Customer Experience Management (CEM)

Customers receive some kind of experience, ranging from positive to negative, during the course of buying goods and services. As such, a supplier cannot avoid creating an experience every time it interacts with a customer.

It has been shown that a customer’s perception of an organisation is formed as a result of their interaction across multiple-channels, not through one channel, and that a positive customer experience can result in increased share of wallet and repeat business.

The goal of customer experience management (CEM) is to move customers from satisfied to loyal and then from loyal to advocate.

The concept of customer experience was first introduced by Pine and Gilmore in their 1998 Harvard Business Review article. They believe that successful businesses influence people through engaging, authentic experiences, that render personal value (Pine and Gilmore 1998).

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."

Customer experience solutions provide strategies, process models, and information technology to design, manage and optimize the end-to-end customer experience process.

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 organisation’s approach to customer expectations and what customers actually want, resulting in the failure of many CRM implementations.

Although CRM is the more traditional approach, one cannot ignore the basic focus on product, price and process. It should be used in partnership with the more modern CEM approach, i.e. first focus internally (CRM) and then externally (CEM). Through the customer relation journey, there must be constant interaction between CRM and CEM processes.