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Encyclopedia > Customer experience management

Customer experience management (CEM) is "the process of strategically managing a customer's entire experience with a product or a company" (Schmitt, 2003, p. 17). This article discusses the general concept of experience. ... This is a list of types of companies, i. ...


Marketing research has 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. This makes marketing the product difficult. Marketers have taken various approaches to this problem including: branding, product differentiation, market segmentation, and relationship marketing. Research covers the search for and retrieval of information for a specific purpose. ... The word commodity is a term with distinct meanings in business and in Marxist political economy. ... Brand management is the application of marketing techniques to a specific product, product line, or brand. ... In marketing, product differentiation is the modification of a product to make it more attractive to the target market. ... Market segmentation is the process of grouping a market into smaller subgroups. ... Relationship marketing is a form of marketing that emerged in the 1980s, in which emphasis is placed on building longer term relationships with customers rather than on individual transactions. ...


Relationship marketing, (also called loyalty marketing) focuses on establishing and building a long term relationship between a company and a customer. There are several approaches that have been espoused including customer experience management, customer relationship management, loyalty programs, and database marketing. A customer is someone who purchases or rents something from an individual or organisation. ... The generally accepted purpose of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is to enable organizations to better serve their customers through the introduction of reliable processes and procedures for interacting with those customers. ...

Contents


CEM's critique of traditional marketing

The development of customer experience management originally started with a critique of three existing marketing concepts. It concluded that the following three concepts do not go far enough:

  • Marketing concept--Since the 1970s there has been a gradual shift from a product-, technology-, and sales-focused orientation towards a customer- and market-oriented approach by determining the wants and needs of customers and satisfying them more efficiently or effectively as compared to competitors. However, the approach is still mostly functional, with similarities and differences between competitors being defined mostly by product features and customer benefits. In addition, the customer is perceived as being rational, which is in most cases not the case, as e.g. Kahneman and Tversky's Prospect theory has proven. Also, it is asserted that market research is mostly analytical leaving little room for qualitative assessments of customer relationhships towards products, services, or brands. It is claimed (by Shultz) that traditional marketing, in practice, takes an inside-out approach (starting with internal variables like production capabilities and available capital then moving to external variables like customer needs), rather than taking an outside-in approach as marketing theory requires.
  • Customer relationship management is claimed to be deficient because it primarily consists of database and software programs used in call centers and thus, focuses too much on quantitative data. By doing this, it is lead by transactions rather than a desire to build lasting relationships with customers.
  • Customer satisfaction is an outcome-oriented attitude deriving from customers who compare the performance or value of the product with their expectations of it. It is claimed that the customer satisfaction approach depends too heavily on outcome oriented measures like satisfaction and too superficially on direct experiential measures. A customer is said to be satisfied when a product's performance is above the cutomer's expectations. Thus, traditional customer satisfaction techniques are deficient if they don't help firms to understand and manage customers' experiences, experiences that lead to the following equation: good experience = satisfaction.

CEM recognizes, as does all of marketing since the early 1970s, that customers are a company’s most valuable asset. What makes CEM different from traditional marketing is that it claims that marketing theory has seldom been implemented adequately. A marketing oriented firm (also called the marketing concept, or consumer focus, or customer focus) is one that allows the wants and needs of customers and potential customers to drive all the firms strategic decisions. ... This article provides extensive lists of events and significant personalities of the 1970s. ... The prospect theory was developed by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky in 1979. ... This article is about the concept in marketing. ... The generally accepted purpose of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is to enable organizations to better serve their customers through the introduction of reliable processes and procedures for interacting with those customers. ... This article is about a term used in economics. ... Value is a term that expresses the concept of worth in general, and it is thought to be connected to reasons for certain practices, policies, or actions. ... Quality refers to the inherent or distinctive characteristics or properties of a person, object, process or other thing. ... In business and accounting an asset is anything owned, whether in possession or by right to take possession, by a person or a group acting together, e. ...


The CEM technique

CEM is a methodology that tries to overcome the gap between theory and practice by reformulating basic marketing principles. The result is that CEM stresses four aspects of marketing management : Marketing management is the practical application of marketing techniques. ...

  • 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

Although all marketing management and strategic management does all of these, CEM supporters claim that they have a methodology that will yield better results. Being convinced that the marketing concept is too product-centered, Customer relationship management too focused on quantitative data, and customer satisfaction too functional, CEM looks for another perspective on the relationship of a consumer with a product or service. And what's key? The experience linked to it is the key. Strategic management is the process of specifying an organizations objectives, developing policies and plans to achieve these objectives, and allocating resources so as to implement the plans. ... A marketing oriented firm (also called the marketing concept, or consumer focus, or customer focus) is one that allows the wants and needs of customers and potential customers to drive all the firms strategic decisions. ... The generally accepted purpose of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is to enable organizations to better serve their customers through the introduction of reliable processes and procedures for interacting with those customers. ... This article is about a term used in economics. ...


This enables companies to strategically manage a customer's experience with a brand and by doing so, achieve a truly customer focused management concept. To accomplish this, a framework is required based on clearly defined company objectives. So far, the following five steps have been suggested in the litarture that should help managers understand and manage the "customer experience":


Step 1: Analyzing the Experiential world of the customer Customer experience management involves five steps. ...

  • analyze sociocultural context of the customer (needs/wants/lifestyle)
  • analyze business concept (requirements/solutions)

Step 2: Building the Experiential platform Customer experience management involves five steps. ...

  • 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 Customer experience management involves five steps. ...

  • experiential features, product aesthetics, “look and feel”, e.g. logos

Step 4: Structuring the Customer interface Customer experience management involves five steps. ...

  • all sorts of dynamic exchanges and contract points with customers
  • intangible elements (i.e. value, attitude, behaviour)

Step 5: Engaging in Continuous Experiential innovation Customer experience management involves five steps. ...

  • anything that improves end customers' personal lives and business customers' working lives

And finally, to bring all pieces together, a holistic approach is required that provides a linkage between the different steps and connects them with the organization:

This article needs cleanup. ... Organizing for customer experience management includes three tasks: Financial planning of CEM in terms of customers - CEMs ultimate goal is a fair and mutually beneficial long-term business relationship between a company and its customers. ...

Examples of CEM

Looking at the current business literature, it appears as if CEM might be following CRM as one of the leading concepts for the years to come. Several books have been written on "Experience" in the last decade and a half, not all of them actually using the term customer experience management. "Experience" authors include Bernd Schmitt, Jerry Zaltman, Pine/Gilmore, Patricia Seybold, Shaun Smith, and Gerhard Schulze to name just a few. The term customer experience management is being used most obviously by Bernd Schmitt. Various leading consultancies now offer CEM Consulting. The generally accepted purpose of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is to enable organizations to better serve their customers through the introduction of reliable processes and procedures for interacting with those customers. ... Patricia B. Seybold, CEO of Patricia Seybold Group, and author of Customers. ...


See also

The Experience Economy, according to B. Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore in their 1999 book of the same name, is an advanced service economy which has begun to sell mass customization services that are similar to theatre, using underlying goods and services as props. ... This is a list of over 200 articles on marketing topics. ...

References

  • 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.
  • Pine, J. and Gilmore, J. (1999) The Experience Economy, Harvard Business School Press, Boston, 1999.

  Results from FactBites:
 
Customer Experience Management (CEM) (950 words)
The art of measuring customer experience and integrating solutions such as Confirmit and Reportal into an enterprise's CRM systems have become a growing trend as businesses look to improve their current practices to achieve their goals.
The art of measuring customer experience is integrating survey and feedback tools and processes throughout an organization to establish ongoing communication channels and ultimately obtain actionable results.
Collecting feedback on customer experience before, during and after each interaction is vital to an enterprise, yet often this feedback is not tracked, measured, or put to use with regards to the company's current processes.
Customer Experience Management Consultants & Consulting (406 words)
Customer Experience Management is a relatively new term with a number of different interpretations in the marketplace.
LRA's customer experience management consultants identify each of these “moments of truth,” ensuring that the company and its people, products, processes and culture are aligned across all of these “touch points” to best serve the customer...
Once there, the future of that customer relationship will be based solely on the quality of that customer experience.
  More results at FactBites »


 

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