Customer Experience Management

CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE MANAGEMENT

As far as is known, customers are the company´s most valuable asset and it should be structured and managed around them. But, the ways of retain its customers and recruit new ones are the main challenges any company should know how to face.

At this point, marketing concept, customer satisfaction and customer relationship management (CRM) have been approaches implemented in companies in order to help managers better understand their customers. However, each approach has remained narrowly focused and unnecessarily limiting.

Considering the lack of these processes was necessary to develop a new approach called “Customer Experience Management (CEM)” which is the process of strategically managing a customer’s entire experience with a product or a company. It is an integrated approach of managing customer experience while interacting with the environment, products, services, and employees. CEM is a truly customer focused management concept (not a “marketing” concept).

The Customer Experience Management framework solves a wide range of business problems; it has got five basic steps which can be used to connect with the customer and delivers growth and profitability to the firm.

Step 1: Analyzing the experiential world of the customer.

It provides original insight into the customer´s world. It means that companies need to become more responsive to customers and incorporate customer insight into their strategies and implementations. To do this, companies need to learn how to see the world from the customer´s point of view.

Companies should use the following steps to analyze the experiential world of the customer:

• Identify the precise target costumer for the planned experience:

 Different customer targets require different experiences (business customers vs. Consumers)

 The kind of experience customers want also will reflect whether the purchaser will actually be the user of the product (Purchasers and users)

 How often the customer uses a product, and how loyal is to a given brand (Usage and loyalty groups)

• Divide the experiential world into four layers, using the customer´s perspective:

 The broad-based experience associated with the customer´s sociocultural context or business context.

 The experience provided by the usage or consumption situation of the brand.

 The experience provided by the product category.

 The experience provided by the brand.

• Track the entire experience along all the touchpoints between the customer and the company, from awareness of the product right through its purchase, usage, and disposal.

• Survey the competitive landscape and examine how competition can affect the customer experience (direct competitors, new entrants and, players outside the industry).

Companies should use the appropriate research techniques and collecting the right data to provide true customer insight:

• Conduct research in natural environments.

• Use realistic stimuli to elicit relevant customer responses.

• Encourage customers to imagine a different reality.

Step 2: Building the experiential platform.

This is the key connection point between strategy and implementation. Building this platform has several managerial benefits:

• The experiential positioning: Depicts what the brand stands for.

• The experiential value promise (EVP): Describes, in experiential terms what the customer gets.

• The overall implementation theme: Summarizes the style and content of the core messages that the company will use across all implementations in the brand experience, the customer interface, and the future innovations.

The methodology for arriving at an experiential platform consists of the following three steps:

• Choose an experiential positioning.

• Specify an experiential value promise.

• Create an overall implementation theme.

Step 3: Designing the brand experience.

It includes all the static elements that the customer encounters (the product itself, logos and signage, packaging, brochures, and advertising).

There are three key aspects of the brand experience:

• The product experience: Is the focal point of the customer experience which includes the functional attributes of the product.

• The look and feel: Includes the visual identity (name, logo, signage), packaging, the store design and merchandising, and the graphic design elements on a website.

• Experiential communications: They provide the brand with a noteworthy, experiential personality showing the customer´s

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