At a recent conference I had an interesting discussion with an executive for a large non-profit organization, originally hired to lead the organization's "CRM" activities. Shortly after starting, she changed her job title to include "customer experience."

Why? Because with a "CRM" title, her boss expected that one of the first things to be decided was which CRM system to implement.

The "customer experience" angle allowed her to focus the organization on learning how constituents perceived their experiences—like giving donations, interacting with people, and web visits too.

That took a year.

Now they're driving systems changes with an outside-in approach. Start with what the experience should look/feel like, then figure out what systems and data are required to deliver experiences that will make constituents happy and loyal.

Now, some may say this is what CRM is, or what CRM was supposed to be. Fine, then why did this leader feel...

Fourteen years ago Greg Gianforte launched RightNow out of a spare bedroom at his house in Bozeman, Montana. Not exactly the tech center of the world, one way that RightNow has taken the road less traveled.

At this year's RightNow Summit, Gianforte said that in those early days, email was the hot thing. Some vendors (e.g. eGain) were launching customer service solutions to support that channel. But Gianforte placed his bets on a web-based "self-learning" knowledgebase. Think FAQ on steroids and wouldn't be far off.

Fast forward to 2011, and you’ll find RightNow as a public company ensconced as the leading B2C customer service solution in the SaaS turned Cloud Computing industry. Web self-service is still a core solution, but RightNow has expanded to offer solutions for the agent desktop and added social and...

Forrester Research was kind enough to share a review copy of a new report on The Emergence of Customer Experience Management Solutions, with the catchy subtitle "How CXM Will Help eBusiness Leaders Drive Interactions Across Touchpoints."

Did you catch that? Yes, that's right, a new acronym is born!

Here's how CXM is defined:

A solution that enables the management and delivery of dynamic, targeted, consistent content, offers, products, and service interactions across digitally enabled consumer touchpoints.

My view is that CXM is Forrester's attempt to create some differentiation in the growing CEM technology world. So long as CXM stands for the technology space/solutions and CEM for the methodology, it just might work.

I was happy to see analyst and lead author Brian Walker also write...

Many years ago as a young Business Unit Executive at IBM, I was assigned an account that was expected to develop into a $50M+ opportunity. Or so my quota said! We had a crack team assigned and everyone was busy, but I wasn't entirely sure that our relationship was on track. So, I set up a meeting with the CEO to ask: "How are we doing?"

Although he said everything was "fine," his body language told me a different story. I dug deeper to get the real scoop and, needless to say, we got busy taking action on the CEO's top issues. Ultimately, the relationship prospered beyond our expectations.

Nothing beats a face-to-face meeting to get customer feedback. Some researchers think that words express only seven percent of human communication. The other 93 percent include how the words are spoken to convey emotion and body language such as gestures, posture, eye movement and facial expression. Emoticons...