FizTrade: A Customer Experience Management Case Study

Tom Grounds, CIO, Dillon Gage Metals

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Tom Grounds, CIO, Dillon Gage Metals, Tom Grounds serves as the CIO for Dillon Gage Metals, an international wholesale trader in the precious metals market. As an engineer of complex softw... More >>

Customer experience management (CEM) plays an important role in the successful implementation of technology that directly affects how customers interact with global organizations. Also known as UI/UX, it can be defined as the practice of managing and improving an organization's customer touchpoints and interactions. The effort combines technology, strategies and resources to significantly improve customer satisfaction and loyalty, ultimately leading to increased revenue.

One of the leading technology specific websites, TechTarget, defines CEM as:

“A collection of processes a company uses to track, oversee and organize every interaction between a customer and the organization throughout the customer lifecycle. The goal of CEM is to optimize interactions from the customer's perspective and, as a result, foster customer loyalty.”

The most notable CEM include software platforms or suites produced by enterprise software vendors while others are custom developed. Increasingly, the successful integration of client-facing applications requires tools that bring data from disparate systems and delivers to clients in real time. The adoption and implementation of a CEM approach can unify a company’s effort to keep their customer at the top of mind and lead to long-term retention and customer satisfaction.

A well-defined, customer-focused approach delivers value across multiple dimensions and delivers a high return on investment. CEM platforms, especially custom-developed ones, can:

• Provide a user experience so strong that they never want to interact with your company in any other way.

• Give clarity to the business about customer issues across all product lines, channels and market segments.

• Provide leaders and teams across the business with full visibility to which areas of the business are most positively and negatively impacting customer satisfaction.

• Provide internal consistency as the organization measures experience using the same metrics.

• Offer a leading indicator of business performance by measuring customer satisfaction across customer interactions and the relationship.

At Dillon Gage Metals, we’re in the business of trading physical gold, silver, platinum and palladium on an international scale with wholesale and institutional clients. We embarked on a mission to create a CEM platform several years ago that is paying some serious dividends years later. FizTrade is our CEM platform and serves as our online trading and business management portal that links our customers directly to the Dillon Gage Metals market-making engine.

FizTrade provides our customers with market prices for physical precious metals on a platform that allows for seamless trading, management of fulfillment services and point-of-sale tools. For greatest flexibility, the platform is available via web browser and iPhone and Android mobile applications.

FizTrade, as a CEM, was proprietarily designed with extensive input from customers. The most important part of designing these systems is to include your core customers in the design of what they need. In addition to offering the basic trading and management tools, there are several other features designed to create both ease of use and a lasting bond with its user base. These features, which are tied directly into the trade of the precious metals industry, include:

• Access to the IRA management platform, which allows dealers to streamline and track their clients’ IRA process
• Order management and the ability to update shipping information and track orders
• Push notifications regarding orders received and shipments initiated
• Visibility regarding receipt of account payments
• Ability to set alerts for premium changes or target metal prices
• Analytics to assist with business monitoring and management

The end goal of the FizTrade platform, and any CEM software, is to exceed customer expectations by providing an intuitive process with which they could transact business more expeditiously and efficiently than ever before. If you ask your customers, they will tell you what they need. That is at the core of CEM.