As a Technical Architect in CDW Services Research and Development, I work with all kinds of technologies daily. One of our newest services is Cisco’s Webex Experience Manager, or WXM. I did not know much about customer experience management until starting and immersing myself in this technology.

Some readers may have heard of a product called CloudCherry, which Cisco had bought and added to their lineup of cloud-based services. This service, rebranded Webex Experience Manager, can connect to an organization’s contact center products, from Webex Contact Center to on-premises contact center enterprise. So, what is this product and what does it do for your organization? I’m going to share with you what I learned.

So, what is experience management, and why is it so crucial to your business anyway? Well, to put it simply, it is all about brand management and making sure every aspect of your business delivers customer satisfaction and employee satisfaction. Most of us have received surveys either through email, text messages, web chat, postal mail or after a voice interaction with a company. These items drive experience management, but it does not end there.

To get the best bang for your buck, you need data and lots of it. Cisco Webex Experience Manager is an open API system that is able to receive data from just about anywhere.

Now that we have the basics down, what does it mean to you? Think about a time that you interacted with an organization and had a bad experience. How likely are you to do business with that organization again? If it gave you a survey, you are more apt to respond, as people are inclined to after a negative experience. When something goes poorly, you want someone, anyone, to hear what the problem is.

Now, if the organization apologized for what went wrong in response to that survey, offered you some kind of inducement for your pain, that bad interaction might be turned into a positive interaction. Maybe a negative tweet gets updated, reflecting that this company cares about its customers.

That is experience management – in a world of social media influence, every interaction receives more scrutiny, and competition in the marketplace is fierce. To help a brand stay relevant with its external and internal clients, it must adopt an experience management mentality. At its heart, that is what Cisco’s Webex Experience Manager is, changing the way a company interacts with customers.

So, what are the ROI factors for transitioning into this new way of thinking about business? That is what the data will tell us using some analysis.

Data is what fuels experience management. To see what is going on you need to have data to review. Also, it is important to note that you need to have data over a period of time. We need to have many points of interactions with customers. Companies that are created today with an experience management mentality start collecting that data right away. For older companies, it is not too late; you need to begin collecting data and import relevant data you may already have.

For readers old enough to remember percolating coffee pots, it took time to get your coffee, but the longer you waited the more robust the coffee was. Experience management is the same way; it is a journey that requires organizations to pivot and change as the data reveals the ebbs and flows of customer satisfaction. Once you have this data, the platform will allow you to analyze and may even recommend actions. 

Once you have access to the data, you can begin to look at things like net promoter score (NPS) or customer effort score (CES). These allow you to analyze trends over time, finding themes in a theme river to show intersections in your data points. All of this helps an organization see what is really driving its experience, and through the data you get a very accurate picture of what levers you can pull to change the way you do business.

You can easily join data and use the built-in statistical functions to show what interactions are driving good and bad customer satisfaction. Depending on the license you buy, you can also have access to some insightful predictions and slider-based modeling of the expected outcomes when making changes to those levers.

For instance, suppose you added more agents to a call center and lowered the time to answer. Cisco Webex Experience Manager can show you the value of doing such a thing. It may not be as impactful as you thought, and knowing these predictions can save you from a costly mistake, as increased headcount typically adds to your expenses. Maybe training representatives in key areas of the business will have a bigger impact.

There are three flavors of licenses: Listen, Analyze and Predict, each of which has the same base features and incrementally increased capacity as you go up in tiers. The Predict license is what gives you the ability to do easy AI analysis of your data, and allows you to do the predictive analysis through AI engines like IBM Watson.

I hope I’ve provided a good introduction to experience management and Cisco’s Webex Experience Manager, what it is at its core. Business and purchase decisions are not always about what is the cheapest; sometimes customers are willing to pay more for a great experience that they can trust. And trust is what drives brand management and leads to great customer experiences.

Scott Petersen is a Contact Center Technical Architect for CDW’s Services Research and Development team. Scott has experience in data center, contact center, wide area network and switching technologies. He is a graduate of the Lean Sigma Six Greenbelt program, as well as an AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner and a Webex Contact Center Expert.