What is Interaction Experience Management (IXM)?
By Smart Communications
Regardless of your industry, customer expectations will (and should) always drive your organization’s innovative investments. When it comes to crafting an exceptional customer communications strategy, staying ahead means more than just delivering information – it’s about creating meaningful interactions that truly resonate with your audience.
Enter Interaction Experience Management (IXM)—a transformative approach that reshapes how organizations collect data from and communicate with their customers. IXM enables personalized, seamless customer experiences across preferred channels, allowing you to scale meaningful interactions like never before.
Watch the video, ‘Introduction to IXM’ to hear more about this topic from Aspire’s Research Director, George Parapadakis.
What is IXM?
IXM, or Interaction Experience Management, is an emerging market segment focused on technologies that facilitate seamless customer interactions across digital channels. IXM covers solutions that transform traditional one-way interactions such as manual or paper-based forms into two-way, interactive conversations. These technologies streamline the process of collecting and managing customer data, ensuring they are efficient, personalized, and consistent.
Industry analysts such as Aspire, Madison Advisors, and IDC have long emphasized that while many companies have made significant strides in improving their customer communications management, many have overlooked the importance of modernizing their forms processes. Traditional forms, whether paper-based or digital, have remained static and disconnected from the broader customer experience strategy. This gap has created friction in interactions, leading to operational inefficiencies and missed opportunities for personalization and growth.
Why IXM Matters Now
With the explosion of communication channels, customers now expect more than just a transactional relationship. They want to interact through their preferred channels, have a streamlined experience, and engage in conversations that feel personal and efficient. Research from our latest Benchmark report found that 83% of customers stated a mobile/web-friendly experience is among one of the most important factors when completing a form.
While businesses historically had a laser focus on reducing costs and minimizing risks, the new obligation is to meet consumer demand by enhancing the experiences they provide. There’s no doubt that the streaming giant, Netflix, and eCommerce king, Amazon, played a large part in guiding how consumers expect to interact with brands. They want their interactions to be fast (instant), personalized, and efficient.
With this expansion of priorities, future-forward organizations are connecting the dots between data collection and communications while simultaneously breaking down the barriers thar prevent data from being shared across the organization and used for consistent, accurate interactions. However, the traditional approach isn’t aligning with these evolving priorities.
Many businesses still gather data via a number of point solutions and manual processes. The data is stored across disconnected systems, limiting their ability to leverage the data to create highly personalized experiences. This not only exposes them to regulatory risk, but it also increases compliance costs and makes for low-quality, unstructured data that requires cleanup before it can be used to offer additional services or make important business decisions.
Do you know which channels your customers prefer to interact on? Access the 2024 Global Benchmark Report to find out how to leverage a multigenerational, omnichannel approach to customer conversations.
Benefits of IXM For Your Business
1. Enhanced Customer Engagement: With the ability to integrate multiple interaction channels, IXM ensures that customers can reach you in the way they prefer, leading to more engaging and efficient touchpoints.
2. Personalized Experiences: IXM technology allows your brand to provide tailored , digital-first data collection experiences, making customers feel like their needs are being met with precision.
3. Relevant High-Quality Data: IXM helps collect and manage data effectively, in a structured format, allowing you to make informed business decisions and improve overall customer satisfaction. Consider that low-quality data may be worse than no data at all, potentially leading to manual cleanup, compliance risk, and ill-informed business decisions that can set your company (or worse, the customer journey) back.
4. Cost Efficiency: Leveraging intuitive forms and self-service applications to facilitate the data collection processes lead to a reduction in expensive calls to customer support/call centers.
5. Reduced Compliance Risk: Errors throughout sensitive interactions—like the collection of personal identifiable information in a healthcare or financial services setting—can put your business at risk, leading to punitive fines and reputational damage. Traditional methods that are managed and overseen by humans are known to be more error-prone than those that are automated.
6. Improved Employee Experience: With such a diverse workforce, including employees working remotely or on a hybrid basis, maintaining and boosting productivity has been at the forefront of business leaders’ minds. Giving staff the right solutions and information they need to effectively manage customer interactions (from wherever they’re working) is a necessity. IXM has the propensity to improve the employee experience by doing just that, which also leads to a better customer experience.
Interested in learning more about IXM? Read ‘Next-Gen Enterprise Data Collection: The Role of Forms in Interaction Experience Management (IXM)’ today.
Conclusion
With 74% of enterprises expanding their CX spend, IXM is the next logical iteration for your customer experience tech stack. If you’re curious about how IXM can specifically impact your industry, stay tuned. In upcoming posts, we’ll delve into industry-specific examples and explore how IXM will elevate your customer relationships.