Before embarking on a Customer Experience Management (CXM) strategy a business must do some soul-searching and prepare for a reorganization of priorities as they reexamine the ways customers communicate in a connected world. Customers and the interactions they have with a product, a company, and an employee are paramount to the success of any business. Sure a business can understand this intuitively. “The customer is always right,” as the old adage goes. But understanding this fact and aligning your entire business model around the satisfaction of every guest at every touch point are very different tasks.
So before taking on a CXM platform any company must set out on a journey to reorganize, restructure and remodel what is possible in the age of the smartphone. That means upending a series of longstanding ideas about where customer experience occurs and how a business can extract information and communicate with their customer base. Even the false assertion that CXM begins and ends in the realm of social media is a highly inaccurate belief to make all business decisions on.
The upside is clear and as Ragy Thomas, CEO of Sprinklr notes “CXM is in the early stages of a 10- to 15-year megatrend. I have no doubt it will be how people start thinking about their organizations and systems going forward.” This couldn’t be clearer then in Wingstop’s decision this month to promote Stacey Peterson to fill the new role of Chief Experience Officer (CXO) for their organization. Moves such as these are just the tip of the iceberg and show how early adopters are beginning to realign their corporate culture around a highly connected customer.
When Marshall McLuhan first coined the phrase “the medium is the message” in his groundbreaking book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man in 1964, the concept revolutionized the way the world looked at the interconnectivity of content and how it was delivered. For McLuhan, it was the medium itself that shaped and controlled “the scale and form of human association and action.” This could not be truer then in the ability to reach customers where they spend their lives, that is, on their mobile devices. Using the computers we all have in our pockets as a tool to engage, to fix, and to build stronger, better relationships with a set of customers. That is why Tattle’s CXM platform is so much more powerful than a simple review tracker that manages the existence of sites like Facebook, Yelp and Twitter.
By bringing a white-labeled CXM as powerful as Tattle into your organization, you are putting your customers on notice, that they are the first and foremost importance to your business. By offering up that lifeline and reducing the barriers to entry, you are empowering guests to heir their grievances in a natural and seamless way. And you are simultaneously reclaiming ownership over your most important asset, your customer’s opinions.
But setting up to begin the journey of CXM is one that will take years to cultivate, to utilize and to recapture and it will take the focus of all of your employees from the top-on-down. Running your business by and for the sake of your customers, in a medium that they truly utilize, will take no less then all-hands-on-deck to bring this asset to its most effective end.
