Customer Experience Management Software

What is Customer Experience Management (CEM)?

Customer Experience Management is an approach to managing and improving an organization's interactions with its customers across all channels and touchpoints in the customer journey. The goal of customer experience management is usually to increase customer satisfaction, foster loyalty, and even encourage advocacy, by making customers feel they have a real relationship with the brand. The strategy involves treating every customer as an individual and delivering a consistent and relevant experience across all communications, including in-store purchases, website visits, customer service requests, email communications, digital ad displays, social media channels, etc.

The process usually involves constantly gathering customer feedback, maintaining a single profile or source of data on each customer, and delivering a personalized experience in each channel based on that data.

What are Customer Experience Management Platforms?

A CEM platform generally involves a suite of capabilities, including a mechanism for collecting and consolidating customer data analytics as well as customer feedback, and a mechanism for delivering the right content to the customer based on that data. The platform may include the full suite of capabilities, or achieve it through integration with point solutions such as A/B testing and personalization tools, web content management systems, product recommendation engines, tag management systems, voice of the customer tools, customer data platforms, data management platforms, customer relationship management systems, usability and UX testing tools, walkthrough software, etc.

Many software vendors are moving toward Customer Experience Management from a different starting point. The term is used by vendors who are more focused on collecting, listening to and analyzing customer sentiment, such as Clarabridge and ForeSee; vendors who are focused on content delivery, such as Adobe Experience Manager; vendors who are focused on understanding visitor sessions, such as IBM Tealeaf; and vendors who started as A/B testing and personalization tools, such as Qubit. Some live chat and help desk vendors also use the term customer experience management, but have only included those that work across multiple channels, or use customer behavior/segment information to personalize help content.

On the TrustMaps above, products fall into these categories. Thus they are not all directly comparable feature-wise; rather they represent different approaches to improving the customer experience.

• A/B Testing and Personalization: Oracle Maxymiser, Qubit, Evergage
• In-page Web Analytics: IBM Tealeaf, ClickTale
• Content Management: Adobe Experience Manager, Magnolia V5+, MindTouch
• Help Desk/Self-Service: Oracle Service Cloud, Zendesk, MindTouch
• Survey & Form Building: Qualtrics, Satmetrix

Customer Experience Management Software Features

Some customer experience management products may focus on one specific area, such as analyzing product usage, collecting customer feedback, testing and optimizing customer journeys, or providing personalized content across digital touchpoints.

• Multi-channel customer feedback collection (e.g. surveys, SMS/messaging, social listening, in-app polls, customer focus groups, etc.)
• Product usage analytics
• Customer experience profiles
• Customer experience and activity dashboard
• Customer journey mapping
• Churn risk scoring
• AI-powered analytics and recommendations
• Website A/B testing
• Mobile applications and dashboards
• Integrations and APIs

Customer Experience Management Software Comparison

As a buyer, some qualities you may want to consider before purchasing include:

• Company size. If you’re part of a larger business, you’re likely to have a larger customer base and therefore require a software program that can help you understand the specific needs of each customer and process large amounts of interaction data.
• Ease of Use. If the product has a large learning curve, be sure you’re willing to undergo a longer implementation and training process.
• Integration. Some businesses may need to integrate their customer experience management platform with other tools in their tech stack. Be sure to research integration capabilities prior to purchasing.

Pricing Information

Pricing for customer experience management software tools varies according to the number of features and users. Some vendors will charge per agent, anywhere between $5 to $300 per user per month. Others will have either a monthly or annual set price. Prices can range widely according to the plan. Therefore it is best to contact the vendor directly to request a free demo. Some software tools will offer a free version as well as a free trial.

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