Find out the top features to choose the best customer experience management (CEM) software platform for your business.
Providing delightful, better-than-expected experiences for customers is critical for brands to stay competitive, achieve business outcomes, and thrive even as consumer behaviors shift over time. But accomplishing this isn’t easy to do manually. In fact, it’s basically impossible without a dedicated platform for capturing feedback, uncovering insights, and guiding action.
Customer experience management (CEM) is the answer. As a practice, CEM empowers an organization to understand its customers and then shape and improve experiences. Packaged in a software platform, CEM serves as the central hub for feedback. It drives decision-making for an organization to craft personalized, engaging experiences across all touchpoints throughout the customer journey.
Top 9 Features to Choose the Best Customer Experience Management (CEM) Software Platform
Choosing software of any type is a challenge more often than not. You’re taking a lot into consideration — from price and functionality to implementation and scalability. CEM software isn’t any different, and it’s why you need to know the features to consider while choosing a platform.
Based on your investment, you need a platform that’s built to elevate customer experience (CX). It should consist of features helping you identify opportunities, fulfill objectives and key results (OKRs), and deliver a return on investment, making everyone throughout the organization realize how important CX is.
Here are the top features to choose the best CEM software platform for your business.
#1. Feedback management
Customer feedback is most useful when captured from an array of sources. Whether it’s direct feedback or indirect, your business has the opportunity to tap into what customers are saying and how they’re feeling based on their experiences with your brand.
CEM software needs to collect data from signals everywhere they emerge — surveys, emails, phone calls, live chats, web interactions, and beyond.
Being this central hub where all signals enter, the platform you choose for customer experience management should allow you to track feedback both broadly and granularly. From the specific issues bubbling up on the front lines of the contact center to the customer sentiment drawn out of social media posts, your CEM software must manage all feedback with precision.
#2. Data analysis
With direct and indirect feedback in one place, CEM software streamlines data analysis to efficiently surface the insights making the biggest impact. Know where your business is excelling to do more of the good — and where it’s struggling to cut the bad.
Data from every signal should be analyzed to provide insights into behaviors and preferences. It’ll also reveal pain points that may exist somewhere in the customer journey. With this holistic view of customer experience, you’re prepared to identify opportunities to improve CX immediately and over a period of time.
#3. Customer journey mapping
Walk in your customers’ shoes to appreciate their perspective. Customer journey mapping with CEM software involves identifying the touchpoints, channels, and interactions a customer has with your business.
You’ll gain a better understanding of customer experience and realize why feedback skews positively or negatively when it comes to your products or services and any specific touchpoints.
Customer experience management isn’t a guessing game, and CEM software mapping out the customer journey brings to light the areas where your brand can eliminate pain points, reduce friction, and shrink customer effort. Ultimately, this allows you to orchestrate the experiences your customers want and expect.
#4. Personalization
Personalization tailors customer experience to the individual preferences of a customer. CEM software should be able to provide businesses with the ability to personalize the customer experience by providing personalized product recommendations while browsing an app, targeted content on a webpage, and individualized customer support, all based on the customer’s profile.
#5. Integration with other systems
Anyone who’s held the responsibility of choosing software for an organization knows that every platform in your tech stack needs to play nice with each other. If your platforms live in silos, expect disparate data that doesn’t lead to useful insights (and an incredibly low ROI).
CEM software must connect to and integrate with other systems, such as customer relationship management (CRM) software. In this case, the integration provides a complete view of the customer journey for individual customers.
Syncing data between platforms also unlocks operational efficiencies for your employees. Rather than jumping between multiple platforms to complete a task, employees have customer data — from feedback to web clicks to order history — at their fingertips in just the CEM platform.
#6. User-friendly interface
Capabilities may appear plentiful for a platform, but your business won’t get much out of the software if it’s too complex or unintuitive.
When choosing CEM software, prioritize the user interface and the learning curve required to navigate its ins and outs. This ensures all stakeholders, in any department, accessing the platform on a regular basis will easily complete tasks and gain insights.
#7. Scalability
Businesses are expected to increase revenue and expand operations over time. So it’s essential to have a platform for customer experience management that grows accordingly, whether you’re a mid-market organization or a large enterprise.
CEM software needs to scale to meet the changing needs of your organization, both in terms of employees using the platform and the volume of customer data to collect and analyze.
#8. Security and privacy
CEM software — and any other software in your tech stack, for that matter — must meet industry and regional security and privacy standards. Customer data will always remain a target for bad actors to access and compromise, the platform you choose to handle it needs to be certified to protect all sensitive information.
#9. Cost-effectiveness
Any software platform considered cannot only be a “nice-to-have” — especially during uncertain times when budgets are tight. It must offer value to the organization and provide a return on investment. CEM software is, of course, no different and should be viewed as a “must-have” due to all the business outcomes that become attainable.
Making CX a top priority is significantly beneficial to every business, from increasing customer satisfaction to carving out a competitive advantage with an improved brand reputation. It impacts the top and bottom lines. Once a CX program launches and is firing on all cylinders, brands typically earn higher sales from new customers and repeat purchases.
CEM software does more than raise revenue and boost customer loyalty, though. It also reduces costs by serving as the central hub for feedback, eliminating the need for redundant tools.
Using Customer Experience Management (CEM) Software Improves CX
Customer experience management software is essential. You can’t collect, analyze, and act on feedback to improve customer experience without a dedicated platform for CEM at the center.
But don’t forget that not all CEM software is equal. The features you find in one platform might not be offered by another, which is why you need to do some homework and research customer experience management software features that actually make a difference.
By having CEM software with all the features listed above, your business is choosing to attract customers and boost revenue rather than fall behind the competition with countless, disconnected platforms incapable of improving CX.
