June 7, 2024
Customer Experience, Tools & Data

10 Must-Have Tools for Customer Experience Management

Customer Experience Management is a team sport. It often requires integrations with tools that aggregate or streamline data from multiple interaction points along the customers journey with your brand. We make it easy and have outlined our top 10 recommended systems or tools you need to be aware of (not develop mastery – we’ll do that for you), to ensure you’re on the right track to delivering customer delight.

1. CRM Systems

While there are many CRM systems in the market today that can provide a whole array of features, the best ones are those that help you do the simple things well. Tasks such as managing your customer interactions, monitoring sales and deals, and securely storing customer data. They should also help you understand your customer better so you can deliver more personalized experiences.

2. Customer Feedback Tools

Your customers want to be heard, and what better way to listen than to implement tools such as SurveyMonkey or Qualtrics. These help streamline your customers voice through surveys and pools, allowing you to make quick and well thought through decisions to meet your customer’s needs. These could be in the form of new tailored offerings, spot promotions or other mechanisms that drive customer loyalty and retention.

3. Live Chat Software

Although speaking with a real person for support always beats chatbots, companies that excel at CX typically implement live chat software to ensure their listening to customers 24/7 and providing quick and reliable responses to queries. These can extend beyond websites to mobile apps, and really provide a solid touchpoint for the customer wherever they may be. They are also great at augmenting the human touch, further driving up brand loyalty.

4. Social Media Management Tools

Wondering what tools to use to manage brand reputation? We recommend Hootsuite or Sprout Social, as both do a fabulous job at monitoring social media activity, scheduling posts and analyzing content performance. Their primary objective is to help brands develop long lasting relationships with customers, proactively respond to issues and build loyalty.

5. Email Marketing Platforms

It has been proven that even today, customers respond better to email marketing messages. These help drive customer engagement and reduce churn. We recommend platforms like Mailchimp or Constant Contact, as they have features that help build targeted email campaigns, track performance and schedule follow-ups. You can also tailor messages to your customer preferences or behaviors, provide in-moment content and promotions, and by doing these frequently enough improve loyalty through personalization.

6. Personalization Engines

Customers respond positively to relevant messages that are personalized to their preference. The art of great digital marketing is knowing what your customers want and delighting them with offers of products/services that exceed their expectations. This in turn drives higher engagement and increases satisfaction in the long term. The experience is ultimately delightful, which improves conversion rates and loyalty. For this we recommend tools such as Dynamic Yield or Optimizely, which are best known for their customer behavior analysis and personalized recommendation capabilities.

7. Analytics and Reporting Tools

Customer experience is a process of continuous learning on digital touchpoints and acting on informed decisions. For this, you’ll need to track metrics such as website activity, content effectiveness and usage, drop off rates, click through rates, etc. Advanced tools such as Google Analytics and Tableau can help you understand customer behaviors, like and dislike patterns together with drill down reporting and detailed visualization. Responding to feedback on digital interactions immediately is crucial to customer retention and conversion.

8. Customer Journey Mapping Tools

Customer journey mapping is a critical piece of crafting a robust customer experience. Companies that do it well map the journey from initial contact to post purchase. This helps them really understand customer friction at various touchpoints, and enables them to surgically improve processes to deliver instantaneous customer delight. For this we recommend tools such as Lucidchart that are easy to implement and require virtually no prior experience in journey mapping.

9. Customer Support Software

Customer support is the engine that drives great customer experience, and lack of the right tools can often lead to customer frustration due to longer response times or resolution, business risk and revenue loss due to perceived lack of quality. Comprehensive solutions from Zendesk and Freshdesk come with workflow automation and rich knowledge bases that can super charge support agents, and eliminate friction in delivering great service quality.

10. AI and Machine Learning Tools

With the recent advances in AI and ML, there are now plenty of tools from vendors such as IBM Watson and Google Cloud that can help you with customer data analysis and anticipating customer needs. At a time when customers are interacting with brands across multiple channels, the sheer volume of data can be overwhelming and these tools can be effectively deployed to predict behavior, deliver personalized interactions and automate processes. Well-designed CX programs harness customer intelligence at all touchpoints and craft personalized responses to drive best of breed engagement and customer loyalty.

Customer experience management relies on the right combination of tools, processes, expertise and best practices. And as systems become more intelligent and easy to deploy, having the right CX tools strategy can enhance your customer interactions that will ultimately drive loyalty. What choices are you making for your CX tech stack? Share your thoughts with us.

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Customer Experience Management is a team sport. It often requires integrations with tools that aggregate or streamline data from multiple interaction points along the customers journey.
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Author

  • Nilesh Savkoor

    Nilesh is a strategic product and services executive recognized for leading enterprise transformation and powering exponential growth, at the intersection of Cloud, Networking, AI and Customer Experience innovation. He is the Chief Product and Technology Officer at VistaXM.

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