A strong customer experience management strategy can make a real difference to growth. It shapes how people find you, buy from you, and decide whether to come back.

This guide explains what customer experience management is, the parts of a good strategy, and how to keep improving it.

What is customer experience management?

Customer experience management (often shortened to CXM or CEM) is the process of understanding how your customers interact with your business, and then improving those interactions to increase satisfaction and loyalty. It starts with analyzing customer habits: where they discover you, how they shop, where they get stuck, and what makes them return.

The experience doesn’t just happen on your website. It covers every channel where customers meet your business: your webstore, marketplaces, social platforms, email, delivery, and service. It needs to feel consistent across all of them, because customers expect an easy experience wherever they shop.

How to create a customer experience management strategy

A clear strategy keeps your team working toward the same goals. Aiming for a world-class customer experience is the target, and the six areas below are a good place to start.

Convenience

Every extra step between a shopper and checkout is a chance to lose the sale. Make the journey as simple as you can:

1. Offer guest checkout, so shoppers don’t have to create an account to buy
2. Optimize for cross-device shopping, so someone who starts on a phone can finish on a laptop
3. Let returning customers save their shipping and payment details

Manage your selling channels with software

To meet customers where they shop, you need to be on the right channels, and your inventory, orders, and shipping need to be under control on all of them. See our guide to managing your sales channels effectively.

Stock accuracy matters most here. If a customer orders from a marketplace and you don’t have the item, the experience is negative however good everything else is. In the State of Commerce Ops 2026 report, only about a third of retailers rated their inventory visibility across channels and warehouses as excellent (33.2% in the UK and 37.2% in the US). Software that keeps inventory and orders in sync across channels, like Linnworks, helps you avoid those moments.

Flexible payments and frictionless deliveries

Flexible payment options, such as buy now, pay later, give shoppers more ways to complete a purchase, and many retailers add them to reduce abandonment at checkout.

Delivery matters just as much. Shoppers look closely at cost and speed, so offer clear options, including free or threshold-based shipping and click and collect where you can, and be open about delivery times and costs before checkout.

Make returns easy too. Pre-paid returns labels and a clear, easy-to-find policy remove a lot of friction. See our guide to returns management.

Understand your customers

Knowing your customers’ habits is a core part of any CXM strategy. Where do they decide to buy on your site? Where do they drop off?

A customer journey map helps you see the steps a customer takes when they engage with your business. You can have different maps for different paths, such as signing up for a newsletter or buying a product. Start with a simple one that covers the basic funnel (awareness, research, purchase, delivery, and after-sales), then add detail for each stage: what the customer does, how they feel, what frustrates them, and how you can help. Look for the points where several channels are involved, because that’s where customers tend to get lost or repeat themselves.

Incorporate feedback

Once your strategy is in place, use customer feedback to keep improving it. Look for patterns in reviews and comments across every channel, including:

• Online reviews
• Social media
• Emails
• Contact forms
• Phone or chat conversations

Patterns point to where improvements are needed. If customers on several channels say your returns process is hard to understand, that’s the area to fix first.

Post-purchase experience

Don’t forget customers after they’ve bought. Their post-purchase experience can be the difference between building loyalty and losing them to a competitor. It starts the moment they click “buy.” A solid post-purchase journey includes:

• A confirmation email
• Package tracking details and updates
• Regular updates if anything changes
• Details of any loyalty program
• A clearly defined returns process
• An opportunity to sign up for newsletters

Returns are part of the experience, and a big one. NRF and Happy Returns estimated that 19.3% of online sales would be returned in 2025, and 82% of consumers said free returns influence where they shop.

The goal of your strategy is to build loyalty and increase the lifetime value (LTV) of each customer. Making sure the post-purchase experience is part of the plan is essential to that.

Review regularly

Once your strategy is running, revisit it often. Check your original goals, monitor reviews, and look at which areas could be better.

Your strategy should also work alongside your day-to-day tactics. Our guide to the five customer expectations you need to meet covers those tactics: reliable delivery, accurate descriptions, items in stock, good customer service, and after-sales support.

Aim for an easy, consistent experience across every channel, with the goal of meeting and exceeding what your customers need at every stage of their journey.