As ever-greater numbers of organizations embrace the age of the smart customer, you might expect Customer Experience Management, or CXM, to be a well-understood term. After all, like ‘customer experience,’ it’s used a lot. However — also like customer experience — it describes many things.
So, to avoid confusion and doubt, I’d like to start this article with two definitions:
This distinction is important for a simple reason: To radically improve your customer experience, you need to radically improve your Customer Experience Management (CXM) capabilities.
Which is why customer experience leaders — defined as the top 20 percent of companies as measured by CX scores, revenue and profitability growth, customer retention, and profit — share a number of customer experience management capabilities in common.
How CX Leaders Lead: CXM Secrets Revealed
Since much of our work over the last 15+ years has been helping organizations enable their customer experience aspirations, we’ve had the pleasure of working with CX leaders in industries ranging from retail to technology, insurance, banking and non-profits.
Though most are organized and go to market in different ways, they have one thing in common: They understand what it takes to positively impact the design and delivery of customer experience. They also understand how design and delivery can be most effectively leveraged together.
After years of observing and assessing these leaders, we codified and summarized the shared attributes and capabilities of the most successful, customer-obsessed organizations. These capabilities — eight in total, with multiple attributes that support them — can help any organization do a better job designing, developing and delivering great customer and employee experiences.
This summary could serve as a roadmap for scaling and systematizing customer experience management (CXM) expertise in any organization.
The 8 key customer experience management (CXM) capabilities include:
CXM enables greater customer centricity, and the institutional ability to sense and respond to change more quickly and effectively than the competition.
From the velocity of changing customer expectations to fast-moving market dynamics, the ability to sense and respond to change (customers, employees, partners and competitors to name a few) isn’t just a business philosophy, it’s a survival requirement.
Getting to the stage that this can be done both regularly and systematically — with systems in place to drive ongoing improvement — requires a framework to leverage and a path to follow. That’s the crux of customer experience management.
Mastering these CXM capabilities not only allows organizations to be more customer centric, it also allows them to be more agile and responsive to changing markets and other ever-changing forces. As these capabilities mature, customer experience will further ingrain itself in the cultural DNA of those organizations that prioritize activating CXM.