Consumerism today is unlike anything the world has ever seen. Online engagement is increasing at unprecedented rates, as new technology is seamlessly adopted and integrated into daily life. To be a leader in today’s competitive market, you must be prepared not only for shifts in consumer behavior and preferences, but also for navigating economic disruption. As you make those decisions, how can you be sure those choices are optimal? To find success in the ever-changing digital world, you must understand that every interaction and experience matters.
Experience management (XM) is a holistic approach to understanding, measuring, analyzing, and improving experiences to achieve better results.
Experience Management Benefits
Experience management ensures your judgments are valid before you invest time, money, and resources by using the voice of customer software. It starts by engaging your target audience from the beginning. This customer-centric approach allows you to optimize your business and inform your decisions to mitigate risk and reduce waste. By putting the customer or your employee at the center, you can make more profitable decisions that have an invaluable impact on your business. Whether you want to learn from current customers, reach new ones, or interact with your employees, experience management engagement tools allow you to collect the relevant data you need for products, customers, employees, and brand.
Types of Experience Management
Product Experience Management
Product experience is all about the right offering for the right customer at the right price. New products can take up to 18 months to develop and often have a failure rate of 50% or higher. This process is inefficient, costly, and contributes to the billions of pounds of waste that businesses generate every year. Product experience management revolutionizes the product development process by using customer feedback and predictive analytics to help you make critical decisions before you invest. Using voice of customer (VOC) tools, businesses can maximize satisfaction to streamline product development and improve their bottom line.
Benefits of Product Experience Management
- Eliminate poor performing products and optimize assortments before you invest
- Waste less by reducing sample costs
- Increase speed to market and shorten your product development process
- Improve buy-depth and reduce inventory
- Optimize pricing: maximize revenue and margins, capture demand, improve promotional strategy, and reduce markdowns
Examples of Product Experience Management
- Modify design early in product development cycle
- Select winning style elements such as color, material, and shape
- Identify trends and predict consumer preference
- Test new product lines to ensure concept is viable
Customer Experience Management
Meeting and exceeding customer expectations is fundamental to any successful business. Did you know their insight is your most valuable resource and competitive edge? Customer experience management puts customers in the center of decision-making by tracking and measuring interactions throughout the buyer journey. This continuous feedback helps create better in-person and online experiences to increase loyalty, satisfaction, advocacy, and value delivery. Customer experience management allows you to know your target audience personally to deliver hand-crafted interactions by cultivating data from all touch points throughout your organization. It allows businesses to organize mountains of analytics into actionable insight, informing decisions seamlessly throughout the customer life cycle.
Benefits of Customer Experience Management
- Boost sales and revenue
- Increase customer loyalty, satisfaction, and advocacy
- Supports a customer-centric approach to your business
- Personalize interactions and experiences
- Reduce customer inquiries
- Reduce customer churn and improve retention
- Increase online and in-store sales conversions
- Improve new offering success rate
Examples of Customer Experience Management
- Test store layouts
- Improve product assortment at the checkout line
- Receive feedback on new online store before it launches
- Deliver better user experience online for your customers
Brand Experience Management
As today’s digital world continues to evolve, marketing and brand decisions have never been more challenging. Whether you’re creating a new brand, formulating an advertising strategy, or evaluating a rebrand, brand experience management allows you to select winning initiatives that resonate with your target customers and optimize ROI. It allows you to leverage data from your current customers or new audiences to predict outcomes before you launch (such as a new ad campaign or product line.) Brand experience management is also a great tool for reputation management. With the amplification of customer opinions in the digital age, companies can avoid PR catastrophes, especially when it comes to avoiding offensive products and messaging. Increase the value of your brand and stay competitive by monitoring and measuring touch points across your marketing mix.
Benefits of Brand Experience Management
- Avoid bad press and better manage your online reputation
- Holistic approach to brand management
- Better understand your brand positioning
- Reduce risk and identify opportunities before you launch
- Optimize advertising ROI
Examples of Brand Experience Management
- Test new products, branding, and messaging to avoid introducing offensive products into the market
- Receive feedback from the target customer persona of a new product line or brand
- Understand how a rebrand would resonate with your customer base
- Identify why consumers pick a competitor over your brand
Employee Experience Management
The easiest way to foster loyalty and keep outstanding talent on board is to treat your employees like your most important customer. Employers can create a productive workforce and winning culture by implementing an employee-centric strategy that makes workers feel heard and appreciated. Employee experience management helps companies recruit and retain top talent by using real-time listening tools to inform decisions. By engaging employees in the process, leaders can create a meaningful relationship with their workers that can support culture initiatives and benefit offering strategy. Do your employees prefer stock options over education assistance? Mental health days over sick days? Flexible work models instead of in-office? Employee experience management will help you ensure your benefit offerings attract top talent, improve job satisfaction, and make your employees the champions of your brand.
Benefits of Employee Experience Management
- Turn your employees into brand advocates
- Increase job satisfaction
- Recruit and retain talent by creating benefit packages your employees love
- Create a winning culture
- Save money by testing benefit offerings
Examples of Employee Experience Management
- Test in-person, remote, and hybrid work model preferences
- Use employee insight to test new offerings first
- Create an employee-centric culture by engaging them in the process
- Listen to employees’ feedback to improve employee satisfaction and drive business results
Why Invest in Experience Management?
Integrating experience management into your business comes down to one primary benefit – reducing risk by making better decisions. Would you make a decision based on what a few experts recommend or the collective response of thousands of expert opinions? Your customers and employees know you better than anyone and at the end of the day, we’re all working to improve the experience of the end-user. Relying on your gut or traditional approaches is a thing of the past, right up there on the dusty shelf next to the dial-up computer. Today, we have powerful, predictive tools at our fingertips to make businesses leaner and more profitable than ever before. Whether you want to be prepared for the next economic disruption, create a more productive workforce, avoid multimillion-dollar PR disasters, or select winning products to drive business forward, investing in XM is a drop in the bucket compared to the value you will gain from a robust experience management platform and solution.
Here at First Insight, we help our customers achieve results with a solution that almost sounds too good to be true. Our story started in 2007 with helping retailers make better product development decisions using our proprietary algorithms and predictive analytics. Today, our solution has evolved as our customers maximize the capabilities our tool to make an array of decisions to support virtually every area of their business. This evolution is known as Next-Gen Experience Management. We believe every experience matters to your business. From startups to the world’s leading brands, companies have trusted First Insight to deliver unparalleled solutions with industry-leading accuracy. If you’re interested in creating your own success story, contact us today for a personalized demonstration.
