Customer Experience is king, with countless statistics that accentuate its importance. For instance, 78% of customers say that the quality of service is crucial to earning both their loyalty and repeat business.
Looking ahead to 2023, how can you enhance your CX strategy? As you consider roles dedicated to the CX cause, Customer Experience Managers can be a valuable asset to your team. What do they do exactly and how can they help grow your business?
What is a Customer Experience Manager?
Broadly speaking, a Customer Experience Manager serves as a company’s champion of customer experience. The Customer Experience Manager’s role revolves around ensuring that customers are receiving the best possible experiences and examines the company’s interactions from the customer’s perspective. While there are numerous customer experience tools available for organizations to monitor, measure and improve their CX efforts, they don’t make as great an impact without a cheerleader to guide and shape that vision.
Let’s be clear, Customer Experience Managers are way more than company cheerleaders.
How can a Customer Experience Manager shape your CX strategy?
Construct and map out the customer experience
Armed with a clear vision of each customer and their specific need, serving as a company’s customer advocate a Customer Experience Manager takes a strategic and hands-on approach to the design, development, and implementation of CX programs. This includes regularly evaluating program metrics and outcomes, sharing customer insights, and making recommendations to drive CX program development.
To successfully accomplish this, having an affinity toward automation and emerging technologies is key.
Why? An effective customer experience leader is one who can create positive customer experiences at scale, and emerging technologies are making such experiences more and more possible. Take, for example, AI-powered customer service platforms. These AI platforms built especially for CX can automate and resolve queries at lightning speed, essentially cloning teams’ best customer experience representatives. Keep an eye out for CX professionals who are eager to try new technologies, as they are the ones that will take your CX to the next level, and keep your organization ahead of the competition.
Train and motivate others, on the path to CX excellence
Armed with a strategic vision of what customer service should entail, they are also responsible for training and supervising teams of customer service representatives.
Advocate Customer Experience to leadership
Speaking on the topic of CX predictions for 2022, Netomi CEO Puneet Mehta noted that “we saw a big shift in the role of CX within an organization, and customer experience executives now have a seat at the executive table.”
Once you get buy-in from leadership, customer experience will be a priority from the top down, making for a stronger foundation for a positive customer experience throughout the customer’s journey.
When should I hire a Customer Experience Manager?
Whether you’re an organization large or small, providing great customer service should be a chief area of focus, and a Customer Experience Manager could serve as a pivotal missing piece of the CX puzzle. Having a dedicated CX leader in this role may be just the thing for your business if:
You want more customer loyalty
There is value to be had in keeping the right customers – in fact, acquiring a new customer is anywhere between five and 25 times more expensive than retaining an existing one! Chances are a solid percentage of your sales come from repeat customers. If it isn’t, wouldn’t you like it to be? If customers enjoy their experience with your company, they’ll return. Keep that door open, to welcome them back in with open arms.
Your business requires customer interactions
The more touchpoints a customer has with your business that go beyond that initial interaction, the more you need to manage their experience. Do you want to keep customers reading your blogs, as new content is posted? To engage with your weekly newsletters? To make repeat purchases? Simply put, if a customer doesn’t enjoy interacting with your business, they’re likely not going to stick around.
You want to increase good leads
Good customer experience warms up leads, passes them through the sales funnel, and eventually results in satisfying conversions. That’s what a business is all about, and a Customer Experience Manager will be able to determine the best way to go about making the customer’s experience smooth and easy.
You have a customer service team
A Customer Experience Manager can be in a position of leadership for your entire company, but specifically for those who most often interact with customers: customer service teams. This position also touches on some of the other areas of the business, like sales and marketing, and while all work together to attract and keep customers, a Customer Experience Manager can serve as an excellent point person for all customer-related initiatives.
To strengthen your CX strategy, add a Customer Experience Manager to your CX dream team
When it comes to imagining a connected CX, the magic lies in a calculated combination of people, tools – such as AI-powered customer service platforms – and processes. Incorporating such tools and resources can help you enhance and hone your CX strategy, stay abreast of current trends, and keep up with evolving customer demands and preferences in 2023 – and beyond. Yet it all begins with a vision, which is where a Customer Experience Manager can function as a guiding light, master planner, and CX champion.