What is Customer Experience Management?

My job title is Director, Customer Experience. So what do I do? Better yet, what am I supposed to do?

My background includes organizational development and strategic human capital management (often called talent management, but not the kind that represents entertainers). In those roles I would approach this problem by completing a job analysis. I might use the Hay Methodology or I might use critical incident debrief or I might just Google for awhile to get things started. Of course, the path of least resistance is to search the Internet so that it where I started when I was hired.

Now, I know that I was hired because Silver Hill Financial likes to capture strong talent when they find it on the street (and then figure out how they can add value) and they liked my work with customer-impacting processes, systems, and people while at PQS, Mundo Strategies, and Royal Caribbean. What I did not know about was this field called Customer Experience Management that they kept talking about. They had a few specific projects that were assigned to me right away. I filled the rest of my time with understanding the business and researching CEM.

What I found was fairly interesting. Clearly, the field of Customer Experience Management is fractured or simply immature. So many vendors of so many disparate products and services were all claiming to be CEM experts and service providers (e.g. ResponseTek has Google's current #1 ranking but only sells opt-in surveys and analysis). However, each of them had very narrow views of what CEM is. (Their definition of CEM just happened to be exactly aligned with what they were selling, but I am sure that must have just been coincidence.) I learned that:

1. CEM is really just another term for Customer Relationship Management (CRM) - at least that is what Wikipedia would have me believe.
2. CEM is really NPS (net promoter score) according to Fred Reichheld's fans.
   
3. You can get a certification in CEM, which results in a lot of ideas.
   
4. CEM is "the process of strategically managing a customer's entire experience with a product or a company" according to brand guru Bernd Schmitt.
5. CEM "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" according to prolific blogger Leigh Duncan.
6. CEM "combines research insights and experience design expertise to measure and enhance each of these "moments of truth," based on what is most important to the customer"according to LRA Worldwide, which seems to have the most complete view of the work that needs to be done.

The deeper I dug, the more I turned up. If you are in the customer service department then your vendors are telling you that they have Customer Experience Management solutions. If you are in marketing then your vendors say the same thing. If you are in product or store design, the same. Call center, the same. Sales, the same. IT, the same (especially if you are in charge of the company's Internet or mobile phone site). HR, the same...

HR, you ask? Well, yes, HR is the department that makes sure you hire, train, and reward people that deliver exceptional "moments of truth". If you don't believe me, just ask the HRIS software vendors!

However, I also found vendors that are starting to use research to point out that competitors are not being accurate in their claims of Customer Experience Management excellence. For example, the call monitoring companies that claim to provide the best CEM solutions started attacking the CRM software vendors by pointing out Gartner research showed that 55% of CRM implementations actually drive customers away. (See my favorite CRM demo here.) Vendors of alternative survey questions have attacked NPS. Customer service solution providers have been attacked because the teams they serve are often called after a service failure, which is reactive instead of proactive. In fact, if you look for articles that debunk Customer Experience Management or attempt to expose the myths, you can spend several hours reading online.

I am left with my original question. What is Customer Experience Management? It seems that the answer is short, but very broad. Customer Experience Management is the active management of all aspects of a company that have any impact on the customer at all. Suddenly, we realize that decisions made by executives that lead to lower employee morale have an adverse impact on our customer's experiences. When we inadvertently put incorrect information on our website or a press release then we have hurt the experience. When we actively monitor references to our company in the press and online we are engaged in CEM. When we ensure that new hires who may contact or be contacted by our customers have the right "price of admission" competencies we are managing the customer experience. When we record and score calls made by our contact center we are actively managing the experience. When we streamline a process that reduces cycle time by 3.4% we have improved our customer's experience. When we switch to recycled plastic containers because research indicates that our most profitable customers are "green" then we are using great customer experience management. The list goes on and on. CEM requires a passion for the customer's experience by the company's executives and everyone else. It has to be ingrained in the culture and a part of every decision. That is what Customer Experience Management is.