What Is “good” CXM?

What is “good” CXM?

People are willing to pay a premium of 7% to 16% for a better customer experience. CX-focused “experience” companies see 1.9x higher customer retention than competitors and 7% higher revenue growth.

The bottom line? Good customer experiences build brands.

There’s just one question:

What do good customer experiences look like?

Bad customer experiences are easy to spot. But the good ones are almost invisible. They address a problem or enrich the customer journey proactively, often before there’s a noticeable pain point. That makes identifying, modelling and replicating good CXM strategies pretty tricky. At least in theory.

In this blog, we’re breaking down the question “what is good CX?” to help you build an effective CXM strategy..

Side note: CX vs CXM. CX, customer experience, refers to the customer’s perceptions of a brand. CXM, customer experience management, is how a company coordinates those experiences. In other words, CXM encompasses CX as well as data management, martech, strategy and customer-centric organisational structure.

You need solid CXM strategies to deliver good CX. That’s why the definitions matter.

We help our clients deliver great experiences through practical support and targeted training.

More about CXM

How the others define good CXM strategy

PwC identifies consistency, speed, friendliness and a human connection as the ingredients of a good experience. That’s a good start, but still too narrow.

McKinsey reckons it’s about brand, product, price and service. Better, though maybe a little too broad.

Adobe says that companies “must instantly provide the right experience at the right time on the right platform – period.” They also say that CXM “aims to create positive, personalised, and consistent experiences that drive customer satisfaction, loyalty, and advocacy.”

Microsoft says CXM is a strategy that puts customers and customer relationships at the centre of a business. Everything else – tech, tools, team structure – is positioned to prioritise personalisation across the customer experience, at scale, in real time.

These are getting close to the customer-centric definition we’re looking for.

TAP CXM’s definition of good CXM

Good CX is understanding your customer’s needs and delivering the right solution when they need it most. It’s about delighting them with relevant, timely, consistent interactions, not just once but repeatedly.

Long-term, good CXM strategy is defined by dedication to continuously improving those interactions across the entire customer journey.

The ultimate goal is maintaining a mutually beneficial relationship. Happy customers are more valuable, so loyalty is worth the investment.

How does this play out in the real world? Glad you asked.

Running a brand campaign isn’t a good CXM strategy. Deliver genuinely good experiences that get them telling their friends, family or colleagues about your brand for you. That’s good CX – showing, not telling.

Thomas Fordham

Understand your customer’s needs

A great experience serves up what your customer (whether consumer, client or account) is looking for when they’re looking for it. In the courting phase, this means relevant offers based on what you know about them. It also means identifying which channel they prefer to engage on.

As the relationship develops (i.e. they become a customer/client/subscriber), aim to be proactive with support or value-adding services.

You need solid customer intelligence to get this right, far beyond basic demographics and purchase history.

How to demonstrate understanding

Gather first-party data to create a comprehensive, centralised and progressive view of every customer.

This 360° profile should include a range of attributes you can use to orchestrate personalised customer journeys. The more you know about your audience, the more proactive you can be with personalised offers, support or cross-selling. Ultimately, the goal is to deliver experiences that anticipate their needs.

That said, there’s a point where personalisation becomes creepy. To keep interactions on the right side of this line, make sure every piece of data you collect for customer profiles is:

1. Relevant to meeting their needs
2. Useable in journey orchestration
3. Obtained with permission

Anything that doesn’t add value or can’t be used to inform CXM strategies is just wasted space in the database.

What to do with what you know

• Start with segmentation: You won’t know everything about an individual out of the gate. Create smaller segments, and segments where those segments overlap, to get closer to audiences of one.
• Ask them: Build user-friendly preference centres and/or gather relevant data through forms and tags to minimise guesswork.
• Implement rules: Assign rules to profiles or journeys, for example, instructing the journey orchestration platform to check a recipient’s preferences before launching a notification.
• Integrate activation channels: Use journey orchestration tools to respond to customer signals in real time. Use predictive analytics to make this process proactive.

Delivering the right solution

Measuring CXM strategies is inherently more complex than measuring marketing campaigns. Customer journeys are progressive, open-ended and enduring, compared to campaigns that have finite goals. Good data management is critical.

At every stage of the customer journey, you need a measure that indicates whether your strategies are helping or hurting the relationship.

CXM strategy means delivering information, products or offers that solve a problem or fulfil a need at the perfect moment. Sometimes, it means not delivering anything at all. In every case, it’s the interaction that takes the relationship one step further.

Thomas Fordham

How to define “right”

Set clear, customer-centric benchmarks that balance customer needs with what’s beneficial for the business.

Start with big-picture organisational goals like profit, market share or total revenue. These are translated into customer value metrics like retention, CLV, cross-selling or even total customer numbers.

Then they’re honed into measurable short-term KPIs like email engagement, website visits, app downloads, CPC and CTR.

• Perform A/B testing to understand what works best and use the results to iterate improvements.
• Mature your attribution models to pinpoint what encourages or repels customers. With more complex customer journeys comes a need for advanced attribution models.
• Enable customer journey orchestration, ideally across an omnichannel landscape, so you can test different approaches and examine the outcomes in context.
• Consider how inbound, outbound and direct marketing initiatives combine to shape the overall journey, and whether the mix needs to fundamentally change.

What to do with what you know

• Consider the bigger picture: Touchpoint-level KPIs are helpful for incremental change but effective CXM strategies drive business outcomes. .
• Empower the customer service team with the tools, data and training they need to go the extra mile for customers and alleviate pain points. That means being willing to share data across departmental boundaries.
• Focus on building relationships beyond transactions. Look for opportunities to increase loyalty and reward customers – and recognise when to back off a little.

TAP helped McDonald’s serve up great experiences for millions of satisfied customers.

Find out how

Delightful, personalised interactions

Every interaction should build the brand-customer relationship.

Personalised marketing goes beyond using the customer’s name. It means using what you know about them from previous interactions, preferences and data to tailor the experience. It also means getting feedback – through interactions, preferences and data – to make the next experience even more personal.

Invest in getting to know your audience so you can humanise the experience using nuanced insights. And always listen closely to what they’re telling you.

Thomas Fordham

How to deliver delightful experiences

Listen to customer signals and adapt your communication style to match.

In practice, this involves analysing sentiment and performance data to understand what resonates.

• Monitor sentiment on social media and in forums to gauge people’s perception of the brand.
• Analyse A/B tests to see which creative worked and continue developing the idea.
• Test CTAs – including placement, tone, type and frequency – to understand how your customers respond to prompts.
• Review messaging to ensure it aligns with the underlying offering and you’re not overpromising.

Messaging also matters across the customer journey. Look for opportunities to improve communication in areas like support documentation, service interactions (e.g. chatbots), operational emails and helpful resources. These are all part of the experience.

What to do with what you know

• Be transparent by showing the recipient what you know about them and explaining why this offer is relevant.
• Remember their preferences and behaviours from previous experiences to make the next one seamless. Asking for the same data twice says you don’t value customers enough to remember them.
• Personalise communication at every possible touchpoint. That includes relevant content and offers, and favouring communication channels based on individual preferences.

Dedication to continuous improvement

Customer preferences and needs are always evolving. Even if you’ve spent years getting to know an individual or account, this crazy ol’ world we live in means nothing is static. There’s always an opportunity to do more.

Whether that means upselling, cross-selling, following up, re-engaging or leveraging loyalty depends on your unique scenario – but the potential is there.

For continuous improvement to work, customer experience excellence must be an organisation-wide priority. If your team isn’t aligned behind a clear goal-driven framework, priorities get skewed and customer experience quality declines.

Here’s the curveball of CXM strategies: Your goal isn’t a ‘good’ experience but an experience that’s better than the one before. Continuous improvement is not just about fixing what doesn’t work. It’s about optimising what does and figuring out how to scale success.

Thomas Fordham

How to get better

Develop a robust feedback cycle that uses data to improve CXM strategies and keep your organisation customer-centric.

Getting there might involve reorganising teams, rethinking processes and redefining success measures. Whatever it takes, it’s worth it. Customer-centric experience companies outperform the competition on all fronts.

• Consider embedding customer value goals into job roles, promotions and incentives, and address information siloes to ensure everyone has the capability to contribute
• Articulate the CXM vision across the business and earn buy-in from leaders to make customer centricity a core part of the culture
• Regularly review processes to ensure they focus on delivering the best customer experience

What to do with what you know

• Establish shared goals and make them transparent, accessible and ambitious. Marketing, Sales, Service, Support – everyone should know what they’re working towards.
• Experiment and iterate, and encourage your colleagues to do the same. A culture of continuous learning and improvement ensures your CXM strategy stays relevant.
• Seek feedback through surveys, reviews, and social media listening to understand how to improve your company’s overall CXM strategy.
• Scrutinise CX KPIs to determine which aspects of your CXM strategy drive business outcomes and which need adjustment.

So, what does “good” CXM look like?

In practice, good CX looks different for every industry, company and customer.

Within companies there are also different success measures at different customer journey stages. We covered that in more detail in CX metrics you should be tracking in 2024.

Still, there are lessons that we as CXM consultants believe are universal.

Good CX is more invisible than visible

Relevant, substantial, value-added experiences will always trump a flashy campaign.

Focus on improving the experience offering before worrying about the visible elements of CXM. The service you provide, how you support customers, the platforms they interact with, which messages you send and when – these build long-term loyalty.

You can’t deliver good CX without customer intelligence

It’s impossible to understate the importance of reliable customer data and a robust system to manage it.

With a data-driven approach, you can identify opportunities, continuously improve experiences, test new ideas, translate “good” into actionable metrics and identify which levers to pull to improve your CXM strategy.

Customers will tell you whether you’re hitting or missing the mark

Listen to your customers and act on feedback. Not just once, and not just when they volunteer information. Analyse direct and indirect signals to make every interaction better than the last.

There is a lot to work through on this checklist. That’s inevitable, given that “good CXM” is a combination of everything your company does for customers, and experience companies don’t do anything unless it’s for customers.

Take it at a manageable pace. Our mantra here at TAP CXM is “think big, start small, scale fast”.

And if you need a hand, you know who to call.

TAP CXM provides practical and pragmatic consulting to support your transformation to an experience company.

Get in touch to talk great CXM with the team who knows exactly what it looks like.