Customer Experience Insights

Achieve excellence with CXM practices and strategies

Written by Alfonso Ramírez | Jan 13, 2023

Discover how to achieve excellence in CXM practices and strategies in your company. Adopt innovative initiatives that will benefit your customer experience management. 

The world is immersed in the era of intelligent customers, so it makes sense that every organization should know what customer experience management (CXM) truly entails.

Before considering adaptation, your company must consider how it has evolved in customer experience management since this topic addresses several dimensions. From what are the business culture perspectives, the development and skill sets specifically focused on continuous improvement of the customer experience (CX), from advancing and increasing deployment in experience design (CXD) to your bottom line or what it translates to in delivering that experience for your company.

 

So, how do you achieve excellence with CXM practices and strategies in your company?

This article will show what aspects your company will need to evaluate and consider to adopt good practices and strategies with CXM direction in your organization.

For a complete adaptation of CXM to your company, consider the following aspects:

  • Make your company evolve from strategies to CXM!
  • The 8 Structural Pillars of CXM.
  • CXM best practice success stories.
  • I'd like you to considerations for helping your company to excellence in customer experience management.

 

 

Evolve your company to CXM strategies!

Customer experience-based strategies have set a precedent in how companies operate. Suppose we do not involve them in our actions. In that case, we can drastically damage our business credibility, the arduous efforts of the departments involved, and, more importantly, the company's credibility.

Strategies based on user experience (UX) and customer experience (CX) must be very hard-working and constantly renewed. 

That said, what do we do to evolve them into CXM strategies?

According to Adobe, it must acquire four types of mindsets to accelerate the process and implementation of CXM strategies. 

They are: 

  • The data-driven mindset.
  • Scaling and adoption of personalization.
  • Improving content velocity.
  • Adopting a leadership alignment mindset.

 

I recommend reading more in:

>>The four ways to accelerate your CXM strategy<<

 

The 8 Structural Pillars of CXM

Eight elements are essential to the structuring and development of Customer Experience Management. It is important to consider that many of these aspects are constantly evolving. If they still need to become familiar to you, it is crucial that you know them and develops knowledge in their different branches.

These are the structural pillars of CXM:

  1. Implementing customer experience strategies: Every organization must meet qualitative and quantitative metrics. They need to analyze their performance in specific periods and their objectives concerning the communication they will have with their customer. It is at that moment when defining strategies becomes an imminent necessity. There is only effective management with strategies as a base.
  2. The mindset of understanding: The best way to empathize, understand, and win customers is by understanding them and, more importantly, understanding their emotions, feelings, wants, and needs. CXM strategy can only be completed by addressing the following questions: Whom does my content help? How do I help my prospects? How do I help my prospects? Why is it important to them? How do I help my prospects? Why is it important to them? How do I help my prospects? Why is it important to them?
  3. Customer experience design: To understand the customer, it is essential to understand their processes, What their routine is like, What their desires drive their purchase, What their interests are, Their process and how they buy, and the moments of truth.

    You can learn more about this consultative methodology in the following articles:

    - Importance of customer experience design.

    - The power of customer experience design.

    - How to be successful in Customer Experience Design.

  4. Data Governance: Every organization today requires understanding, internalizing, and adapting data management and control practices and policies aligned with its business processes, requirements, and objectives. Data governance must ensure data management's protection, control, cost reduction, transparency, and efficiency to improve decision-making.
  5. Setting the stage for a customer-centric culture: Beyond process mapping, the application of control tools and strategy planning. It is crucial for any organization to "get customer-centric" by fostering and developing a customer-centric culture. By adopting a customer-centric culture, your company can improve its practices and make its experience management strategies more human and empathetic to its ideal customer.
  6. KPIs or experience performance measures: Every effort requires measurement to diagnose its path to excellence or improvement points. Customer experience-centric strategies need to be analyzed and measured for performance and results: How have your sales teams performed, improved customer experiences, or stagnated in the drab? 
  7. Technology as a consequence and enabler for your customer experience management strategies: Technology today still requires methodologies to be functional. In the same way, your customer experience management strategies and management without it lack veracity, visualization, and omnichannel distribution of knowledge, practices, and analytics of the performance of the commercial areas in your organization.
  8. Business Processes: No software or technology can create CXM practices and strategies in your company alone! Software is dumb if there is no proper management, definition, and structuring of processes to automate your CXM strategy.
     
    Here are some article recommendations:
     
    - Adapting to disruption: defining processes before automating.
    - 6 key steps to lift your business processes.
    - 10 reasons to automate your business processes.

CXM best practice success stories.

The practical and constant evolution of customer experience is often challenging for many companies. The digital world requires a continual demand for valuable content, process design, business process automation, and performance and results in measurement.  

This element is because there are many factors to be taken into consideration, such as the following:

  • The structural pillars for the development of any CXM strategy.
  • The implementation of strategic plans to strengthen the personalization of multichannel experiences.
  • The adoption of a customer-centric culture.
  • The design and measurement of experiences through enterprise omnichannel.
  • The automation of processes associated with each customer experience.


We will now analyze some success stories in customer experience management:

  1. Case Study Adidas: 
     


    The renowned German sports footwear company has sought to maximize digital experiences recently. To be more precise, its approach focused on customer experience.

    By practicing several studies and analyzing data, Adidas discovered that their customers bought more products online than in their physical stores. So they decided to practice data-driven experience design, which helped to personalize the customer experience in those moments of truth. Another critical point applied by Adidas is the customer understanding mindset.

    Through the understanding mindset it has put in place, Adidas gets feedback and actively listens to its customers to design innovative experiences.

    For example:

    - Designing new sustainable products, such as footwear from ocean waste. This strategy achieved sales of more than 1 million pairs in a year.


    In highly competitive industries such as retail, it is crucial to consider that adopting a customer-centric culture encourages the redesign and personalization of customer experiences.


    Investing in customer experience management can exponentially boost a company's growth and even become a leader in its industry. 

  2. Case Study Anheuser-Busch InBev: 



    Anheuser is a leading organization within the brewing and beverage production industry worldwide. It has gained an iconic reputation in the marketplace in various parts of Europe and the United States. Within its broad product portfolios, Anheuser-Busch discovered a significant business challenge familiar to many enterprise businesses and part of its growth process in international markets.


    Having multiple brands in different territories, each requiring a specific web store, generated the business challenge of needing to reduce costs, reduce the high complexity of handling and managing the sites, and, most essential, not lose the objective of providing services focused on customer experience. 

    In general aspects, Anheuser-Busch realized through two strategic pillars of CXM, the application of strategies designed in the customer experience and the automation of processes making use of technology as a consequence.

    This situation was possible by redesigning the shopping experience and automating these processes through the implementation and automation of Adobe Commerce.

    Its director of Demand Management & Marketing Technology, John Faviano, discusses in more detail his keys to solving these challenges in the following Adobe article.

    >>How Anheuser-Busch Created a 'Customer-First' Experience<<


  3. Case Study T-Mobile:




    T-Mobile is one of the leading organizations in the U.S. telecommunications industry. as part of the constant challenges and variations in the dynamism of what it takes to specialize in the telecommunications industry. T-Mobile found that one of its most significant challenges was to improve the personalization and perception of its customers' experiences with potential growth.

    In addition to these factors, the organization faced the reality that with exponential growth in its business demands, it needed to develop workflows imminently. This characteristic was because their current processes needed to be keeping up with the expectations of the experiences required by their customers.

    In the following articles, you will find an in-depth look at these challenges faced by companies and how Imagineer develops process and automation solutions: 

    - Process Improvement Using As Is & To Be.
    - Introduction to Business Process Automation.
    - Automate the follow-up of business opportunities with workflows.

    Also required developing more agile ways of working and boosting efficiency. T-Mobile bet on redesigning the customer experience and obtained excellent results. Achieving an 80% growth in user participation in its platforms increased the deployment and delivery of projects per month, translating into a 275% increase in productivity. 
     
    In general, T-Mobile realized, through the pillars of CXM, developed strategies designed for customer experience and process automation using technology as a consequence. To enhance this orchestration of efforts, it implemented and automated its business processes using Adobe Workfront.

Considerations for guiding your company to customer experience management excellence

Within the long journey and odyssey on the road to customer experience management, there can be many aspects, factors, obstacles, and decisions that companies must face very coldly in the new era of digital experience. 

As a teaching aid for organizations, McKinsey & Company highlighted within their excellent article "The Predictions of the Future of Customer Experience" how data and analytics had revolutionized the entire art and science of what is involved in the customer experience spectrum. However, it is evolving astronomically to the point that executives at companies with significant business legacies must reconstruct their thinking; what will be the next steps they must take to move forward or die trying?

Every company needs to be guided to excellence in customer experience management. They need to internalize and adapt to the following conditions:

  • Shatter old work schemes and be reborn through cross-functionality in team management:  Companies must boost the multifunctionality of skills of their collaborators. Through this, they can maximize their potential, knowledge, and abilities, and how they approach customers will become more personalized.

  • Redesigning the consultative mindset: Beyond approaching prospects and despairing in the attempt to sell, companies need to understand that prospects or customers are not interested in how much or what an executive will sell them. Still, in how they can help them improve their experience day-to-day, the consultative approach empowers a mindset of understanding the customer. This result is an apparent pillar of customer experience management practices and strategies.
  • Highlight the precision of experience design and the personalized use case: Each customer is a different universe. As much as Buyer Persona, their journeys, buying processes, and use cases are out, it can deepen your understanding by analyzing what interests them, why, and how they want it. Regarding the customer experience, management practices and strategies must constantly improve these details. The only thing that can measure their satisfaction is how personalized, relevant, and suitable those use cases of your company's solutions are.


At Imagineer, we understand the moments to create high-value experiences. If this article interests you and you want to take your company to excellence with customer experience management practices and strategies, schedule a consulting session with one of our consultants.