Experience Management

Experience management is an effort by organizations to measure and improve the experiences they provide to customers as well as stakeholders like vendors, suppliers, employees, and shareholders. The concept posits the notion that experiences comprise distinct economic offerings that create economic value and competitive advantage.

Organizations have begun to collect experience data in addition to operational data, since experiences are seen as a competitive advantage. Experience management platforms provide various services to automate the process of identifying and improving experiences across an organization.

Broader than customer experience, experience management now encompasses customer experience along with other areas, such as brand experience, employee experience and product experience, which are all seen as interrelated.

Management

To create and manage the experiences, businesses must evaluate, implement, integrate, and build experiences from a fragmented landscape. Such needs are met by experience management platforms, which help automate the process of measuring and improving experiences across an organization by coordinating content, customer data and core services, and unifying marketing, commerce and service processes.

Experience management platforms compare multiple layers of data and statistics to enable organizations to identify any experience gaps. They connect operational databases with human feedback, analyzing respondents’ emotions, beliefs, and sentiments for a holistic view of the experiences they provide. Their methods include artificial intelligence, predictive analytics, and statistical models.

Other uses

While the term experience management is predominantly used in business, it has another meaning. It is used for a special kind of knowledge management that deals with collecting, modeling, storing, reusing, evaluating, and maintaining experience. In that sense, the term is interchangeable with expertise management.

Importance:

• Global pandemic has shifted our world to online/virtual: Many of our day-to-day activities including work, shopping, communication, etc. are now done virtually using technology. That means a bad experience can easily result in loss of business. For example, employees that get frustrated from bad experiences at work may consider switching to a new job. Customers who can’t easily navigate your website or access the information they need, for example, will likely consider alternatives from another vendor.
• Device and app proliferation: A constant increase in device models, OS versions, and applications had led to a more complex environment that organizations need to support. For example, IT needs to support a wide range of device and operating system (OS) combinations across their employee base. An app developer needs to make sure the app works on any device and any OS to retain and increase the customer base. And so on.
• Consumerization of everything: The expectation for flexibility, choice, and ease of use that originated in consumer-originated technologies has expanded to other areas of our lives, including work style preferences and flexibility.

Working:

Measure: to effectively measure end-user experience, an organization should have the ability to capture both quantitative and qualitative data. Quantitative is normally data collected by systems like:

• Endpoint management tools that capture data such as device health. For example, how much memory capacity is left on the device or what is the battery life status can impact user experience.
• Application performance monitoring (APM) tools that capture app crashes, hangs, errors, etc. For example, have the ability to measure how long it takes to perform a single task. These tools also often track how users navigate an app and provide more information about user experience while in the app, such as how easy it is to checkout or identify where users typically drop.
• Network monitoring tools track the availability, health, and performance of networks. There are many protocols for network monitoring that look at different aspects of network traffic.

In addition to quantitative data, organizations that want to manage experience also need to capture qualitative data to better understand the end-user sentiment and capture issues that might not come up otherwise. There are many surveying tools in the market to capture this data.

Analyze and Visualize: once the data is collected, organizations need a way to analyze and visualize the data, normally this is done through dashboards and reports. Some tools use machine learning models to provide additional, more advanced insights such as experience scores, or identifying when a KPI is outside a normal range. This enables organizations to get visibility into their environment and make data-driven decisions.

Troubleshoot: in case of an issue, organizations should proactively troubleshoot to find the root cause of the issue. In many cases, this is done manually which can be extremely time-consuming and often requires the end-user to be involved in this process. In many cases the amount of data is overwhelming and a more guided approach based on past experience can be useful, for example, in a case where the same issue has happened in the past with another user. Additionally, providing admins with more data in context to the issue at hand can speed up root cause analysis.

Remediation: once a root cause of an issue has been identified, the organization would want to fix it. In some cases, the issue can be solved by the user without intervention from the company, for example, a password reset. Ideally, organizations would want to leverage automation and self-service workflows as much as possible to cut down costs and improve the overall experience.

Organizations that are more advanced in their experience management journey would want to transition from reactive issue detection to a more proactive approach where they can identify issues before the end-user notices or their experience is impacted. Additionally, advanced organizations would provide end users with self-service options, providing more flexibility and reducing costs at the same time.

Features of experience management software

Ticket management

The software allows you to log all customer issues. You can use this data to identify customer needs. The platform avails customized automations and ticket routing.

Products and inventory

The management software has an integrated product data base for ease of tracking. You can identify the products people are buying more and associate particular products with specific customers.

Customer management

This feature allows you to analyze customer data. This includes their contacts, product preferences or locations.

Integration

Experience management software can integrate seamlessly with other business systems, eliminating duplication of effort and tasks. For example, integrating your experience management software with your CRM software enhances coordination, collaboration and productivity across your teams. The software integrates well with business systems thanks to the availability of APIs.