Making the Transition From CRM to CEM

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Customer Experience Management (CEM or CX) is the new buzzword when it comes to boosting sales. CEM will eventually replace Customer Relationship Management (CRM), but what is it really? 

 

CEM combines a customer’s individual experience in one single transaction with the totality of experiences across all touch points and channels throughout the customer-supplier relationship. It drills down to an individual customer’s needs, remembers past purchases, adapts to buying behaviors and conversationally engages customers by leveraging  the power of today’s emerging interactive social technologies.

 

The truth is, CEM is not as new as it sounds. It’s basically respecting the individuality of customers and exploiting new technologies to achieve that end. CEM was born from a need by customers to take a greater role in the sales process. "After decades of being managed and forced to adapt to companies' internal business processes, consumers have had enough," explains Andrew Hull, director of Product Marketing at RightNow. "They are unleashing their power on the social web and it is rapidly gaining momentum."

 

A 2011 Bloomberg Businessweek survey revealed that "delivering a great customer experience" has become the new benchmark. Over 80 percent of the companies polled rated customer experience as a top strategic objective. A Forrester study entitled The Customer Experience Quality Framework, noted that the quality of the customer experience impacts loyalty (81%), advocacy (81%) and increased spending (73%).
 
While CRM remains the “data engine” upon which CEM is built, companies need to jettison the traditional CRM sales paradigm. "Businesses that ignore this and don't look beyond internally focused customer relationship management systems (CRM) to externally focused customer experience solutions (CX) will not survive," said Hull. 
 
"CEM is a 'set of applications and methods that turn visibility of each and every customer's experience over time and across all moments of interaction into tangible business advantage,'" notes Anandan Jayaraman, chief product and strategy officer at Connectiva Systems.
 
CEM technologies unite these silos of customer data and turn them into useful sales tools. "Too often, the datastreams that paint the total customer picture exist in silos," said Cheryl Flink, vice president of customer experience solutions for Market Force Information. "Marketing collects satisfaction and social media data. Operations collects mystery shop data. Merchandising collects competitive pricing information," she explained. "That can create chaos with stakeholders in different silos seeing only a part of the elephant. Without integrating the datastreams, it's difficult to know where to focus in order to improve the experience," she said.
 
CEM engages customers in a way that is both personal and proactive, using today’s emerging social-tech tools. Adopting CEM can result in more referrals, higher brand loyalty, a larger slice of the customer pie, and more repeat business. 
 
Image courtesy of FloatingLemons/FreeDigitalPhotos.net
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  • Alex Kecskes
    Alex Kecskes •
    Daniel: Vision Critical has launched a new customer experience management platform that collects and integrates data from customer surveys, CRM, transactional databases and social media to provide companies with a real time overview of the service they are providing. The firm said that the new CEM platform allows users to organise, analyse and share feedback with decision makers within the company, eliminating the need for someone to advise on how to distribute findings.
  • Daniel H
    Daniel H •
    What you say makes sense but I don't understand how CEM/CX  intigrates all this data?
  • Alex Kecskes
    Alex Kecskes •
    Thanks for your comments, Terry and David.
  • Terry S
    Terry S •
    Agree:  CRM systems are great tools for marketing to track and measure campaigns over multiple channels and for companies to keep track of and to easily access information about the customers or clients the business is dealing with. The Sales Automation Force (SFA) software and contact management software still needs to be customized to enhance the buying experience during and after the buying process.  Referrals and enhanced customer experience are increasing the Customer Lifetime Value (LTV) exponentially.
  • David V
    David V •
    Awesome info byte. Thanks for giving up a core relationship mantra. I have been living on the outside way too long and desire total information silos, to secure the potential for a more loyal customer base. THANK YOU !

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