It's time to manage the customer experience

Meet the next three-letter-acronym in CRM: CEM - Customer Experience Management.

It was bound to come. After so many years of focusing on internal CRM processes (how the organization is working with the customer) now it's time to improve the customer's experience in his/her interactions with the organization.

There are many interpretations to this relatively new buzzword (2003), one of them, by Bernd Schmitt, defines CEM as "the process of strategically managing a customer's entire experience with a product or company."

Everyone wants engagement with the customer. But how do you create a positive customer experience, when each customer has his/her own preferences, and they have different preferences when it comes to different types of transactions.

Right now most organizations don't have these answers. We have only began to scratch the surface on this important area. But I think that we will see pretty soon that companies who can consistently provide a positive customer experience throughout all their touch points with their customers will have a distinct competitive advantage.

After a couple of difficult years, the CRM Israeli market is picking up (10% annual growth). While early CRM projects in Israel (2001-2004) focused on the operational part, in recent years we have seen the focus of CRM projects move to analytical initiatives. I estimate that the next phase will be all about managing customer experience, and the next big challenge is focusing on the touch points with the customer ("Collaborative CRM" or as I like to call it "multi-channel" CRM)– organizations will focus on the channels in which the organization talks to the customer.

These points of interaction include Call Centers, Web, Email, SMS/MMS, and direct mail. In the past CRM projects were all about the internal processes of an organization while dealing with the customer across the service, sales and rarely also marketing touch points. Future projects will force organizations to adopt the customer’s point of view – how does the customer talk to the organization? Or in other words – managing the customer experience. We are already getting a lot of questions from large Israeli organizations with more mature CRM practices about the management of a multi-channel approach towards customers.
Next big spenders in the Israeli CRM market that will enter new CRM projects during 2008-10 are: Insurance & Capital investment companies, and SMBs.