One impact of COVID-19 pandemic that is not widely appreciated is the increased focus on customer experience management. Organizations of all sizes quickly realized that landing new customers during a pandemic is extremely challenging while customers are hesitant to buy things from someone they just met on a video conference call. Consequently, many organizations have honed in on driving additional revenue from existing customers.
The challenge organizations encounter is most of them don’t have anything that approaches a real process for consistently managing customer experiences. There may be a team that is tasked with that responsibility, but it is usually made up of customer service representatives and project managers that don’t often directly engage customers unless an issue has arisen. By that time, the customer is usually well on their way to being unhappy.
MetaCX’s Solution
MetaCX, a provider of a namesake customer experience management platform, announced today it will make it simpler for organizations to proactively manage customer experiences via a software-as-service (SaaS) platform that functions as a hub for accessing customer data stored in a wide range of applications. The MetaCX Data Integration Hub integrates with more than 200 data sources, including customer relationship management (CRM) applications from Salesforce, HubSpot and Microsoft Dynamics; analytics tools such as Pendo and Mixpanel, and data warehouses such as Snowflake and Google BigQuery.
The MetaCX Data Integration Hub will then be extended in future updates to make it simpler to aggregate support tickets, contracts and agreements, project details and status updates via a single digital workspace that organizations can later op to embed within a larger set of applications that might make up a digital business process, says MetaCX president Jake Sorofman.
The launch of the MetaCX Data Integration Hub comes on the heels of an alliance with Valuzie, a consulting firm, to create Co.Lab, an entity through which they will help organizations build a prototype of a customer experience management application that could be incorporated into a larger digital business transformation initiative.
MetaCX currently provides a customer experience management platform that provides both organizations and their customers with an overall view of the current status of their relationship that everyone involved agrees on. Via a web interface, customers can easily assess how well an organization is doing in terms of keeping its promises to them. That approach also serves the dual purpose of making it simpler for salespeople to proactively address any customer issue long before they become a major problem, says. “It acts as an early warning system,” he notes.
Managing the Customer Experience
Every minute a salesperson spends trying to keep an existing customer happy is one less minute they have to land a new customer. The truth is many salespeople are more comfortable trying to manage a process on behalf of customers than they are trying to land new business. In theory, a customer experience management platform would significantly reduce the amount of time salespeople spend trying to manage internal processes. Given how often customers are unhappy, it’s clear existing processes are deeply flawed.
It’s a dirty secret in most organizations, but the truth is the sales process in most organizations is fundamentally inefficient. That’s not necessarily anyone’s fault. It’s just the way things have always been. That does not mean, however, it necessarily has to stay that way forever.
