, but direct feedback. This can ensure that the company takes the right or most beneficial direction in the given context.

How do customer experience tools work?

Every company that is interested in promoting positive customer experiences benefits from experience software. Such platforms are already used by companies in many different industries, including retail, healthcare, tech companies, financial service providers, the hospitality industry, and even non-profit organizations.

How the programs work primarily depends on which application area they focus on. In addition to customer experience systems, there are also specific B2B experience solutions or programs for analyzing the product experience. Market feedback tools also fall into the category of "experience software" in a broader sense.

However, the basic modes of operation are always similar. Customer service or customer success teams, marketing, and product development are among the biggest beneficiaries of experience management solutions. Typical experience management software processes are presented below based on typical usage patterns of these departments.

• Support: Customer service works particularly closely with business customers and thus plays an important role in managing customer experiences. Customer service teams use experience management software to track CX metrics with surveys that measure NPS, CSAT, and CES. Based on these values, you can see where you have deficits and which potentials exist to meet the expectations of your customers. Customer Experience Management solutions, among other things, highlight negative customer feedback. They provide the responsible teams with tools with which they can deal with these customers and transform negative experiences into positive interactions. The feedback collected using experience management programs is sent directly to the company's contact center, where the employees take care of the dissatisfied individuals.

• Marketing: Most consumers today heavily rely on the reviews of their peers when making purchase decisions. Therefore, positive customer experiences are an effective tool for promoting a company's goods or services. With software for experience management, marketing teams can capture positive reviews and feedback that can be shared on social media, added to marketing materials, or used as case studies. There are enormously many possibilities for use.

• Product development: Experience management software helps in the decision-making process regarding product updates and the development of new solutions. With text analysis and advanced reporting features, product teams can identify pain points in the user experience, among other things. Based on such findings, functions can now be optimized or new features introduced that improve the customers' experiences with the product.

What are the advantages and disadvantages of experience management software?

An experience management system can significantly support the closing of the gap between the experiences you believe you are offering your customers, and those that buyers actually have. Ideally, a comprehensive overview of the customer experience and many data-based reference points will be available at the end to optimize this. A better experience generally means more sales. The central advantages of such programs in this context are summarized in detail below:

• Direct, largely unambiguous insights: Similar to software for managing company feedback, experience management tools allow NPS, CSAT, and CES to be measured via surveys. Although many of these tools focus on customer service, they can also be used in other areas of a company - such as in product development, marketing, and even human resources. The tricky part of corresponding surveys is that the data obtained provides interpretation-free insights. Customers best of all share directly what they like and what they do not like. This allows absolutely precise advantageous measures to be initiated.

• Comprehensive analysis overview: By summarizing and analyzing customer feedback from different channels, experience management software gives you a holistic view of your customers' experiences. Corresponding solutions can, for example, be used to evaluate individual products, classify social media information or analyze check-out processes in the online shop. Over time, it is possible to ask about experiences with all critical business points.

• Increased brand value: It is vital for you to have a high brand value in the eyes of your target customers. Brands with a high value generate emotions – and these are very important for long-term sales success. Customer Experience Management software offers companies the opportunity to orient themselves closely to the interests and needs of their customers. In the course of this, they can get many points of attack for generating emotions.

• High customer satisfaction and –loyalty: Companies that consistently satisfy their customers have significantly increased chances of retaining the long-term loyalty of these individuals. With the help of experience management software, the factors that favor high customer satisfaction can be precisely captured. These can then be specifically strengthened. This is very important as customers nowadays can use a variety of alternative providers for almost every purchase concern. But once a company has won the loyalty and trust of certain buyers, this risk is significantly reduced.

In addition to the many advantages, there are unfortunately also certain disadvantages or – better said – potential problems. A particular aspect of the use of experience management software is a considerable challenge for quite a few companies.

• Lack of acceptance: Experience management software cannot establish relevant processes overnight. If you do not already have appropriate strategies and procedures, it may be difficult for responsible teams to accept or fully exploit such a platform. Before implementing an experience management solution, executives should review their current processes and consider whether maybe the framework conditions need to be worked on first. The central questions are whether there is generally already a customer-centric approach and whether feedback is already being used. If both are the case, the path to successful introduction and use of a customer experience system is easier.

How do you choose the right customer experience management platform?

Choosing a suitable experience management software is usually quite a tricky task. The market offers a variety of solutions that not only offer different ranges of functions, but are also designed for different areas of application. To simplify the finding process, you should ask yourself the following questions in particular.

What should be achieved by collecting feedback?

This question should be answered before even thinking about other aspects. Because the goals for the implementation of the experience management system determine the basic orientation and the functions that are needed. Typical reasons for collecting feedback include:

• There is a global behavior (such as a decline in customer loyalty) that cannot be explained by traditional analytics.
• Customers clearly have certain pain points that responsible parties want to identify and address precisely.
• The services of support should be monitored and improved.
• There is increased relevance to equip a product with novel features and/or to push it in customer acceptance.

Once you have an idea of what you want to achieve, a narrower selection of sensible solutions will be made. For the last point mentioned, for example, a product experience solution should probably be used. Whereas to solve the first case, a specific customer experience management software would be ideal.

The range of functions should then be chosen based on the sub-goals of corresponding analysis processes. The other questions listed here help to think through the options.

How many survey variants are needed? Appropriate feedback features are the central means to ensure a useful function of experience management software. When evaluating the right solution, it should therefore be ensured that exactly the surveys for customer feedback are possible that cover the underlying requirements.

Surveys that relate to relational feedback (for example, the net promoter score) measure how customers think about a brand overall. In contrast, transactional feedback surveys (for example, on customer satisfaction or customer effort score) relate to specific touchpoints. They typically allow insights into the quality of customer service interactions.

Many companies want to use several variants of surveys and different measuring bases. The possibility of customization is also an advantage. Ideally, decision-makers look for a solution that gives them access to standardized surveys for their company context. In addition, the standards should be able to be adjusted if needed.

Which channels should be used? Addressing your target customers via their preferred channels increases the chance that they will respond to corresponding surveys. So anyone considering introducing a customer experience management solution should consider in advance which distribution method or channel compatibility it need to offer.

Website, in-app, or social media surveys are very popular and potentially plentiful. They are both convenient and easy for potential customers and companies. Collecting feedback via email, SMS, or messaging apps is also a good option. However, you need the permission of the recipients that you may send such messages to them.

Is the experience management system easy to set up? Ideally, customer experience platforms can be set up quickly and easily. The necessity to get into the code and integrate the system via individual interfaces into the established software architecture for processing the customer experience is a no-go for most companies. They simply don't have immediate access to developers to handle such tasks.

If experience management software is complicated to implement, this fact may also be reflected in its usability. This in turn may prevent relevant employees from fully exploiting the potential of the solution.

You should consider these points very carefully when making your decision for or against a specific customer experience management software and even put them above the functions. Because even the most powerful system has few advantages if it is not implemented correctly in the first place and secondly not fully exploited in daily use.

Should feedback be used in combination with other programs? In most cases, this question will be answered with a definite "yes". If, for example, a special content management system (CMS) is in use, you should look for a compatible platform. This will trigger targeted sending of surveys based on user interaction with the website based on the CMS. In addition, automatic data exports to a CRM system or for further analytics are almost always useful.

If the experience management software is optimally integrated or networked, companies avoid duplicating the transfer of information. The team then tends to accept such a solution more quickly. It is possible to incorporate the customer feedback effortlessly into other everyday tools and thus benefit wider.

How is the feedback analyzed? The segmentation and analysis of customer feedback in Excel should once and for all be a thing of the past with the introduction of experience management software. Modern platforms can be equipped with powerful analysis and reporting tools that greatly shorten the evaluation work.

You should look closely at what you need and what you might not need. The analytics scope and corresponding automation – for example via AI - have a great influence on the price. Perhaps a robust analysis platform is already in use. Then only an experience management software is needed that can pass on corresponding feedback data to this.

What kind of support is needed? Experience management software comes with various additional services. Support is usually included. But here and there premium support can also be added.

In addition, there is occasionally the possibility to receive implementation services, training, and strategic support. Since such and similar services again strongly influence costs, it is necessary to think carefully about what is needed and what is not.

What do customer experience solutions cost?

The prices for customer experience management software vary primarily depending on the number of features and authorized users. Some provider companies charge between five and 300 euros per month per employee. Others have either a monthly or an annual fixed price.

Many solutions can initially be used in a free trial version. Some customer experience management companies also offer guided demos. You should definitely accept corresponding options - in view of the many factors to consider when choosing. There are even some completely free programs. Of course, their functionalities are relatively heavily restricted.