What Is Customer Experience Management (CEM)?
Customer experience management (CEM) is a strategy that focuses the operations and processes of a business around the needs of the individual customer. Companies are focusing on the importance of the experience. Jeananne Rae says that companies are realizing that "building great consumer experiences is a complex enterprise, involving strategy, integration of technology, orchestrating business models, brand management and CEO commitment."
According to Bernd Schmitt, "the term 'customer experience management' represents the discipline, methodology and/or process used to comprehensively manage a customer's cross-channel exposure, interaction and transaction with a company, product, brand or service."
The goal of customer experience management is to move customers from satisfied to loyal and then from loyal to advocate.
In-N-Out Burger
University Tower in Irvine, next to the University of California. This office building is home to the corporate headquarters of In-N-Out Burger. The In-N-Out restaurant chain has developed a highly loyal customer base and has been rated as one of the top fast food restaurants in several customer satisfaction surveys.
Customer experience solutions provide strategies, process models, and information technology to design, manage, and optimize the end-to-end customer experience process.
Why Isn't Customer Relationship Management Enough?
Traditionally, managing the customer relationship has been the domain of customer relationship management (CRM). However, CRM strategies and solutions are designed to focus on product, price, and enterprise process, with minimal or no focus on customer need and desire.
The result is a sharp mismatch between the organization's approach to customer expectations and what customers actually want, resulting in the failure of many CRM implementations.
Where CRM is enterprise-focused and designed to manage customers for maximum efficiency, CEM is a strategy that focuses the operations and processes of a business around the needs of the individual customer.
Companies are focusing on the importance of the experience and, as Jeananne Rae notes, realizing that "building great consumer experiences is a complex enterprise, involving strategy, integration of technology, orchestrating business models, brand management and CEO commitment" (2006).