What Is Customer Experience Management (CXM/CEM)?

What is customer experience management?

Customer experience management (frequently referred to as CEM or CXM) is a set of all the tools and procedures your company implements to track, analyze, and optimize every single interaction between the company and its customers. CXM is vital throughout the entire customer lifecycle, from the very first interaction to becoming a loyal customer.

Of course, CXM is not a lonely island; it should be integrated with other customer-related elements in your company, especially the customer journey, but more about that in a moment.

Why is customer experience management important?

For 56% of companies surveyed by Zendesk, driving better customer experiences is their number one priority for the coming year. This seems reasonable; after all, customer interactions build your company’s image and reputation. Over 80% of customers say a positive customer service experience makes them more likely to make another purchase.

The better you are at meeting customer expectations and answering their needs, the more stable and profitable your company is. But that’s just the beginning—the list of perks is much longer.

Customer loyalty

More than 60% of customers say they now have higher customer service standards. This means achieving customer satisfaction is more difficult than it was just a few years ago. But when you attain this goal and surpass your customers’ expectations, you win their loyalty. Be in no doubt; customers won’t easily let go of a trustworthy and customer-centric company. And it goes without saying that customer retention is cheaper and more effective for your business than customer acquisition.

Revenue

Market research, as well as hundreds of companies across the globe, confirm that customer experience management has a positive impact on the company’s revenue. Customers will simply spend more money with your company when they see that you:

• Offer preferred communication options (e.g., social media or chat)
• Value customer feedback and implement necessary corrections
• Provide advanced solutions such as personalized experiences
• Optimize all the customer touchpoints to provide exceptional service throughout the entire customer journey

Reputation and word of mouth (WOM)

Good customer experience management leads to positive online reviews. Satisfied customers are more eager to recommend your business to other internet users, as well as their friends and families. In fact, word of mouth is one of the best ways of acquiring new customers. Forbes even reports that, on average, WOM is responsible for 13% of all sales worldwide!

But, sure enough, you won’t benefit from it unless you take care of customer interactions and deliver a great customer experience.

CXM for Digital Transformation

Customer expectations are higher than ever, and businesses must embrace digital transformation to deliver seamless, efficient, and personalized experiences. Technologies like AI, automation, and omnichannel platforms help companies streamline processes, reduce friction, and provide real-time support.

Your CXM strategies should encompass;

• Invest in AI-driven automation to reduce wait times and enhance personalization.
• Use omnichannel CX platforms to create a consistent experience across all touchpoints.
• Analyze customer feedback in real time to identify pain points and areas for improvement.
• Adopt cloud-based tools to ensure seamless data access and collaboration across teams.

Related Read: Discover 10 Great Customer Service Examples & Tips that will help you get better reviews.

CXM vs. CRM

Add these to your list of businessy acronyms! CXM (Customer Experience Management) and CRM (Customer Relationship Management) both play a role in shaping how businesses interact with customers—but they serve very different purposes.

A simple way to think about it:

• CRM helps businesses manage relationships with customers (primarily for sales and retention).
• CXM ensures every interaction customers have with a business is seamless, satisfying, and memorable.

CRM: The Sales-Focused Approach

CRM (Customer Relationship Management) is all about managing and optimizing interactions between businesses and customers—but with a focus on sales. CRM systems store customer data, track leads, and help sales teams nurture and convert potential buyers into paying customers.

Think of CRM as your company’s digital Rolodex, but way more advanced. It typically includes:

• Customer contact details (emails, phone numbers, company info)
• Sales tracking & lead management (who’s in the pipeline?)
• Purchase history (what they’ve bought before)
• Follow-up reminders (stay top-of-mind with potential customers)

CRM tools like Salesforce, HubSpot, and Zoho CRM are widely used to help sales teams stay organized, automate tasks, and close deals more efficiently.

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CXM: The Holistic Experience Approach

While CRM is transactional, CXM is transformational—focusing on the entire customer journey, not just sales interactions.

Customer Experience Management (CXM) is about designing and optimizing every touchpoint a customer has with your brand—from their first website visit to post-purchase support and beyond. It’s not just about keeping customer data—it’s about using that data to create better, more personalized experiences.

CXM focuses on:

• Understanding customer needs through data and analytics
• Personalizing interactions across all channels
• Improving customer service and reducing friction
• Boosting customer loyalty and retention through positive experiences

Some popular CXM tools include Qualtrics, Medallia, and Adobe Experience Cloud, which help businesses collect feedback, analyze customer behavior, and optimize touchpoints across digital and physical interactions.

CXM vs. CRM: The Key Differences

Feature	CRM (Customer Relationship Management)	CXM (Customer Experience Management)
Primary Focus	Sales & Customer Data	Holistic Customer Experience
Main Goal	Convert leads, retain customers, increase revenue	Improve satisfaction, loyalty, and brand perception
Key Users	Sales & Marketing Teams	Entire Organization (CX, Support, Product, Marketing)
Customer Interaction Type	One-on-One (Emails, Calls, Follow-Ups)	Omnichannel (Website, Chat, Social Media, Support)
Data Collected	Contact Info, Purchase History, Sales Interactions	Behavioral Insights, Sentiment Analysis, Customer Feedback
Outcome	More Sales & Higher Retention	Enhanced Customer Satisfaction & Brand Advocacy

Do You Need Both CXM and CRM?

Short answer? Yes.

Think of CRM as a tool to manage customer relationships, while CXM ensures those relationships are actually meaningful and positive. Without CXM, even the best sales pipeline won’t keep customers coming back. And without CRM, you might struggle to track and manage customer interactions effectively.

A well-rounded customer strategy combines both—using CRM to keep customer information organized and CXM to ensure customers enjoy every step of their journey.

Related Read: Learn the difference between Customer Experience vs User Experience.

Challenges of customer experience management

As we mentioned earlier, customer expectations are continually growing. There are more and more challenges and obstacles on the way to fulfilling these expectations. There are four crucial elements to mention here.

Commitment

Customer engagement should be your top priority. If you don’t devote enough effort and resources to it, your overall CX will suffer. Again, this is a global problem:

How can you avoid this scenario?

• Train and educate your customer support team so that they have a deeper understanding of what good customer experience management actually means.
• Optimize all of your customer-related processes, and make sure everything is convenient and fully functional from the buyer’s perspective.
• Use available CX tools and apps to gather customer insights and feedback. The more customer experience data you have, the better. As a start, you can use NPS (net promoter score) surveys to understand what customers like and dislike about your company.
• Adopt automation tools so that you don’t find yourself swamped doing mundane and repetitive tasks while the more pressing and strategic problems remain unsolved.
• Continually track all the relevant customer-related metrics (e.g., CSAT, customer churn, and customer retention rate) and set reasonable KPIs for your customer-facing touch points.

Bad Data

Data utilization in CXM is only as good as the data itself—and bad data? It’s a recipe for missteps, frustrated customers, and wasted resources.

Poor-quality data leads to:

• Inaccurate personalization – Customers get irrelevant recommendations or outdated information.
• Misguided decision-making – Your CX strategy is built on flawed insights.
• Wasted time & money – Teams chase incorrect leads, send the wrong messages, or struggle to resolve issues.
• Customer frustration – Wrong names, duplicate accounts, and poor service experiences erode trust.

Common Causes of Bad Data

• Incomplete or outdated customer info – Customers change emails, phone numbers, and preferences, but databases don’t always keep up.
• Duplicate records – A single customer might exist multiple times in your CRM, leading to inconsistent interactions.
• Siloed data – When marketing, sales, and customer service don’t share information, customers receive disconnected experiences.
• Manual data entry errors – A simple typo can derail an entire personalization effort.

How to Fix Data Utilization in CXM

• Automate data collection & cleanup – Use AI and automation tools to eliminate duplicates and correct errors.
• Unify data across teams – Integrate CX tools so everyone works with the same, accurate customer info.
• Regularly audit & refresh data – Outdated data is just as bad as no data. Clean up and validate customer records frequently.
• Capture feedback correctly – Ensure surveys, NPS scores, and customer insights are accurate and actionable.

Garbage in, garbage out. Bad data means bad CXM. Prioritize data quality, integration, and automation to ensure every customer interaction is based on real, reliable information.

Resources

Customer experience management takes time, effort, and some financial resources as well. If your company’s procedures and customer-facing solutions are outdated, it's due time to think about the digital transformation of your business. Concentrate on solutions and technologies that can give your CX a boost. Here, automation and personalization are essential. They make a real difference, and it doesn’t take much time to see the results of implementation.

If you can afford that, you can go one step further and think about AI-powered solutions (e.g., based on machine learning). These tools will give you additional insights you can use to build brand loyalty.

Cross-Departmental Responsibility

Customer experience management (CXM) isn’t just the job of a single team—it’s a company-wide effort. When different departments operate in silos, customer interactions become disjointed, leading to inconsistent experiences, miscommunication, and frustration. Customers don’t see departments; they see one brand experience, so every team must work together to ensure consistency at every touchpoint.

To break down silos, companies should establish cross-functional collaboration, where departments share customer insights, feedback, and processes. Implementing a unified CX strategy, centralized customer data, and cross-team training helps align efforts. Regular interdepartmental meetings, shared KPIs, and technology integrations (like CRM and CXM tools) ensure everyone has access to the same customer information, leading to more seamless interactions.

Departments Involved in CXM

• Marketing: Creates brand messaging, customer engagement strategies, and personalized campaigns based on customer data.
• Sales: Builds relationships, understands customer needs, and ensures a smooth handoff from lead to client.
• Customer Support: Handles inquiries, resolves issues, and gathers feedback to improve customer satisfaction.
• Product Development: Uses customer insights to enhance products and create user-friendly solutions.
• IT & Digital Teams: Maintains CX technology, integrates data systems, and ensures smooth digital interactions.
• Operations & Logistics: Ensures timely delivery, service fulfillment, and backend processes that impact CX.
• Human Resources: Trains employees in customer-centric culture, communication, and service excellence.

By aligning these teams under a unified CXM strategy, businesses can create a cohesive, frictionless customer experience.

Customer experience strategy

Brand experience cannot be improved overnight. You need a well-thought-out strategy that takes all the relevant elements into account. Take the omnichannel model, for example. This one thing requires implementing new communication channels into your business and integrating all of them together. And that's just one face of CXM!

To come up with a useful strategy:

1. Analyze customer data (use customer profiles and personas) as well as the customer journey and see what elements along the way are important (spoiler alert: All of them are).
2. Think about how each one of them can be improved or accelerated for the benefit of your customers.
3. Improve everything you can step-by-step, and always keep your customer's perspective front-of-mind.

Now let’s talk a bit more about that last part.

Customer experience management best practices

Your CXM strategy should revolve around several fundamental elements to help you understand and fulfill customer needs.

Only 22% of companies surveyed by Zendesk believe their customer service is “extremely strong”. There is always room for improvement!

Customer journey management and customer personas

You need to understand your customers if you want to provide top-notch CX. That’s why it all starts with creating customer personas—in other words, fictional representations or archetypes of your customers. How can you create a customer persona for your business?

And what about customer journey management? In general, the customer journey depicts what happens before, during, and after the purchasing process in your company. It is comprised of all the touch points and stages each potential customer has to go through. Customer journeys are frequently presented in the form of a workflow referred to as a customer journey map.

Ideally, all of your company’s procedures and workflows should be tailored to the customer journey in your business like so:

1. Map the Entire Customer Journey:
   • Identify every touchpoint where customers interact with your brand (website, email, social media, support, in-store).
   • Pinpoint friction points and opportunities to enhance the experience.
   • Use data and customer feedback to refine the journey continuously.
2. Ensure Seamless Omnichannel Integration:
   • Maintain a consistent experience across all channels, whether online or offline.
   • Sync customer interactions so they don’t have to repeat themselves across touchpoints.
   • Use automation and AI to personalize interactions based on past behaviors and preferences.
3. Continuously Monitor and Optimize:
   • Track key metrics like customer satisfaction (CSAT), Net Promoter Score (NPS), and churn rate.
   • Collect real-time feedback to identify pain points and opportunities for improvement.
   • Regularly update the customer journey map to reflect changing behaviors and expectations.

Assemble a CX team

Customer experience is a term that encompasses far more than just customer service. It’s all the experiences related to your brand and company, starting with the website and finishing with the product quality. That’s why you need to create a team composed of specialists from many departments (e.g., sales, customer service, IT, marketing, quality assurance, and logistics) to grasp the big picture and take a look at your customer experience strategy from many perspectives.

Each department in your company has its unique view of customers, their expectations, challenges, and complaints. Only together can they come up with the comprehensive customer information you need to measurably improve CX.

Concentrate on things that make a real difference

I get it, we're in a recession—not every company has the resources to do everything for everyone all the time. If you need to focus on the highest-impact stuff, and nothing else, start with:

• Automation of repetitive tasks: This way, you will be able to focus on the most important aspects of customer experience management.
• Customization and adjustment: Never rest on your laurels; CXM is a never-ending process. Evaluate your processes, your team’s performance, and the tools you use, at least from time to time.
• Elimination of potential pain points: Even if the overall experience is positive, one badly designed touchpoint or procedure can ruin it. Ensure there are no weak spots in how your company works.
• Personalization of customer touchpoints: Product recommendations, customer portal, website, web/mobile app - all these things need to be personalized. (More on this below.)

Personalization in CXM

Customers don’t want to feel like just another number in your database—they want to feel seen, understood, and valued. That’s where personalization comes in. It’s no longer a “nice-to-have”—it’s an expectation. In fact, 71% of customers expect companies to deliver personalized interactions, and 76% get frustrated when that doesn’t happen.

But let’s be clear: personalization is more than just using someone’s first name in an email. It’s about tailoring experiences, recommendations, and communication to fit individual needs and preferences.

Here are my suggestions for leveraging personalization in CXM:

1. Use Data to Understand Your Customers
   If you want to personalize experiences, you need to start with data. Use customer analytics, purchase history, and behavioral tracking to identify patterns and preferences. The more you know about what customers like (and don’t like), the better you can cater to them.
2. Segment Your Audience for Targeted Messaging
   Not all customers are the same, so why treat them that way? Segment your audience based on demographics, behaviors, and purchase history to deliver messages that actually resonate. For example:
   • A first-time visitor might get an onboarding email.
   • A repeat customer might receive a VIP discount.
   • A customer who abandoned their cart might get a friendly reminder.
3. Personalize the Buying Journey
   Personalization should happen across every touchpoint—not just in marketing emails.
   • On your website: Display dynamic content based on a visitor’s past interactions.
   • In customer support: Have agents use customer history to provide faster, more relevant help.
   • In product recommendations: Suggest items based on previous purchases or browsing behavior.

Training

Each person in your company having contact with customers needs to be trained. Without adequate training, good customer experience is a roll of the dice. Create and execute a custom-made training program for your company. It should include such elements as:

• Good customer service practices
• Communication guidelines and standards
• Dealing with difficult/unhappy customers
• Product knowledge
• Soft skills

Of course, not every training module and workshop needs to be done during business hours. You can decide to organize some of them in the form of a webinar, which gives you a lot of flexibility, especially if your team is spread around the country or even the world.

Employee experience

Customer experience management starts with your employees. Think of each and every one of them as your brand’s ambassadors. Would they be willing to recommend your company to others? Don't make the mistake of brushing this off—the employee experience can make or break the potential of your business to attract and retain top talent. To find out where your company stands, conduct anonymous (and I mean truly anonymous!) surveys to see what can be improved concerning the way your organization treats its employees.

If there are areas that require your attention and significantly impact the employee experience, don’t hesitate to deal with them as quickly as possible. Unhappy employees can’t help you get happy customers.

Interestingly, Zendesk also asked about employee experience in their study. As it happens, there is still a lot to do; less than 20% of surveyed customer service agents were fully satisfied with their work and training:

According to this study, employees need:

• Manageable workloads
• More training
• Better performance metrics
• Clear career development opportunities
• More respect

The last point is particularly alarming; as much as 38% of respondents say that the customer service team is not treated as well as others in the organization. Don't let this happen on your watch! The effects, aside from being ethically gross, will invariably come back to bite you where the sun don't shine.

5 Simple Steps to Successful CXM

Want to master Customer Experience Management (CXM) without overcomplicating things? Follow these five simple steps to create a smooth, seamless customer journey that keeps people coming back.

1. Know Your Customers 🎯

Use data, surveys, and feedback to understand customer needs, preferences, and pain points. Build customer personas to tailor your approach.

2. Map the Customer Journey 🗺️

Identify every touchpoint where customers interact with your brand—website, email, social, support—and optimize for ease and engagement.

3. Personalize Every Interaction ✨

Make customers feel seen and valued with AI-driven recommendations, targeted messaging, and customized support. One-size-fits-all is dead.

4. Streamline & Automate ⚡

Use CX tools to reduce friction, automate routine tasks, and provide fast, consistent experiences across all channels. Less manual work = happier customers.

5. Measure, Improve, Repeat 🔄

Track key metrics (CSAT, NPS, retention rates) and listen to customer feedback. Optimize continuously—CXM is never "done."

Bottom Line: Happy customers = loyal customers. Focus on experience, and the revenue will follow.

CXM Software and Evaluation Techniques

Taking care of your company’s CXM takes not just time and work but also tools that streamline your efforts. Here are my recommendations:

1. 1. monday service — Best for customizable workflows
2. 2. SurveySparrow — Best for utilizing customer survey feedback
3. 3. Salesforce Service Cloud — Best for customer experience personalization
4. 4. Birdeye — Best AI-enabled customer experience software
5. 5. Freshdesk — Best for a comprehensive ticketing system
6. 6. Survicate — Best for multi-channel feedback collection
7. 7. Zoho CRM — Best for CX management within a complete CRM
8. 8. Jotform — Best for advanced surveys and forms
9. 9. Hiver — Best for Google Workspace integration
10. 10. Nextiva — Best for personalized journey orchestration

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5 Tips for Choosing the Best CXM Software

1. Define Your CX Goals and Needs
   • Identify what you need from CXM software—better customer insights, automated support, omnichannel engagement, or all of the above.
   • Make a list of must-have features based on your customer journey strategy.
2. Ensure Seamless Integration with Existing Tools
   • Your CXM software should integrate with your CRM, marketing automation, helpdesk, and analytics platforms for a unified customer view.
   • Check compatibility with current tools to avoid data silos.
3. Prioritize AI, Automation, and Personalization
   • Look for AI-driven insights, chatbots, and automation features to streamline workflows and personalize customer interactions.
   • Ensure it supports real-time engagement based on customer behavior.
4. Check Usability and Scalability
   • Choose a user-friendly interface that your team can easily adopt.
   • Ensure the software can scale as your business grows, accommodating more customers, channels, and data.
5. Evaluate Pricing and Support
   • Compare pricing models (subscription, per-user, or usage-based) to find a cost-effective option.
   • Look for reliable customer support, training resources, and community forums to ensure smooth implementation.

Well, this has been an experience.

While customer experience management is a broad discipline full of intricacies, this overview has hopefully given you a basic understanding of the concepts you need to know. I encourage you to dig deeper and see how to use it to grow your business across multiple channels and audiences.

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Related Read: Digital Experience Manager Roles, Responsibilities, & Salary