Customer Experience Management, also known as UX, is an increasingly popular way to navigate and expand a business’s consumer base. In a nutshell, Customer Experience Management looks at the total experience of the consumer on a business’s website. It looks at how the consumer views the homepage or storefront, how easy it is to navigate the website as a whole with different browsers, ease of contacting the company, brand recognition and purchasing steps. It also goes beyond this and also encompasses the likelihood that the consumer will return to the site, recommend the site, talk about it on social network mediums and their loyalty to the brand.
Understanding the consumer on this level has a lot less to do with technology, and much more to do with strategy. Companies are realizing that their consumer base is as broad as the World Wide Web, but it is the consumer’s attention that needs to be grabbed and held on to. There is immense competition on the internet. It takes strategic moves to get the consumers attention long enough to get them to click on the website, and browse around. If the website is not user friendly, suffers from ecommerce failures, or is not compatible with all browsers, the customer will get frustrated, leave, and most likely never return to that particular site.
Part of Customer Experience Management is controlling that environment. Making sure that all the technology, like the servers, are up to date and can handle the influx of consumers to a website if a popular promotion is announced. It is also measuring the relevancy of online offers to the consumer base, relevancy of content posted on the company’s webpage, and how engaging the site is. Utilizing social media is another factor, but this also entails measuring its effectiveness to online campaigns.
Another key part of Customer Experience Management is listening to the consumer. Receiving consumer feedback and using that information to tailor the consumers experience is part of the process. The company can use that information to create improved products or better service of their products. Then the revision is tracked to see if the improvements are driving more consumers to their site, and whether more products are being purchased. Those changes may also increase brand awareness as well as loyalty. All of the above equals to greater profits to the company.
Understanding the total customer experience and management of that information can increase a company’s relevancy to consumer searches, bringing them closer to the coveted top ranking in popular browsers. This is because by listening to what the consumer has to say about a company’s website or product and making appropriate changes increases the popularity of the site. If a website is easy to navigate on someone’s cell phone as much as it is on their home computer, they are more apt to return to that site. People share their bad and good experiences on social network sites each day. If the product is more consumer driven because the company has made improvements based off of valuable feedback, loyalty to both the product and the company will shine through. Because the online world is so vast, it is imperative to look at this information to increase a company’s consumer base.
