Achieve excellence with CXM practices and strategies

Customer experience management (CXM) is the discipline of designing, measuring and continuously improving every interaction a customer has with a company, and of running the organization so that those interactions deliver on its strategy. Excellence in CXM practices and strategies comes from joining culture, data, process and technology into one management system, not from isolated projects.

For a CEO or a commercial leader, the question is not whether customer experience matters. It is whether the company manages it with the same discipline it applies to finance or operations. When CXM is managed well, it shows up in revenue (higher conversion and share of wallet), in margin (fewer discounts needed to win and keep customers), in retention and in a lower cost to serve. When it is managed as a slogan, the same budget gets spent on campaigns, surveys and software that never connect.

We live in the era of the informed, intelligent customer, so every organization should know what customer experience management truly entails and how mature its own practice is. CXM spans several dimensions at once: the business culture, the skills devoted to continuous improvement of the customer experience (CX), the depth of experience design (CXD) and, ultimately, what all of it contributes to the bottom line.

This article covers the aspects a leadership team should evaluate to adopt CXM practices and strategies:

• How to evolve from scattered CX initiatives to a CXM strategy.
• The 8 structural pillars of CXM.
• CXM best practice success stories from Adidas, Anheuser-Busch and T-Mobile.
• Considerations and a practical checklist for guiding your company to excellence in customer experience management.

What is customer experience management (CXM) and how is it different from CX?

Customer experience (CX) is the customer's perception of every interaction with your brand, from the first ad to the last service call. Customer experience management is what the company does about it: the strategy, governance, metrics, processes and tools it uses to shape that perception deliberately and profitably.

Three related terms are often confused, and the difference matters when you assign budgets and owners:

How do you evolve your company from CX initiatives to CXM strategies?

Customer experience-based strategies have set a precedent in how companies operate. Companies that leave them out of their decisions risk damaging their credibility in the market and wasting the hard work of the departments that serve customers every day.

Strategies based on user experience (UX) and customer experience (CX) must be worked hard and renewed constantly. So what does it take to evolve them into CXM strategies?

According to Adobe's guidance for retailers, an organization must acquire four mindsets to accelerate the process and implementation of CXM strategies:

• The data-driven mindset. Decisions about the experience are based on customer data rather than opinion.
• Scaling and adoption of personalization. Relevant experiences move from pilots to every channel.
• Improving content velocity. The company can produce and adapt content at the pace customers expect.
• A leadership alignment mindset. The executive team shares goals and priorities for the experience.

Adobe's professional services team makes a similar point in 4 winning ways to turbocharge your CXM: build a framework around data, content, delivery and orchestration first, align leadership on measurable goals tied to customer journeys, change the approach and not just the tools, and unify customer data into a single profile.

In practice, the evolution from initiatives to strategy usually goes through three stages:

1. Reactive. CX shows up as complaint handling and occasional satisfaction surveys. Each department optimizes its own touchpoint.
2. Project-based. The company runs journey mapping workshops, a website redesign or a CRM rollout. Results are real but local, and they fade when the project ends.
3. Managed. There is a CX strategy linked to the business plan, a governance model, shared KPIs, prioritized journeys and a backlog of improvements funded like any other investment. This is CXM.

What are the 8 structural pillars of CXM?

Eight elements are essential to structure and develop customer experience management. Many of them evolve constantly, so leaders who are less familiar with them should build knowledge in each branch before deciding where to invest.

1. Implementing customer experience strategies. Every organization must meet qualitative and quantitative goals, analyze its performance over specific periods and define the objectives of its relationship with the customer. That is when defining strategies becomes an imminent necessity. There is no effective management without strategy as its base.
2. The mindset of understanding. The best way to empathize with and win customers is to understand them, including their emotions, wants and needs. A CXM strategy is incomplete until it answers questions such as: Whom does my content help? How do I help my prospects? Why is it important to them?
3. Customer experience design. To understand the customer, it is essential to understand their processes: what their routine is like, which desires drive their purchase, what their interests are, how they buy and where the moments of truth occur. You can learn more about this consultative methodology in these articles:
   • Importance of customer experience design.
   • The power of customer experience design.
   • How to be successful in Customer Experience Design.
4. Data governance. Every organization needs to understand, internalize and adapt data management and control practices and policies aligned with its business processes, requirements and objectives. Data governance must ensure protection, control, cost reduction, transparency and efficiency in data management to improve decision-making. Without it, personalization and measurement rest on unreliable ground.
5. Setting the stage for a customer-centric culture. Beyond process mapping, control tools and strategic planning, the organization must truly become customer-centric. A customer-centric culture makes experience management more human and more empathetic toward the ideal customer, and it is what keeps improvements alive after the consultants leave.
6. KPIs or experience performance measures. Every effort requires measurement to diagnose its path to excellence and its improvement points. Customer experience strategies need to be measured for performance and results: have your sales and service teams improved the customer experience, or has it stagnated?
7. Technology as a consequence and enabler. Technology still requires methodologies to be useful. Conversely, CXM strategies without technology lack accuracy, visibility and omnichannel distribution of knowledge, practices and performance analytics across the commercial areas of the organization.
8. Business processes. No software can create CXM practices and strategies on its own. Software is dumb if there is no proper management, definition and structuring of the processes it is meant to automate. Here are some recommended articles:
   • Adapting to disruption: defining processes before automating.
   • 6 key steps to lift your business processes.
   • 10 reasons to automate your business processes.

The pillars work as a system. A company with excellent design but no data governance cannot personalize; one with strong technology but no defined processes automates confusion; one with metrics but no culture measures problems nobody owns.

Which KPIs should leaders use to manage customer experience?

Measurement is where many CXM programs stall. Surveys are useful, but they rarely tell an executive where to act or what an improvement is worth. McKinsey's analysis Prediction: The future of CX found that only 15 percent of the CX leaders it surveyed were fully satisfied with how their company measured customer experience, and only 4 percent said their system let them calculate the return on CX decisions. The authors argue for predictive, data-driven systems that link experience to financial outcomes.

A balanced CXM scorecard usually combines four layers:

• Perception metrics: Net Promoter Score, customer satisfaction (CSAT) and customer effort score by journey, not only at company level.
• Behavior metrics: conversion by stage, repeat purchase, churn, share of wallet and adoption of digital channels.
• Operational metrics: first contact resolution, response and resolution times, order accuracy and SLA compliance.
• Financial metrics: customer lifetime value, cost to serve by segment, margin per customer and revenue retained.

CXM best practice success stories

The practical and constant evolution of customer experience is challenging for many companies. The digital world demands a continuous flow of valuable content, process design, business process automation and measurement of performance and results. Several factors come into play:

• The structural pillars for developing any CXM strategy.
• Strategic plans to strengthen the personalization of multichannel experiences.
• The adoption of a customer-centric culture.
• The design and measurement of experiences across the enterprise's channels.
• The automation of processes associated with each customer experience.

Let us look at three success stories in customer experience management.

Case study: Adidas

The German sportswear company has sought to maximize its digital experiences with a clear focus on the customer. Through research and data analysis, Adidas found that its customers were buying more products online than in its physical stores, so it turned to data-driven experience design to personalize the experience at the moments of truth.

Adidas also applies the customer understanding mindset. It gathers feedback and actively listens to customers to design new experiences and products. One example is its line of footwear made with recycled ocean plastic in partnership with Parley for the Oceans: CNBC reported that Adidas sold 1 million pairs of these shoes in 2017, with each pair reusing 11 plastic bottles.

In highly competitive industries such as retail, a customer-centric culture encourages the redesign and personalization of experiences, and investing in customer experience management can boost a company's growth to the point of leading its category.

Case study: Anheuser-Busch

Anheuser-Busch is a leading organization in the brewing and beverage industry worldwide, with an iconic reputation in the United States and Europe. With a broad brand portfolio, it faced a challenge familiar to many enterprises: each brand had its own web store, which drove up costs, made the sites complex to manage and threatened the goal of offering a customer-focused shopping experience.

According to Adobe's Anheuser-Busch customer story, the separate brand shops ran on different commerce solutions, which made the operation expensive, inconsistent and slow. John Faviano, Director of Demand Management for North America, summarized the problem bluntly: "We were not thinking consumer first." The company consolidated its branded shops into one cross-brand store managed from a single dashboard, and its revenues in the first quarter of 2019 exceeded its total for all of 2018.

Faviano explains his keys to solving these challenges in more detail in the Adobe article How Anheuser-Busch Created a 'Customer-First' Experience.

In CXM terms, Anheuser-Busch combined two structural pillars: a strategy designed around the customer experience, and process automation with technology as a consequence. The shopping experience was redesigned first and then automated through the implementation of Adobe Commerce.

Case study: T-Mobile

T-Mobile is one of the leading organizations in the U.S. telecommunications industry. Amid the constant change that defines the sector, one of its most significant challenges was improving the personalization and perception of its customers' experiences while it grew. With demand rising quickly, it needed new workflows, because its existing processes were not keeping up with the experiences customers expected.

The following articles look in depth at these challenges and at how ICX Consulting develops process and automation solutions:

• Process Improvement Using As Is & To Be.
• Introduction to Business Process Automation.
• Automate the follow-up of business opportunities with workflows.

T-Mobile also needed more agile ways of working and higher efficiency. Its marketing projects had been run through email, spreadsheets, meetings and phone calls, which fragmented priorities and created rework. As Adobe describes in its T-Mobile story, after centralizing that work in Adobe Workfront the company achieved a 275 percent increase in average projects delivered per month and reduced its weekly process meetings from twelve to one. Reports on the case also cite an 80 percent growth in user participation on its platforms.

T-Mobile applied the same CXM pillars: strategies designed around the customer experience and process automation with technology as a consequence, orchestrated through Adobe Workfront.

Considerations for guiding your company to customer experience management excellence

On the long road to customer experience management excellence, companies face many obstacles and decisions that must be made with a cool head in the new era of digital experience.

McKinsey & Company's article on the future of customer experience highlights how data and analytics have transformed the art and science of CX, and how fast that change is moving. Executives at companies with significant legacy operations must rethink their next steps or risk falling behind.

Every company that wants to reach excellence in customer experience management needs to internalize and adapt to the following conditions:

• Break old work schemes through cross-functional team management. Companies must build multifunctional skills in their people. That maximizes their potential and knowledge, and it makes the way they approach customers more personal.
• Redesign the consultative mindset. Beyond chasing prospects in a hurry to sell, companies need to accept that customers care less about what a salesperson wants to sell them and more about how the company can improve their day-to-day. The consultative approach builds a mindset of understanding the customer, a clear pillar of CXM practices and strategies.
• Bring precision to experience design and the personalized use case. Each customer is a different universe. Buyer personas, journeys and buying processes are a start, but understanding deepens when you analyze what interests customers, why and how they want it. Satisfaction is ultimately measured by how personalized, relevant and suitable your solutions are for each use case.

What this means for the C-level

CXM excellence pays off when it is connected to the levers the executive team already manages. These are the ones where it applies most directly:

• Convert: design the buying journey around moments of truth and remove friction between marketing, sales and quoting. Measure conversion by journey stage, not just by channel.
• Retain: use behavioral and service data to predict churn and act before the customer leaves, as McKinsey's predictive CX model suggests.
• Loyalty: turn customer feedback into product and service decisions, the way Adidas used listening to shape new lines, and close the loop with customers so they see the change.
• Serve: define service levels by customer segment so the most valuable customers get the right attention without raising cost for everyone.
• Efficiency: consolidate duplicate platforms and processes, as Anheuser-Busch did with its brand stores and T-Mobile with its project workflows, and only then automate.

The common thread is governance. Appoint an executive owner, agree on a short list of CX KPIs tied to financial results and review them in the same forum where you review revenue and margin.

A practical CXM checklist you can apply next week

1. Name the owner. Confirm which executive is accountable for customer experience and give that role a seat in the leadership meeting.
2. Pick two priority journeys. Choose the journeys with the biggest impact on revenue or cost, for example onboarding new customers and resolving service requests.
3. Score the eight pillars. Rate each pillar from 1 to 5 for those journeys. The lowest score is usually where the next investment should go.
4. Map the current process. Document the as-is process before buying or configuring technology, including handoffs between departments.
5. Connect metrics. For each journey, link one perception metric, one behavior metric, one operational metric and one financial metric.
6. Audit data readiness. Check whether you can identify the same customer across marketing, sales and service systems.
7. Set a 90-day backlog. Define three to five improvements with owners, cost and expected impact, and review progress monthly.

How ICX helps

ICX Consulting helps leadership teams turn customer experience into a managed discipline. Our customer experience consulting practice applies the ICX Compass methodology to set strategy, prioritize journeys and design the operating model, and the ICX Maturity Model for customer experience to show where your company stands across the pillars. We then define the right KPIs and OKRs and implement process automation on platforms such as HubSpot, Salesforce and Adobe, with technology as the enabler rather than the starting point.

To organize your own roadmap, use the ICX Transformation Framework toolkit, which helps your team plan how strategy, process and software come together in a CX program.

Frequently asked questions

Who should own customer experience management in a company?

CXM needs an executive sponsor with authority across marketing, sales and service, often a Chief Customer or Chief Experience Officer, or the CEO in mid-sized firms. Day-to-day work sits with a small CX office that coordinates journey owners. Without cross-functional authority, CXM tends to become a survey program inside one department.

How long does it take to see results from a CXM program?

Quick wins on one or two priority journeys, such as fixing a broken handoff or simplifying a form, can appear within the first months. Cultural change and a reliable measurement system take considerably longer, often more than a year, because they depend on data governance, new routines and leaders using CX metrics in regular decisions.

Is CXM software enough to manage customer experience?

No. Experience platforms, CRM and survey tools collect data and automate interactions, but they cannot decide which journeys matter, who owns them or what good looks like. Companies that buy software first often automate existing friction. Define strategy, processes and metrics, then configure technology to support them.

Excellence in customer experience management rarely comes from one big initiative. It grows from clear ownership, a few well-chosen journeys and metrics that leadership actually uses. If you want to know which of the eight pillars is holding your company back, request a diagnostic with an ICX consultant and get a clear view of where better customer experiences will move revenue, retention and cost to serve.