5 signs your business needs a customer experience platform
Improving customer experiences typically starts with taking a closer look at the way your business service or product interacts with customers. Evaluating online, over the phone, or in-person interactions with your customers can help you identify pain points that may be affecting their overall experience. The use of a customer experience management (CXM) platform can significantly ease this process by empowering your organisation to collect customer feedback from multiple touchpoints. On top of automatically deploying surveys, an AI-driven customer experience platform can conduct root-cause analysis and transform unstructured feedback into clear, actionable insights. These capabilities are critical to your business success, especially if your organisation is familiar with the following challenges:
1. Inconsistent customer experience across touchpoints
Customers today interact with businesses in many ways—website visits, phone calls, in-store experiences, and more. Customers expect a seamless experience, and yet, it’s not unusual for companies to be disjointed when customers begin to interact across different touchpoints.
So with countless touchpoints to manage, how do you know where to look? How can you make improvements when feedback is scattered and unsorted? The good news is, the platform will help you identify which touchpoint requires your attention.
A CXM platform automates feedback collection in one place and sorts it for you. For instance, is your post-interaction service doing well but your customer service calls falling short? The platform identifies these gaps. Best of all, every interaction is measured seamlessly. Allowing you to learn from both the channels that are exemplary and from channels that need improvement. It takes every feedback and categorises it together with other similar feedback to give you the bigger picture. But it also gives you the freedom to focus on each individual feedback to action on if you prefer.
2. Manual and inefficient feedback analysis processes
These days, gathering large volumes of data is no longer the issue. Collecting customer feedback is one thing, but analysing each one manually can be a time-consuming and inefficient process. The real challenge lies in making sense of it all. When you rely on manual analysis, it’s easy to miss trends and form biases. It can also take too long to be resolved. These delays can lead to missed sales or lost customers.
Without an efficient system to manage feedback, it’s easy for your team to feel overwhelmed and to overlook the valuable information customers are providing. A CXM platform that utilises artificial intelligence has the means to not only simplify feedback collection but also conduct a thorough analysis of substantial volumes of data. Its use, in turn, allows your team to focus on making improvements rather than being bogged down by too much information. Through real-time analytics and reporting, a CXM platform can also quickly highlight areas that need attention, enabling your business to respond swiftly and strategically.
3. Difficulty in tracking and measuring customer sentiment over time
Understanding how your customers feel about your brand requires more than just one-off feedback collection. Sentiment changes over time, so tracking these shifts manually is a complex and often inaccurate task. If you’re relying on sporadic feedback or intuition, you might miss signs of growing dissatisfaction until it’s too late. Additionally, without a clear way to measure sentiment over extended periods, you’re left guessing about the long-term effects of any changes you implement.
Another challenge lies in addressing broader, systemic issues affecting sentiment—a concept that is often referred to as the “outer loop” in customer experience management. While the “inner loop” focuses on resolving individual customer concerns, the outer loop involves identifying recurring patterns, determining the root causes of problems, and implementing improvements across the organisation. Without reliable technology, it can be difficult to distill actionable insights from sentiment data at scale.
A CXM platform solves this problem by sending out pulse surveys over a set period of time to monitor any changes in trends and sentiments. It then provides continuous monitoring of customer sentiment through multiple touchpoints and automates the analysis of trends. By using advanced analytics, it can track trends and provide an evolving picture of how customers feel about your business. This allows you to make informed decisions based on hard data rather than assumptions, ultimately helping you maintain a positive customer relationship over time.
4. Lack of timely feedback and response capability
The ability to receive and respond to feedback in real time is crucial for modern businesses. If you’re relying on inefficient and outdated methods like waiting for negative reviews to appear online, you’re missing opportunities to resolve issues quickly. Delayed responses can also aggravate customers and result in lost sales or damage to your brand’s reputation. A customer experience platform empowers businesses to turn potentially negative interactions into opportunities for building stronger relationships.
Now, imagine a scenario where a dissatisfied customer leaves a negative review online, but after a representative reaches out to them to resolve their issue, they might change their mind. More than 65% of negative reviewers improve or remove their review when businesses respond. The same principle applies to a CXM platform. Real-time alerts and feedback analysis allow your team to immediately reach out to address burning concerns. This quick effort to resolve an issue demonstrates that your business genuinely values its customers, and it will show. Often, such prompt action can transform a detractor into a promoter, even if their original feedback score doesn’t change. The act of being heard and helped can make all the difference.
5. There is no easy way to close the feedback loop
Gathering feedback is essential, but if there’s no streamlined process for acting on it, you’re not getting the full value of your efforts. In many businesses, feedback gets passed around various teams, with no clear ownership or follow-up process in place. This leads to unresolved issues, frustrated customers, and ultimately, missed opportunities for growth.
A CXM platform simplifies the process of closing the feedback loop. It allows you to assign, track, and resolve customer issues all in one place, ensuring that every piece of feedback is addressed efficiently. This is especially helpful in addressing issues within the inner loop of customer experience management, where a CXM platform can provide your business with the tools and authority to act on individual customer feedback. By empowering customer-facing teams—such as branch managers, customer service representatives, and support staff—your business can address customer concerns quickly and effectively.
Indeed, closing the feedback loop demonstrates to customers that their voices are heard and that your business is committed to continuous improvement. This fosters trust and strengthens your brand’s connection with customers over the long term.
Conclusion
Incorporating a customer experience platform into your business is more than just addressing these immediate challenges—it’s about creating a foundation for sustained growth. By optimising customer interactions and ensuring that feedback is both gathered and acted upon efficiently, you’re setting the stage for improved customer loyalty, better brand reputation, and ultimately, increased revenue. As you improve the customer experience, you’ll see that the investment in a CXM platform directly contributes to the success and growth of your business.
