Seeking Most Credible Customer Experience Management Certification

Graham Hill

Broaden Your Search a Bit

Rachel

Daryl makes a very important point.

There are more vendors of CEM training out there than meets the eye. And not all of the training on offer is really worthy of the name. Don't be fooled by clever advertising and endorsements. Much of the training is shallow and superficial, and of less educational value than reading through a good CEM book and mapping out your own approach with your team. And don't be fooled by the "certification" on offer either. There are no standards bodies for CRM or CEM, so certification is just meaningless marketing hype.

There are no blue-chip universities offering CEM executive training that I am aware of. In their absence, take a look at the consulting companies that sit behind the authors of the best books on CEM to see what they have to offer. They often have training programmes too. Contact them to find out.

Far better to hear about CEM from an expert author with years of deep CEM consulting and a bona fide consultancy behind them, than from a training company that has never actually implemented CEM itself. And as the majority of the training effect occurs back in the workplace after the training has been completed, you will need post-training support (sometimes quite detailed hands-on support) from them over the next 12-18 months, as you start to implement what you learnt. This is something that training companies do not provide.

Who are the best CEM authors, what books did they write and what consulting companies sit behind them? I have consulted in CEM for clients of all sizes over the last seven years. Here is the list of books that sit on my shelf and that I use in my own consulting.

Bernd Schmitt
Customer Experience Management (and other books)
the Ex Group
http://www.exgroup.com/

Colin Shaw
Building Great Customer Experiences (and other books)
Beyond Philosophy
http://www.beyondphilosophy.com/

Lou Carbone
Clued In: How to Keep Customers Coming Back Again and Again
Experience Engineering
http://www.expeng.com/Default.htm
Carbone also works with IBM too.

Shaun Smith & Joe Wheeler
Managing the Customer Experience (and other books)
(Smith) Shaun Smith + Co
http://www.shaunsmithco.com/
(Wheeler) The Forum Corporation
http://www.forum.com/

Michael Dunn
Building the Brand-Driven Business
Prophet
http://www.prophet.com/

There are others, but these are by far and away the best. They all contain frameworks to help you think through how to analyse, design, plan and implement CEM.

I have looked at each of Lior Arussy's books when they first came out. Sadly, I found them somewhat biased towards customer service, and shallow and uninspiring to boot. I cannot recommend the Strativity Group's new CEM course for this reason.

Perhaps the most innovative thinker in the CEM space today is Chris Lawer of the OMC Group. Although not published (unless you count a PhD thesis), Chris has done more to expand CEM to include Customer Co-Creation than anyone else I know. If you think of what P&G's A G Lafley said about brands needing to let go at the 2007 ANA conference(http://customerlistening.typepad.com/customer_listening/2006/10/pg_boss_...), you will understand where Chris is coming from. And I know he gives CEM training courses based upon his unique approach too.

Chris Lawer
OMC Group
http://www.theomcgroup.com/index.htm

And don't forget Paul Greenberg of BPT Partners. Paul and the BPT team are CRM authors, experienced consultants and BPT Partners is a visionary training company too.

Paul Geenberg
CRM At The Speed of Light
BPT Partners
http://www.bptpartners.com/

As I see you work in the advertising industry (for Javelin Direct), perhaps it would be best to start looking at Bernd Schmitt, Shaun Smith and Michael Dunn's books and companies as a start point. They all come at CEM from the "Brand the Customer Experience" perspective, rather than the opposite "Experience the Real Brand as the Customer Does" perspective.

If you don't find anything you are looking for. Don't forget that it is possible to have a CEM course custom developed for you. There are a number of experienced CEM consultants who would do this for you. Silvana Buljan of Smartworxx (http://www.smartworxx.com/com/home/index.htm) has done this for telecoms/business school clients for example. And you would own the IP on the resulting course. That would mean you could reuse it internally, with your advertising clients and with Javelin Direct's advertising partners ad infinitum. At no extra cost.

Please let us know what you decide to do.

PS. free to contact me at graham[dot]hill[at]web[dot]de if you want more guidance on selecting suitable training. I ran part of the biggest CRM/CEM training project in Europe (10,000 staff, 85 trainers, 18 months) and CRM/CEM consultant traing for PwC in a previous job), so I have some experience about what to look for in good CEM training and post-training support.

Graham Hill
Independent CRM Consultant
Interim CRM Manager