Does your customer service measure up? If not, you may be losing customers. In this Amazon era, customers expect every interaction with a brand to be quick and convenient. When it’s not, they shop elsewhere. A PwC customer loyalty survey found that a bad experience with customer service was a top reason (endorsed by 32% of respondents) for abandoning a brand.
Customer interaction management is crucial for understanding and meeting customer expectations, improving customer experience and loyalty.
What Is Customer Interaction Management?
Customer interaction management (CIM) is a strategic approach that focuses on managing and optimizing interactions between a business and its customers across various channels. It involves gathering, analyzing and evaluating customer data to understand their needs and preferences, and then using that information to provide personalized support and enhance customer satisfaction. Businesses often use customer interaction management software to handle interactions across all touchpoints.
Five Key Components of Customer Interaction Management
Omnichannel communication: Delivering consistent, connected communication across multiple channels [such as phone, email, SMS (short message service) or business RCS (rich communication service), live chat, social media] to provide a harmonious and convenient customer experience.
Personalization: Tailoring interactions to individual customer needs and preferences based on their data profile. Customer interaction management software extends personalization beyond communication and content, allowing you to tailor each touchpoint to the individual customer’s needs. Offering relevant product recommendations, upgrades or special offers demonstrates that you know and value customers.
Data collection and analysis: Gathering data from customer interactions (e.g., contact center calls, emails or social media) to identify customer needs, preferences, pain points, patterns, trends and areas for improvement. This enables you to tailor products, services and communication to meet customer expectations and needs. For example, customer service interaction data provides valuable insights into areas that need improvement. Typically, customers reach out to call centers or use website chat when they encounter issues. By analyzing their needs, you can proactively address potential problems and enhance future support efforts.
Effective issue resolution: Promptly and efficiently handling customer inquiries, complaints and problems. Customer satisfaction declines from 79 (out of 100) when calls are handled in six to 10 minutes to a score of 51 when calls take more than 30 minutes.
Proactive engagement: Anticipating customer needs and reaching out to customers before they contact you (such as sending alerts regarding shipping delays, suspicious account activity or service outages). Live chat helps website visitors navigate your site and find the information they need quickly, without having to contact a live agent.
Five Benefits of Customer Interaction Management
CIM can improve:
Customer satisfaction. Personalized interactions and efficient issue resolution lead to happier customers. Customers whose issue is resolved within the first call have an average contact center satisfaction index score of 82 (out of 100). Satisfaction drops to 58 when it takes three calls to resolve an issue, and to 31 when the issue is unresolved.
Customer loyalty and retention. Positive customer experiences foster long-term relationships. More than half (51%) of consumers said they’re less likely to be loyal to a brand if its online shopping experience isn’t as easy or enjoyable as shopping in person.
Brand reputation. A reputation for excellent customer service can attract new customers and inspire brand loyalty. Chewy, an online pet supplies company, is well-regarded for promptly replacing incorrect items—without customers having to return them. Instead, Chewy asks customers to donate the wrong pet food or ill-fitting collar to an animal shelter.
Operational efficiency. Streamlined processes and automation can improve productivity and reduce costs. For example, implementing an AI-powered chatbot to handle common customer inquiries reduces the number of calls that must be routed to live agents. This decreases contact center costs and frees agents to handle more complicated issues.
Data-driven decision-making. Insights from customer data can inform business strategies, process improvements and marketing efforts. For example, if many customers call your contact center with [subscription] billing questions, you may decide to implement a digital bill explanation solution.
What Are the Differences Between Customer Interaction Management and Customer Journey Management?
According to Forrester, customer journey management refers to “the practices of journey mapping, journey visioning, and journey orchestration, to improve customer experiences and business results across all phases of the customer lifecycle.”
While both customer interaction management (CIM) and customer journey management (CJM) focus on enhancing the customer experience, they have distinct approaches and scopes.
Customer interaction management is a crucial component of customer journey management, but CJM takes a broader perspective, considering how all interactions in a customer’s journey (i.e., the customer’s path and perceptions as they pursue a goal) fit together to create a positive experience. Customer journey analytics helps you understand each customer’s journey by tracking and measuring every interaction with your brand, across every channel the customer uses. Journey analytics helps measure the impact of customer behaviors on business outcomes, and is a key way to monitor CX performance to quickly identify areas for improvement.
A real-time decision engine delivers the right messages at the right time by the right channel, adjusting the communication in real time as the interactions unfold.
A real-time decision engine analyzes customer interactions in real time to:
- Identify customer needs and intent (i.e., predicts customer behavior)
- Determine the next best action to take, at what time, for each customer, in the context of everything known about the customer up to that point
- Modify the next best action as the context (e.g., situations and behaviors) shifts
- Adjust messaging based on factors like recent interactions, preferences or real-time signals to prevent sending too many—or conflicting—communications
Differences Between Customer Interaction Management and Customer Journey Management
Here’s how the two systems would treat a customer who has a service appointment scheduled in the late afternoon.
Customer interaction management
- Send an email and text message in the morning, reminding the customer of the appointment and providing instructions for the visit, as these are the channels the customer primarily interacts with.
- Notify the customer by email and text that the technician is running late
Customer journey management
- Send a text message (the customer’s preferred channel) in the morning, reminding the customer of the appointment, providing instructions for the visit, and asking the customer to confirm the appointment.
- Notify the customer via IVR that the technician is running late
- Allow them to reschedule using digital channels, or route them to the correct agent if they choose to call
- Confirm the new appointment day and time via text
- Send a reminder text the day of the new appointment
| Focus | Scope | Key Components | When to Use It? | |
| Customer Interaction Management | Individual interactions between customers and a company | Managing and optimizing specific touchpoints – Phone calls – Emails and texts – Social media messages – In-store interactions | – Omnichannel communication – Personalization – Data collection and analysis – Effective issue resolution – Proactive engagement | When you want each interaction to be efficient, personalized, and contribute to overall customer satisfaction. |
| Customer Journey Management | The entire customer experience, pre- and post-purchase. | – Mapping out entire customer journeys – Identifying pain points and opportunities for improvement – Optimizing the overall experience | – Customer interaction management PLUS – Customer journey analytics – Real-time decisioning | When you want to create seamless, effortless, and enjoyable customer journeys that drive loyalty. |
Build Loyalty and Long-Term Business Growth With CSG Xponent
CSG Xponent is an intelligent customer experience platform that uses real-time data to personalize every touchpoint at an individualized level. It orchestrates departments and channels, anticipating customers’ needs and delivering the right message, at the right time, in the right channel. Powered by a decisioning engine, Xponent leverages real-time insights and analytics to optimize customer journeys. This enables proactive next-best-action recommendations and unified communication across channels, driving higher customer engagement, loyalty and lifetime value.
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