Does Customer Experience Management Really Work?

Everybody is talking about Customer Experience Management (CEM). Go to a customer-related conference and half of the speakers will be talking about it. But nobody will have the same definition of what it is! And anecdotal evidence aside, none of them will be able to provide hard evidence that it increases customer satisfaction, that it increases customer loyalty and most importantly, that it increases customer cashflows.

And that is not just down to the limits of a 45 minute speaking slot. I have quizzed literally dozens of managers responsible for CEM projects at conferences over the past couple of years and not one, not a single one, had hard evidence that it really works. Many of them had business cases, but they were so full of rosy assumptions and had so few results directly attributable to CEM that they were in effect meaningless. The plethora of recent CEM books don’t help much either. They all view CEM differently, few of them provide much in the way of detailed case studies and none of them describe how to construct a business case for CEM. And neither does the academic literature. A recent search I carried out on Google Scholar revealed only one or two studies into the effects of CEM on satisfaction, loyalty or profitability.

Don't get me wrong. Based upon my own experience implementing customer strategies with blue-chip companies over the past 20 years and the research I carried out into CEM during a six-month sabbatical some years ago, I do believe that CEM can increase customer cashflows if done properly. But I don't see much evidence of the end-to-end, joined-up thinking required to do CEM properly. Instead, I see lots of managers in a hurry to make this exciting new thing, CEM, work in a post-CRM world. And lots of rebranded CRM consultants, or worse, branding consultants, selling their services to those same managers desperate for advice about how to make CEM work.

Why is there so little hard evidence that CEM really works? Is it because like CRM a few years ago, we are still working out what it is? Is it because we are still coming to terms with how to profitably deliver value to customers? Is it because we still don't really understand how customers assess touchpoints, episodes and entire experiences? Is it because we are only just starting to identify the neurobiological roots of experiential perception in customers? Or is it a combination of these things and many more?

So the next time you are thinking it is time to kick-off your first CEM project, take a long-hard look at what we already know about CEM. About what CEM is. About how to make it work. And about how to make it pay back. Only when you understand these things should you start with the project. The time for wishful thinking about CEM is over.

What do you think? Do you have hard evidence that CEM really works? Or is your project running on a wing and a prayer?

Post a comment and get the conversation going.

Graham Hill
Independent CRM Consultant
Interim CRM Manager