Customer experience management: importance and its impact on various behavioral outcomes

Every organization, whether it‟s a market leader or running to attain that position always think of the importance of customer experience improvement. Happy customers do transactions more, spends more, drives growth and promotes the business whereas unhappy customers damages the business soon and throws it away. To determine how much the business flourishes tomorrow, it‟s important to know how the customers feel about it today. Customer Experience Management views and improves the interactions between the business and the customer entirely from customer‟s point of view. This paper focuses on the importance of customer experience management and its impact on various behavioral outcomes.


Introduction
Customer Experience Management has become the hottest topic in the business field.
Gartner figures "that customer experience management as the practice of designing and reacting to customer interactions to meet or exceed customer expectations and thereby increasing customer satisfaction, loyalty and advocacy". Due to the competitive edge, Customer Experience Management is crucial and has become a niche for firm"s performance. A successful implementation for a Customer Experience Management system is achieved when it helps business organisations meet their business objectives. These objectives are grabbing the new customers, retaining existing customer, increasing customer satisfaction, improves customer loyalty and converts advocates. In other words, better business results.

Objectives & Methodology
This conceptual study aims at achieving the following objective:  To identify the importance of Customer Experience Management in various aspects and its impact on various outcomes. Also, the study focuses on the innovative steps to improve customer experience.
This study is based on Secondary data collected from various journals, articles, blogs, publications and other websites.

Need for Customer Experience Management
Customer experience concept might sound idealistic, but anyone who neglects it faces decreased customer loyalty, reduced scope of differentiation through product features, and with increasing costs of customer acquisition. Customer experience management combines technology, strategy, and resources to improve how the customer experiences your brand. Thus it has become a critical differentiator in today"s hyper-competitive, hyper-connected global marketplace.
To get a better experience, customers are ready to pay even more than the usual. As per a report from Forrester Research, 10% improvement in customer experience can produce cost savings of about $1 billion. Customer experience management helps businesses with a different approach for creating better experience for the customers every time they approach the product or service.

Good customer experience management always
 Provides memorable experience that enriches brand preference  Increases profit by more sales from already existing customers and creating new customers from word of mouth.

 Lowers cost by decreasing customer attrition
Steps to get customer experience management right Customer experience can be shaped by so many things and so one should know where to start.
Successful customer experience management includes  Creating complete customer profiles  Personalizing customer interactions  Right message, right place, right time

Creating complete customer profiles
Organizations should know their customer better than ever before. Complete customer profiles should be maintained at every touch point across multiple channels.
The more the organization knows its customers, the more effective it will be at delivering relevant offers to them. The more relevant the offers are, the closer the relationship between the business and the customers that drives metrics like loyalty and retention.
In addition to using demographic, transactional and log data, organizations should focus on Page 48-56 emerging types of data from social media, video, RFID, sensor, geolocation, etc.
By analyzing complete customer profiles, Organization can  Find out the ways at every touch points to enhance customer experience  Learn wants and expectations of the customers  Take superior decisions much faster

Personalizing customer interactions
Now a day"s customers have more choices than ever before. After getting the thorough knowledge about the customers, every interaction should be personalized using that knowledge.
The customers as well as the context in which they operate should be focused. If the timely, personal and relevant messages are provided to the customers, brand loyalty can be driven, if not the customers would be missed immediately.

Right message, right place, right time
To improve customer experience, each customer touch point has to be delivered with the most value. Analytics should be mapped to every particular stages in the customer life cycle so that right message can be delivered to the right place at the right time. Each stage in the customer life cycle is important as it is an opportunity to improve customer experience.

Innovative Tips to Improve the Customer Experience
Organizations looking to improve the customer experience should stay away from usual things and take up attractive tactics. Every organization often talks about innovation, but very few organizations implement and consistently good at it. The same could be true in case of customer experience management also. People who are responsible for innovation initiatives and customer experience projects are always never in a position to mandate all the changes required.
Mary Mesaglio said, "Most people charged with improving the customer experience sincerely needs to innovate more, but held by business-as-usual processes failed to innovate their company"s customer experience".

Customer Experience Innovation
Aim not to delight the customer Organizations need to find the exact meaning of delight and all the efforts should be focused there.CX innovators should take off the hairy things such as "delight the customer" and plan for something more specific.

Care for small changes
Small changes can make or break the customer experience. All the ideas are not equal and small ideas might make all the difference. People responsible for customer experience should always start small but aim big.

Reality must be revealed not conveyed
Every new idea has to be inclined beyond the expectation by creating a rule. It is very difficult to distinguish the value of technology theoretically, rather it should be touched and felt to make it clear to the customers what it offers.

Customer needs should be led by the technology
Customer"s actual need has to be driven by the technology innovators and not the technology"s potential. The more you are away from the customer, the more it is difficult to assess the effects that a technological innovation has produced on a real-world customer experience.

Impact of Customer Experience Management on behavioral outcomes
The most relevant research, theories and models pertaining specifically to customer experience management are discussed in chronological order from 2005 to latest. The discussion provides a theoretical assessment of the major concepts of customer experience management to understand its relationship with various behavioral outcomes.
Zillur Rahman (2005) explored and tested the relationship between customer experience and loyalty. For this purpose, a modified "loyalty acid test" was used. The study concluded that, on average, a majority of customers are satisfied with the present functioning of the bank but would definitely be delighted if the bank changed its interface with the customers to become more cognitive (intelligent), emotional, physically pleasing and well connected. The study proved that service delivery or service performance is the major factor affecting customer experience for cellular mobile services. The reviews summarize the contribution of customer experience management in shaping various behavioral outcomes. Simply by having greater understanding of customers and building good relationships with the existing customers, the companies can actually have the potential to increase the customer base over time by building customer loyalty.

Conclusion
In today"s world, there are more products and services offered to the customers than in the past.
This has led to the increase in the customer expectations of the products and the services offered, however satisfaction of the customers is in the downside. Customer experience management can reverse this by acting as a bridge between organization and customers and making satisfied customers to loyal customers and then from loyal customers to advocate. To make this possible, understanding the customers plays an important role. The various reviews discussed in this