Customer experience management
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Customer experience management (CEM) describes the processes and methods used to design and manage a customer's entire experience with a product or a company.
Marketing research is said to have shown that about 70 to 80% of all products are perceived as commodities, that is, seen as being more-or-less the same as competing products. Marketers have responded to this in a variety of ways, including: branding, product differentiation, market segmentation, and relationship marketing.
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[edit] A CEM Framework (developed by Santosh)
CEM stresses four aspects of marketing management :
- CEM focuses on all sorts of customer-related issues
- CEM combines the analytical and the creative
- CEM considers both, strategy and implementation
- CEM operates internally and externally
The holistic customer experience is the key to these.
Schmitt's book "Customer Experience Management" offers the following five step framework that should help managers understand and manage the "customer experience":
Step 1: Analyzing the Experiential world of the customer
- analyze sociocultural context of the customer (needs/wants/lifestyle)
- analyze business concept (requirements/solutions)
Step 2: Building the Experiential platform
- connection between strategy and implementation
- specifies the value that the customer can expect from the product (EVP = experiential value promise)
Whereas steps 1 (Analysis) and 2 (Strategy) form the basis for CEM, steps 3, 4, and 5 are focusing on Implementation.
Step 3: Designing the Brand experience
- experiential features, product aesthetics, “look and feel”, e.g. logos
Step 4: Structuring the Customer interface
- all sorts of dynamic exchanges and contract points with customers
- intangible elements (i.e. value, attitude, behaviour)
Step 5: Engaging in Continuous Experiential innovation
- anything that improves end customers' personal lives and business customers' working lives
[edit] Organization of CEM
Organizing for CEM includes three tasks:
- Financial planning of CEM in terms of customers - CEM's ultimate goal is a long-term business relationship between a company and its customers. Customers will reward the company financially by doing business with it. The value of the customer to the firm, referred to as customer equity, will increase.
- Allocation of organizational resources - Improving the customer experience, and thus increasing customer equity, requires internal resources. The company needs to ask what financial, structural, and personnel resources it needs to engage in CEM to deliver an ongoing desirable experience to customers. Resources must be allocated to the brand experience, the customer interface, and innovation.
- Enhancement of the employee experience - The concept of experience applies also to the internal customers, the company's employees. What all employees, across all levels, get from an experience-oriented organization is a more rewarding employee experience that includes a new form of professional and personal development. Employees of such an organization live a more experiential and thus more satisfying and productive life. They are also more motivated and capable of delivering a great experience to customers.
[edit] References
- Bliss, J. (2006) Chief Customer Officer, Jossey-Bass, San Francisco, 2006.
- Pine, J. and Gilmore, J. (1999) The Experience Economy, Harvard Business School Press, Boston, 1999.
- Schmitt, B. (2003) Customer Experience Management, The Free Press, New York, 2001.
- Schmitt, B. and Simonson, A. (1997) In Marketing Aesthetics:The strategic management of brands, identity, and image The Free Press, New York, 1997.
