What Is Unified Customer Experience Management (CXM)?

Your customers are everywhere, on any channel you can think of, but you’re struggling to keep up with them. You’re behind on responses, tickets, and customer issues. Sound familiar?

Customers need you to keep up — 87% of them want a consistent, personalized experience across channels, but only about half of companies prioritize providing it. It’s no surprise: The number of ways your customers can reach you is growing, and while that’s convenient for them, it’s spreading your customer-facing teams thin.

Luckily, there’s a solution. It’s called unified CXM, and it can transform the way you communicate with your customers.

What Is Unified CXM?

Unified CXM is short for unified customer experience management. It’s based on providing a consistently great customer experience across channels and touchpoints because today, consumers want to talk to brands on a channel and at a time that suits them instead of the one you may try to impose on them.

These channels include the usual customer service channels like phone and email. Live chat and SMS messaging have become more popular in recent years, but you now also need to look after your customers through social channels, such as WhatsApp, Twitter (X), and Facebook.

The struggle, of course, is keeping track of thousands of interactions across all these channels. If you miss the mark, you risk losing your customers to competitors who can serve them quickly on the platform of their choice.

Unified CXM is a complete solution to this modern communication challenge.

Related: Digital Experience Management: What It Is and Why You Need It

Unified CXM Key Functions

Here are four key CXM functions.

It creates a holistic customer view

Your customer data lives in your marketing campaigns, your sales data, and your customer service interactions, including social media, a CRM system, a feedback collection tool, and more.

Let’s say a customer reaches out through email, and the only information you have about them is their previous emails to your contact center: no previous purchases, no social media comments, and no live chat transcripts.

This is an incomplete customer profile — you’ll struggle to make them feel heard or understood without first spending some time getting to know them and how you can best help them.

Unified CXM integrates these different sources and tracks the entire customer journey so you can instantly delight customers at every interaction.

It ensures consistency across channels

Your customers interact with your business in more ways you can imagine.

They Google your products, view them on your website, or take them off a store shelf; they reach out to you on Facebook or via a text message, phone call, or email. They ask their friends about you, read your reviews, scan your FAQ pages, scroll your LinkedIn, and watch demo videos.

If you’ve ever explored Unified Communications as a Solution (UCaaS), where key functions include voice, video, messaging, and collaboration, you’ll find there’s an upside to consolidating multiple contact channels into one software platform.

Each of these touchpoints should make your customer feel the same about your brand. All your channels should carry consistent messaging, branding, values, and emotions.

Customers quickly move between devices and channels, and the consistency offered by unified CXM means your customers will recognize and love your brand instantly every time.

It provides real-time interaction management

Unified CXM uses AI to track metrics and turn them into actionable insights faster than humans ever could.

Customers share their preferences, needs, and satisfaction, which you can turn into strategies for your products, pricing, personalization, and more — but they do so in real time, and keeping tabs on them manually is near impossible.

With real-time interaction management, you can find the right details at the right time and add the human touch to infinitely more customer interactions than you could without unified CXM.

It incorporates feedback loops

Should you…

• Expand a product category?
• Add more features to your most popular product?
• Tweak your onboarding process or welcome emails?
• Add more video guides than written ones?

For many questions like these, your only option might be to guess. Not ideal. Each of these changes could take your customer experience — and your business growth — to the next level, but only if your guess was correct.

If it wasn’t, you might spend precious months making a change that makes things worse rather than better.

That’s where unified CXM comes in: It has built-in, continuous feedback from customers in one place, helping you make the right decisions and improve the customer experience.

What Challenges Does Unified CXM Address?

Supporting your contact center representatives with the right training and tools is key to the success of your business. Unified CXM arms your staff with everything they need to resolve customer issues efficiently and effectively. 

It connects all customer data

Your consumer data is everywhere. First, it is on all the digital channels you use to market and sell your products and support your customers — social media, your CRM, and your support ticketing system. But it’s also in sales reps’ notebooks and heads.

In other words, your customer data is in silos. It’s isolated, making it unhelpful to any person who doesn’t have access to a silo — or doesn’t even know it exists.

Let’s say you’ve nailed social listening, and you really have your ear to the ground to understand and leverage conversations about your brand and your industry. Your social media team can directly access all these insights, but they’re the only ones with access.

Your product and development teams could directly use those insights to improve your products, but they’re only vaguely aware of the information and need to cut through red tape and spend hours on approvals to access it. The solution is unified CXM: a single platform that gives a unified view of customer interactions and insights across all platforms.

It addresses CX gaps

The customer journey can be rough, even if you’ve done everything you can to hit the mark. Let’s say the delivery of a customer’s order is delayed, they realized they purchased the wrong product, or they want to upgrade or tweak their plan and they aren’t sure which one to go for.

They’re already somewhat frustrated when they reach out to your team, and all they hear is, “Let me pass you to another department” or “You’ll need to reach out to us over the phone, as we can’t solve this via email.”

Each time this type of interaction happens, your reputation and customer satisfaction are at risk. You might even lose the customer.

This creates a huge customer experience gap — the exact opposite of a customer-centric approach that makes customers feel good at every interaction, even when things aren’t going perfectly. A unified CXM solution erases that gap.

It supports faster innovation cycles

Want to get ahead of your competitors and stay there? Hope to be the go-to choice for your ideal customers?

Being quick to adapt to what your target market needs is the key to driving innovation. Embracing a unified CXM approach makes it possible because you can:

• Spot any issues, needs, and gaps in your product as soon as they happen.
• Prioritize the problems to address based on how frequently they occur and how severe they are.
• Brainstorm diverse solutions to find the best one.

The result? A customer experience built on what real people need you rather than pure theory to make customers feel seen, heard, and understood.

It expands customer retention

Customer retention, satisfaction, and loyalty are core elements of a healthy business. According to Smile.io, there is a 27% chance that a customer will return after their first purchase; this increases to 49% and 62% if they make a second and third purchase, respectively.

Yes, marketing is competitive, but unified CXM helps you create a seamless customer experience — that’s what turns casual buyers into loyal customers.

The shoe retailer Zappos is known for exceptional customer service. No one buys from Zappos because they want to have an issue that needs to be solved but because they know they’ll be well taken care of if anything goes wrong — every time.

Why Brands Should Care About Unified CXM?

Investing in customer experience management is worthwhile for several reasons. UCXM strengthens your business by growing customer loyalty, speeding up your decision-making, and even enhancing your online reputation.

Increased customer loyalty

One study after another has proven that enjoyable customer experiences lead to increased customer engagement, which then leads to increased loyalty. Your current and potential customers want you to understand their wants, needs, and preferences from a product or service like yours.

Not just that, according to Harvard Business School Professor Gerald Zaltman, customers make 95% of their purchasing decisions subconsciously based on what they feel rather than on logic.

Yet, Gartner reports that over 70% of CX leaders struggle to design projects that increase customer loyalty. The challenge is real, and there’s clearly a gap you can fill.

So, instead of spending all your energy on a fancy, expensive video marketing campaign or the latest trend in email automation, invest in showing your target customers you understand exactly what they need at every touchpoint, big or small.

Better decision making

When it’s time to change something about your business, you may be tempted to default to surveying your end users with straightforward questions, like “Would you prefer [feature A] or [feature B]?” or “How much would you pay for [type of product]?”

If you go the unified CXM route, you can tap into so much more data than a single survey’s results because, throughout their journey with you, customers reveal details about themselves. For example, you can learn:

• Which product price converted more potential customers.
• Which campaign drove the most repeat purchases.
• How customer service response time affects customer satisfaction.
• Purchase habits and frequencies of different customer segments.

This comprehensive data powers more informed and confident business decisions.

Increased revenue

If you only chase one-time purchases, you’re on the fast track to burnout because this approach requires you to constantly reach new audiences, come up with new concepts to intrigue them, and wonder why most of them didn’t convert (remember that e-commerce websites, for example, only convert around 3% of their visitors).

Looking for a better way? Increase your revenue by:

• Driving recurring purchases.
• Upselling and cross-selling as customers’ needs evolve.
• Encouraging word-of-mouth referrals.
• Partnering with ambassadors and affiliates to tap into their audiences.

The key to achieving these benefits is, you’ve guessed it, a frictionless customer experience. Satisfied customers are 5.1 times more likely to recommend a brand and 3.5 times more likely to purchase again than dissatisfied customers. Data also shows that referred customers tend to convert better, spend more, remain customers for longer, and refer more often.

A win across the board.

Reputation management

Finally, you should care because unified CXM is vital for reputation management.

Customers will review your brand whether you like it or not. They use their app stores, location services, social media profiles, and more to tell others what they loved or hated about buying from you.

If you don’t keep a finger on the pulse of your brand reputation, you’ll only find out something that went wrong when it goes really wrong and spreads like wildfire. Don’t wait that long. Be proactive and track your reviews, tickets, feedback, and customer satisfaction in real time.

Not only will you end up with a strong reputation with customers, partners, and investors, but you’ll also delight way more customers.

Nextiva’s Approach to Unified CXM

Want more revenue, a better reputation, and a wildly loyal customer base — all from an engagement solution that tracks customer interactions holistically and in real time?

Here’s Nextiva’s take on a unified CXM platform.

Multi-channel support

With Nextiva, you can meet your customers where they are and where they want you to meet them — modern channels included. Email, live chat, messengers, WhatsApp, SMS, and social media are all covered.

Not just that, you can turn interactions into leads and sell products wherever you are.

Social media management

Nextiva is not just for tracking customer engagement but for social media management as a whole, including scheduling social media posts so you can publish them at the right time and on the right channel and monitoring responses like replies, comments, or messages.

It gets better: You can also dig into social media trends for your industry. Lean on market trends to inspire your strategy and stay top-of-mind without adding more work to your plate.

Unified messaging app integration

Want to integrate your CXM solution with Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, and more? With Nextiva, you can.

Use the platform to respond with timely, relevant, and detailed responses wherever customers choose to contact you and automate responses for basic inquiries and frequently asked questions.

AI-powered live chat

AI is magical — for a busy, growing business, it’s a superpower.

Switching it on means you can automatically route live chat inquiries to the team member best equipped to handle the issue. You can also use conversational AI and chatbots to make your team more efficient.

And because live chat is part of a bigger CXM solution, you automatically gain a 360-degree view of your website visitors as they reach out.

Integrated email ticketing

Instead of jumping between inboxes and dashboards, Nextiva integrates incoming emails and tickets from all your service channels.

You’ll never have another case slip through the cracks thanks to real-time alerts on incoming cases and reminders to keep an eye on all current issues.

Review monitoring

Don’t stop at tracking purchases and customer service tickets. Consider customer reviews as another part of the customer experience — track them, respond to them, and use them to solve real customer issues.

Nextiva lets you track reviews like any other customer message and react promptly.

Unified CXM Is How You’ll Win

Now you know: Embracing unified CXM will give you the ultimate advantage. It gives customers the ease and comfort they need from customer experience and gives your business the growth and stability to thrive.

Which unified CXM solution do you need? A solution that is reliable, highly rated and recommended, and packed with features and plugins that make you efficient.

See how Canyon Coolers powers its customer conversations with Nextiva.