Customer Experience Management

“Today, the number of companies that understand how to stage impressive experiences for their customers are few. Tomorrow, those that don't get it right will struggle. In a world where products and services can be quickly copied and improved by your competitors, the kind of customer experience you deliver remains the true differentiator that will determine whether you keep (grow) or lose your customers.” ATG

Shaw and Ivens, in their first book ‘Building Great Customer Experiences’, said that “71% of senior business leaders say that the Customer Experience is the next competitive battleground.” … their latest research however now says that “this figure has now increased to 95%”!

The strategic logic that underpins our Customer Experience Management (CEM) initiatives:

We subscribe to the ‘Two Birds with One Stone’ Customer Experience Management strategic logic (developed by Reg Price , a subject matter expert of SRD Group and Don Schultz, a professor of marketing at Northwestern University in the US ). It argues that two strategies must be employed in order to maximize growth from a customer base - these are the “two birds”.  The first strategy must be to reduce dissatisfaction by meeting the basic expectations of customers.  To do so reduces the number of “detractors” - negative customers who tend to leave for a competitor and bad mouth the offending firm.

Fixing the problems that cause such dissatisfaction will not in itself, however, overcome the ambivalence customers feel towards a provider.  This requires another strategy altogether aimed at making a company stand out above the rest.  This is the second “bird” in the two birds with one stone strategy.  We like to use the term “spiky experience”.  Creating an experience of the spiky kind requires a dedication to making the process memorable and compelling in some way.  The best proponents of this do not try to be great at everything.  They reliably do one (or just a very few) special brand-reinforcing thing(s) that is distinctive, relevant and involving for customers.

To deliver on these two strategies requires consistency more than anything else.  Customers need to know what to expect and to get it reliably over time.  The “stone” in this logic is “consistency”.

Is Customer Experience Management (CEM) worth it?

We get asked this question all the time.  So consider the graphic below:

How do we go about it?

There are 4 distinct stages to our Customer Experience Management programmes and these are outlined below. Our involvement at each stage can vary depending on the organisations capabilities and resources and we are happy to discuss other options that clients might want to explore.

The concepts of a Customer Experience and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) are related. We offer some frameworks that help our clients understand the distinctions and similarities, so that it is straight forward to get to practical action. See Customer Experience Research and Reviews, Customer Experience Improvement Programmes, Designing Customer Experiences.