Connect your customer experience management efforts across the company, and enjoy exponential benefits, according to the 2011 Business-to-Business Customer Experience Management Benchmarking Study.
Companies with managers (of their top five methods to achieve CEM goals) who meet together quarterly or more often for coordination purposes, or have dotted-line reporting to a single executive or committee tend to enjoy advantages* in the following areas:
- Role of CEM: Top management’s day-to-day activities indicating that customer experience is a competitive differentiator, CEM is a formal business process, and CEM is an influencer of major business decisions.
- Voice of Customer: Identify and collect voice of the customer form all the influencers on the buying decision (i.e. initiators, approvers, users, buyers, influencers, gatekeepers, decision-makers). And involve executives in listening to customers, capture front-line employees’ observations of customer sentiment, and capture customer complaints anytime anywhere.
- How We View Customers: Integrate customer feedback sources, analyze integrated customer data, establish a single view of each customer across divisions and regions, use customer metrics to evaluate organizational performance, and include customer metrics in the company’s balanced scorecard.
- How we Focus Employees on Customers: Onboard all employees regarding customer experience programs, review business processes form the customer perspective, use customer metrics in performance reviews, reward customer experience improvement by teams, align incentive pay to customer experience metrics, and create department-level action plans to improve customer experience.
- How we Focus our Business on Customers: Use customer feedback to guide annual operating plan and listen to customer needs prior to product development efforts. And increase funding for cross-organizational collaboration.
Top 5 Methods to Achieve CEM Goals: Study participants named the following customer experience management efforts among their top 5 ways to improve customer experience:
Recommendations: Recommendations for stronger customer experience strategy, cross-organizational cooperation, and business results are provided in the study, which can be accessed at www.ClearAction.biz/benchmarking.
*Companies with managers (of their top five methods to achieve CEM goals) who meet together quarterly or more often for coordination purposes, or have dotted-line reporting to a single executive or committee reported at least 20 percentage points advantage in the performance of holistic customer experience management, as well as strong business results.
Footnotes of coordination graph:
1 or more often for coordination purposes
2 to a single executive or committee
Footnotes of top 5 CEM efforts graph:
1 including user experience
2 including CRM, ERP, data mining
3 not customer-facing
4 dissatisfied to delighted
5 including forums, user groups
6 to increase purchase volume or duration
