As customers, we all want better experiences. As businesses, we want to provide those experiences that appeal to customers. Of course, none of those great experiences happen by accident. If you’re serious about CX success, it’s time to get serious about your customer experience management framework.

Why a customer experience management framework is crucial to your strategic success

A robust customer experience management framework is the cornerstone of building high-quality customer experiences and establishing brand loyalty. The latter results from consistent, reliable service across all engagement channels and platforms and effective use of marketplace data. A structured framework is crucial in helping companies identify opportunities to enhance their products or services based on customer feedback, thereby driving customer ambassadorship, repeat purchases, and referrals.

Moreover, a well-considered customer experience management framework allows businesses to thrive in a modern environment that demands incredible agility. This enhanced adaptability enables them to quickly respond to volatile demand peaks and valleys without disrupting existing operations. In other words, a culture of flexibility and responsiveness can make all the difference in your customer experience management (CXM) initiatives by consolidating positive touchpoints and erasing obstructive ones.

As a backup to the above, here are some verified statistics that leave no doubt customer retention is the route to improving your ROI:

1. Customer churn costs US businesses (SMBs and enterprises) nearly $168 billion annually (CallMiner).
2. US companies could reduce overheads by over $35 billion annually simply by focusing on existing customers’ happiness (CallMiner)
3. In 2013, each new e-commerce customer acquisition cost an average of $9, jumping to $29 (a 222% increase) by 2022 (SimplicityDX).
4. Businesses have a 3.5 to 12 times better chance of selling to an existing customer than a new prospect (Forbes, quoting the book Marketing Metrics)

Critical components of a customer experience framework

There are three primary components, which largely overlap: Customer journey mapping, Voice of the Customer programs, and customer feedback systems.

1. Customer Journey Mapping

Creating a customer journey map is more than just identifying CX touchpoints. It requires a deep understanding of every brand/customer interaction, bolstering the advantageous ones, and minimizing the obstructions. Creating an insightful, actionable map involves a professional approach and appreciating the process essential for success. In short, elevate it from basic to comprehensive.

Here are the crucial journey-mapping steps:

1. 1. Set definable goals: Begin with broad objectives (e.g., “improve customer satisfaction”), then categorize them into more tangible and defined goals, like reducing response times to customer queries. Following this thinking, itemized goals such as “enhancing customer service” or “streamlining the buying route” should emerge.
   2. Collect robust data: Identify all customer data sources by reviewing the wealth of records in your operations, from web analytics to CRM systems, customer feedback forms, social media interactions, and sales data.
      1. You should discover Qualitative and quantitative data qualify for this exercise, capturing information across different customer journey stages for an expansive and integrative view
      2. Timed surveys frequently create incredible insights (otherwise possibly hidden forever)—deep dives into customer behavior patterns.
   3. Know your customer categories: Market segmentation is a critical component of journey mapping, which means understanding who you’re selling to on every level. It involves breaking down customer groupings by demographic influences (e.g., age, gender, occupation, location, income level, and education), psychographics (e.g., interests, hobbies, values, attitudes, and lifestyle), and behavioral patterns (e.g., brand interactions, and product usage). These throw light on pain points, motivational drivers, fears, aspirations, and opinion leaders influencing customers’ decisions. A segment may be as small as one customer (for example, Boeing for brake parts placing orders for hundreds of millions of dollars with one supplier) or millions (e.g., McDonald’s customers buying Happy Meals for less than $5 at a time).
   4. Identify the customer touchpoints you can control: Touchpoints either drive the customer journey forward or screech it to a standstill. Indeed, customers may abort the trip and jump on another brand bandwagon in severe cases of frustration.
      1. The idea is to shorten the route as much as possible, and thus, the room for error.
      2. Knowing the touchpoints, monitoring them, and reacting quickly to touchpoint signals are indispensable components of a robust marketing program.
   5. Visualize the customer journey, close the gaps, and improve the touchpoints in your favor: This is where you bring everything together to streamline each customer category’s journey from A to Z. In other words, you map out a touchpoint chain from the day the idea of buying the product enters the customer’s mind to the cash till and beyond. It’s a detailed process of sifting through the data, looking for strengths and weaknesses, and knowing that every segment is different. Also, one touchpoint may be enough to derail a journey forever (e.g., interaction with an impatient or rude client support agent).

2. VoC as a Customer Experience Model

One comes across this concept under CXM, focusing on putting the customer first. A Voice of the Customer program is more or less the same as Customer Journey Mapping (see above), where you apply every effort to understand your customers’ pain points (conscious and subconscious) as the gateway to linking your brand as a more than competitive solution. It epitomizes defining your value proposition by erasing touchpoint obstructions, introducing and strengthening those that support a customer loyalty outcome.

3. Customer Feedback Systems

There are probably as many ways to give feedback as there are customers with comments to share. Setting up clear systems, however, will help you to ensure the right feedback gets routed to those who can take action. The list below is by no means comprehensive, but it’s a good start.

SURVEYS
Surveys are the most versatile feedback methodology available to businesses today. Why? They’re the most engaging way to receive answers to precise questions and are easy to distribute to hundreds of respondents for insightful feedback. Another significant benefit is aligning surveys close to a touchpoint you want to evaluate (e.g., a customer service call). Here are the most prolifically deployed survey types:

• Customer Satisfaction Survey (CSAT)— This is a single-question survey with the power to redirect or revitalize one’s marketing strategy. For example, when a specific CX touchpoint (still fresh in the CX) registers negatively on the CSAT, you can earmark it as a disruptive CXM issue.
• Net Promoter Score (NPS) surveys— Generally executed six-monthly, they reveal customers’ overall sentiment toward the brand or company. NPS is not touchpoint-specific (like CSAT). Instead, it provides insights into accumulated impressions.
• Customer Effort Score (CES)—This score helps you understand how easy it is for customers to use your products or services

Tips: Keep your survey questions simple and concise, mixing open-ended, qualitative, and closed-ended quantitative (i.e., yes or no) questions to generate rated feedback with expanded customer sentiments. Rely on these scores as reliable KPIs (see below).

EMAILS
If they allow you to include their email addresses on your mailing list, it’s an excellent start to getting customers to respond to email automated messages. They are more responsive and willing to share opinions when they are brand loyal or interested in becoming part of the family. To make the most of this engagement, using email verification helps ensure your automated messages reach real, active subscribers, improving deliverability and building trust with an audience already inclined to respond and participate.

Tips: Emails are effective as a churn or retention signal immediately following a product purchase, a new promotion, or another pivotal touchpoint (such as after canceling a subscription). Emails should be short and to the point, similar to effective survey protocols, with response channels embedded in the email at a click

INTERVIEWS & FOCUS GROUPS
Interviews and focus groups are the most costly (and therefore limited to small field sizes) but arguably the most penetrative. Why? They can generate groundbreaking qualitative data directly from targeted customers. In this scenario, the interviewer’s expertise and the respondent’s pre-selected demographic, behavioral, and psychographic relevance significantly contribute to the results.

Face-to-face or over-the-phone conversations rely on prepared and ready interviewers with the experience and skills to anticipate back-and-forth conversations. Selective prompts combine with more detailed questions, allowing the participants to respond in-depth.

Tips: Subject deviation sometimes works well, but there’s a narrow line between getting more information and losing control of the interview in the given time. While deviation can result in exciting insights, you’ll want to avoid going far off-topic and missing valuable on-point feedback

SOCIAL MEDIA
News (especially when it’s “bad news”) travels fast and furiously on social media. SM opinion voicing is a galloping trend, and reviews can go viral—especially the most scathing ones. The most influential brand sentiment drivers include Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok. So, I advise you to track and monitor your social media channels to tune into the chatter around your brand on other people’s platforms for two primary reasons:

• It can be beneficial in detecting emerging problems or market advantages and, with early alerts, either stopping or accelerating them
• Customers expect your SM participation, and some studies show that 59% of people perceive brands more favorably if marketers respond to social media complaints.

WEBSITE ANALYTICS
Website traffic patterns teach us much about your customers’ sentiments by analyzing pages where they browse longer and the ones they bounce from—in other words, what your customers like and don’t.

Tips: Ensure you have the right tools to accurately appraise things without letting any biases into the system.

FREE-TEXT FEEDBACK
Many e-commerce businesses, app-developer sites, and brick-and-mortar entities with an internet presence generate or provide pop-ups, feedback buttons, product request forms, and more. Why? Free expression via a text box with no comeback is an enticing option for customers to express opinions, outline pros and cons, and vent frustrations.

This category is not your closed-end one-question feedback lane; it’s just the opposite. In short, open-ended, anonymous formats deliver incredible insights for those marketers providing a relatively new feedback option.

DATA ANALYSIS & INSIGHTS
Big data analytics is critical to building a CX framework. It involves collecting, processing, cleaning, and analyzing large datasets. Out of the gate, I emphasize that affordable software will do all the heavy lifting in this arena. How?

• Collecting data varies by organization, but AI and ML technologies seamlessly gather structured and unstructured data.
• Applied technologies cover every corner of the company’s record base—from cloud storage to mobile applications to in-store IoT sensors—storing the information in allocated data warehouses and data lakes
• From there, the organization begins by sorting through the records, separating the reliable and accurate from the misleading and irrelevant—a challenging task.
• Data “purification” requires the following crucial inclusions:
  • Data scientists overviewing the touchpoints, directing the tools to batch or stream-process the information pool (depending on time constraints and budgets)
  • Fine-tuned data cleaning formats everything for fast and easy analysis (sometimes called scrubbing).

You may well ask, “Why all this due diligence?” Unfortunately, accurate data’s primary benefit (mega-volume readings) is also its liability. How do I reach this conclusion? Unless businesses can separate the golden nuggets from the dirt (professional data mining), relying on the results can do more harm than good. Again, why? “Garbage in” is “garbage out,” so the bottom-line message is:

• Businesses cannot afford to deploy anything but accuracy when looking back with total clarity.
• Identifying patterns and trends, seeing market openings hidden from everyone (except those perusing the data), and making predictions with AI algorithms are phenomenal benefits, but only if the data beneath it all is dependable and laser-accurate.

Types of customer experience frameworks

Customer relationship management (CRM) software is an indispensable resource pool for growing your business and marketplace brand presence. However, no two CRM systems or CX frameworks are the same. Indeed, when different technologies enter the picture, they create structural diversity along operational and analytical lines

These two categories represent the mission to develop the optimal framework for customer experience management. As a result, operational and analytical CRM adopt the same approach, but their focus differs.:

• On the one hand, operational CRM tools tackle day-to-day touchpoints in the customer experience, continuously applying strategies to smooth the customer journey.
• On the other hand, analytical CRM devices focus on probing and reanalyzing strategy, generating improved analytics, and covering several items that aren’t directly related to customer interactions
• Operational CRM is customer-facing, whereas Analytical CRM develops strategies via customer insights

Consider the more detailed explanation below:

1. Operational CX Frameworks: Operational CRM software aims to erase or minimize obstructive touchpoints in customer interactions. It reduces time spent on frequently repetitive crisis issues by redirecting team effort to tasks that help take better care of your customers. Management deploying operational CX methods generally sell, market, and retain customers more efficiently. The three essential features are sales, marketing, and service automation.
   • • Sales automation: This focuses on the sales process from A to Z, nurturing customer relationships by:
       • Auto-populating customer profiles from internal and external sources
       • Integrating data from various sources and eliminating unnecessary overlap
       • Streamlining the lead process.
   • • Marketing automation: Brings prospects into the customer base and engages prospects and customers meaningfully with event-sensitive promotions and email campaigns. For example, when a customer inquires about a particular product, marketing automation fires on all cylinders, targeting them with pinpointed ads, and developing customized content
   • • Service automation: The service automation feature identifies disruptive touchpoints or those stalling the journey, following up with CX-changing assistance. It scans the available resources, sending out a combination of benefits at the heart of customer motivation (based on data segmentation analysis.) Follow-up and after-sales service are vital components of service automation.
2. Analytical CX Frameworks: Data analytics are the foundations of customer retention strategies and customer acquisition initiatives. Reiterating conclusions under “Data Analysis and Insights” above, data scientists use this software to collect, sort, clean, and analyze rough unstructured data into usable formats with reliable insights. Massive information volumes flow daily in every organization, but it isn’t valuable until you extract the insights. Operational CRX systems depend on these actions to function seamlessly in their corner.

Creating and implementing a customer experience management framework

I’ve dealt with this under the Journey Mapping and Voice of Customer systems (VOCs) above, where we outlined the CXM process step by step. Additionally, I have covered extra ground, so a recap with some add-ons is appropriate. Without repeating the details (see above for that), the steps are:

1. Set definable goals for creating customer satisfaction.
2. Collect robust data using the analytical CRM tools highlighted above.
3. Analyze and evaluate, looking for trends, patterns, and predictability
4. Bring it all together to build a guiding qualitative and quantitative database
5. Most importantly, know your customer categories demographically, psychographically, and behaviorally
6. Identify the customer Touchpoints you can control
7. Visualize the customer journey, close the gaps, and improve the Touchpoints in your favor

Data collection relies on customer feedback, and we have outlined several ways to derive those crucial insights. Following the steps above brings a streamlined approach to each customer category’s journey from A to Z. In other words, mapping out a touchpoint chain from the day the idea of buying the product enters the customer’s mind to the cash till and beyond. It’s a detailed process of sifting through the data, looking for strengths and weaknesses, and knowing that every segment is different. Keep in mind that one poorly managed touchpoint — a rude agent or a confusing resource — may be enough to derail a journey forever.

Best practices for optimizing your customer experience framework

Here are six primary best practices for success in CX framework development and management.

1. Take your internal data sources seriously. The gold is buried deep in your backyard; you don’t have to look further to begin the process
2. Leverage the comprehensive data analytics software in the marketplace and the advice that goes with it. A single dedicated CXM tool can outperform an entire team in a fraction of the time
3. As noted above, surveys are robust customer feedback options for measuring overall brand image and success through touchpoint interactions.
4. Adhere to strict anonymity protocols. It will ensure your research respondents participate without fear of losing their privacy or any other unwanted kickback.
5. Constructing a customer experience model is not a one-person project. It relies on team commitment and contribution, from the brand managers to the sales representatives, client support agents, digital promotion planners, SEO specialists, the production department, HR, IT, and more. To get the best results, make the strategy inclusive of the best skills in the business.
6. Don’t take shortcuts; verify that the data you’re mining is accurate and relevant to the CX visions underlying your program.

Measuring the success of your customer experience framework

What’s success if it’s not measured? Setting clear KPIs can help to clarify whether your system is working. Consider the following metrics.

• Customer Churn Rate
  This KPI (Keep Performance Indicator) measures how fast a company’s existing customers fall off the brand bandwagon. For example, assume a company had 600 customers on December 31st (end of the year) from 750 customers on January 1st (beginning of the year). At first glance, 150 customers exited. However, we must dig a little deeper, as follows:
  • Add 110 new customers during the year = 150 + 110 = 260 lost customers over 12 months
  • The churn rate = {260/750} x 100 = 35%.

  What do you compare this to? Relate the percentage to industry standards or historical performance. From another angle, an e-commerce business can measure the drop-off in subscriptions with a similar calculation.

  Another churn KPI is the Effort Score, which measures how easy or difficult it is for a customer to complete a purchase, return an item, and more. For more information and calculation steps, please see the Sogolytics article, “Will Customer Effort Score Be the Next Best Predictor of Success?”

• Net Promoter Score (NPS)
  As part of a structured VOC program, Net Promoter Scores (NPS)℠ assess where your brand stands with your customers. For detailed calculations, I refer you to a Sogolytics article, “The Ultimate Guide to NPS: Everything You Need to Know.” A low NPS indicates that you have more detractors in your customer base than promoters and vice versa. Detractors use one of the most destructive weapons to undermine a brand – word of mouth. It works similarly in your favor when positivity shows in your NPS surveys.

• Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)
  CSAT is another survey rating I highlighted above under that heading. For detailed calculations, I refer you to a Sogolytics article, “Everything You Need to Know About the CSAT Survey.” It evaluates customer experience along cultural lines or connected to any particular situation you want to gauge. High scores align with solid retention; low scores signify that churn is more likely.

• Average resolution time:
  Two questions arise with this KPI:
  • How does your software calculate it? Total Resolution Time for all tickets solved / Number of tickets solved = Average Resolution Time.
  • Why is this an insightful and pivotal journey or touchpoint measure?
    • 90% of customers express that they expect an “immediate” response to complaints, difficulties, or questions regarding a product or service (and 60% of customers define “immediate” as 10 minutes or less).
    • It cements brand loyalty and retention when the average response time improves (or vice versa when it deteriorates). It’s also applicable if a particular marketing event reflects an average resolution above or below the company’s yardstick average.

• Other KPIs impacting retention, churn, and profitability:

1. • Customer acquisition rate: Every business experiences some churn. To counteract this, enterprises must recruit new customers.
   • Conversion rate measures the average time for a customer journey to culminate in a purchase. Obstructive Touchpoints slow the process, whereas engaging ones accelerate it
   • Customer engagement KPIs that align with the items above: Time spent on the website, bounce rate, and cart abandonment frequency.
   • Campaign ROIs reflect overall success, milestone by milestone.

Conclusion

This article’s coverage has provided a detailed look at developing a CX framework and explaining why CXM is crucial to customer retention. It covers the best customer experience methodologies and step-by-step approaches to creating a robust customer relationship management program. In between, I explained why data is arguably the most valuable asset in every business today, how to access it, traps to avoid, and techniques for generating customer feedback as your thumb on the pulse of a healthy CXM.

So, are you ready to improve your CX framework? Sogolytics is here to help you manage your employee and customer experiences and feedback. Learn how our customer experience platform can help! We have the resources to help you in every aspect, including customer feedback, to emerge with an improved ROI. If any of this sounds familiar, let’s connect and talk CX!

Frequently Asked Questions

1: What are the benefits of using a CXM framework?

Answer: Less customer churn, improved customer retention, solid ROI

2: How do I get started with building a CXM framework?

Answer: Follow the Customer Journey Mapping process outlined in this article.

3: What are the most important CX metrics to track?

Answer: NPS, CSAT, Effort Score, Average Resolution Time, and ROI.

4: How can I improve employee engagement in my CXM efforts?

Answer: Listen to your customers (feedback), know your customers (maximize your data), and follow all the implementation tips and guidelines in this article.