Glossary of Terms

Deepen your understanding to drive your expertise, and share with colleagues to enlighten ideas and inspire innovation. This glossary of terms will help to elevate clarity, and guide conversations that bridge gaps across teams of shared interest in customer centricity.

What is Customer Experience Management (CEM)?

    Customer experience management (CEM), sometimes referred to as voice of the customer (VOC), is the practice of designing, managing, and improving the customer experience at every key point along the customer journey. Successful CEM programs are characterized by a deep understanding of the customer journey and the ability to change processes and influence employee behaviors to align on the goal of improving customers’ perceptions of the brand.

    A majority of businesses now compete mostly on customer experience, making it more important than ever for businesses to manage and optimize CX and the customer journey. Providing exceptional experiences has a significant impact on the bottom line because it can turn customers into brand promoters. Promoters are more loyal, less price-sensitive, purchase more, and recommend businesses to friends and family. Ultimately, promoters help fuel business growth.

    For CEM programs to be effective, they need to take a structured approach to optimizing customer journeys. A customer experience management process consists of the following five steps:

    1. Gather data. The first step in a CEM process is to gather experience-related data from sources like customer surveys, social media comments, customer service interactions, contact center operational data, and customer focus groups. Mining multiple data sources will ensure a more holistic understanding of customer perceptions.
    1. Analyze data. Analyzing the data from these separate sources requires a holistic VOC to aggregate the data and use it to identify root causes of positive and negative experiences, understand drivers of customer loyalty, and provide other insights that will help with customer experience management.
    1. Close the loop. Successful CEM programs “close the loop” on negative customer feedback by following up with individual customers to solve problems and rescue the experience.
    1. Distribute insights. The insights from the analysis will affect multiple functions within the organization, from the contact center to product development to the web team, and more. The analysis should be shared to encourage collaboration.
    1. Drive change. Ultimately, CEM programs should drive change that improves CX and the customer journey. These five steps are a repetitive process designed to consistently improve customer perceptions and business results.

    About NICE Satmetrix

    NICE Satmetrix is the leading global provider of Voice of the Customer (VOC) software used by the world's most forward-thinking companies to analyze and transform their customer service interactions. Our Customer Journey-based solution combines and analyzes customer interactions, solicited feedback, and operational data at enterprise scale to uncover blind spots, increase customer satisfaction and improve agent performance.

    With consumers reaching out to contact centers for more reasons than ever before, providing consistent and optimized experiences is central to fostering loyalty and increasing customer lifetime value. NICE Satmetrix VOC enables businesses of all sizes to grow the value of customer service touchpoints and operationalize customer feedback.

    With NICE Satmetrix VOC, the top VOC solution for contact centers, contact centers get access to:

    Integrations with NICE inContact CXone and the NICE portfolio of contact center solutions

    • Superior analytics
    • Digital omnichannel and hassle-free IVR integrations
    • Customer Journey-based design
    • One-stop-shop for all your contact center VOC needs

    NICE Satmetrix is the co-creator of the Net Promoter Score® (NPS®), one of the best indicators of customer loyalty and predictors of business growth. We've instilled our deep knowledge of consumer behavior into our VOC software to make NICE Satmetrix holistic VOC a true one-stop shop for Voice of the Customer with a self-service solution that meets the needs of organizations of every size.

    Back to Glossary