A growing number of books and articles are actively promoting the concept of Customer Experience Management (CEM).

Popular leaders include Bernd Schmitt, author of Customer Experience Management and Experiential Marketing. Joseph Pine and James Gilmore, co-authors of The Experience Economy have also gained a great deal of exposure. You may have read Managing the Customer Experience by Shaun Smith or Customers.com by Patricia Seybold. You may also have seen articles about and by Harvard Professor Gerald Zaltman, author of How Customers Think.

There are also a growing number of agencies and consultancies claiming expertise in CEM—all with varying degrees of involvement and expertise in the arena.

While there's a clear reason to become a staunch supporter of CEM, there's a great deal of confusion over what it really is. As more individuals get on board the CEM bandwagon and build services, confusion seems to be increasing. It's time to demystify the hype.

Defining CEM

While no individual really "owns" the term "Customer Experience Management," it is often attributed to Bernd Schmitt, who in 2003 defined CEM as "the process of strategically managing a customer's entire experience with a product or company." Building further on Schmitt's definition: "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."

When we look at the nature of Customer Experience Management, there are essentially five key areas that CEM practitioners or "Experience Architects" examine. While these are broken down by consultants in slightly different ways, based on individual methodologies, they can be described, at a high level, as follows:

1. The Customer. CEM analysis focuses on developing a multidimensional understanding of customers. This understanding includes cultural, sociological, behavioral and demographic analysis, and culminates in a detailed ability to articulate the needs, wants, desires, expectations, conditions, context, and intentions of various customer groups. This understanding informs audience segmentation and guides the prioritization of key segments. Customer analysis is proactively benchmarked against a company's capability to meet customer needs—both in a present and a future state capacity.

Customer understanding therefore serves as the primary driver in shaping the business approach, aligning strategy and investment.

2. The Environment. Examining the "landscape for brand discovery" is an essential tenet of CEM. This landscape is composed largely of market conditions, competitive factors, channel use (and channel/cross-channel dynamics), the process for purchasing (steps to buying), the "real" purchasing environment (store, phone, Web, etc.), and the service environment.

Leveraging this knowledge against customer analysis, CEM strategists work with companies to create integrated plans which "order the paths" that customers commonly follow in the purchasing process. These multi-path strategies work to ensure that customers have an intuitive, pleasing experience at every step in the journey to brand discovery.

Subscribe today...it's free!

MarketingProfs provides thousands of marketing resources, entirely free!

Simply subscribe to our newsletter and get instant access to how-to articles, guides, webinars and more for nada, nothing, zip, zilch, on the house...delivered right to your inbox! MarketingProfs is the largest marketing community in the world, and we are here to help you be a better marketer.

Already a member? Sign in now.

Sign in with your preferred account, below.

Did you like this article?
Know someone who would enjoy it too? Share with your friends, free of charge, no sign up required! Simply share this link, and they will get instant access…
  • Copy Link

  • Email

  • Twitter

  • Facebook

  • Pinterest

  • Linkedin


ABOUT THE AUTHOR

image of Leigh Duncan-Durst
Leigh Duncan Durst (leigh at livepath dot net) is a 20-year veteran of marketing, e-commerce, and business and the founder of Live Path (www.livepath.net).