Customer Value Management (CVM) is widely undervalued in the way we practice customer experience management (CEM). Excellent resources on the CVM topic abound, yet few executives — and even few CEM professionals — are aware of them. Sometimes CVM seems too quantitative or difficult to grasp or implement, but the companies that have distilled customer value management principles are certainly reaping higher value for their stakeholders, especially customers! In addition to step-by-step calculations for customer lifetime value, return on customer, customer equity, customer value-added, and other essential metrics, CVM literature provides practical advice that is absolutely necessary for managing customer experience right.

This article describes the 5th of 10 unique characteristics of customer experience relative to more well-known concepts such as customer satisfaction and retention. The characteristic defined in this article is: Choice — Customer experience is built on trust and mutual respect for variety; share of budget is more important than loyalty.

So you want a relationship with your customer? If one of your greatest hopes is for your brand to be loved by your customers, think about what it takes for your personal relationships to thrive. Since customers (even B2B) are people, they tend to have similar responses to relationship strengths and weaknesses whether the relationship is personal or with a brand. As you know from your own experiences, trust and respect for your choices are at the root of relationship failure or success. Yet, customers' trust of companies is steadily eroding! In fact, U.S. consumers' trust dropped a whopping 8 points from 2010 to 2011 in the Edelman...

What do you think of this theory: As customer-centricity of an organization increases, customer experience management return on investment also increases.

Exploring the Theory
This theory originated as an observation of my own experience as a customer and results of studies that contrast top management's ratings of their own customer-centricity against the perceptions of those executives' customers. Typically five times as many executives think theyre customer centric relative to the number of customers who agree.

Recently I explored this theory with customer centricity experts Jeanne Bliss, Jill Griffin, and Dick Lee in a roundtable discussion that was recorded...

This article is 5th in a series describing 10 unique characteristics of customer experience relative to more well-known concepts such as customer satisfaction and retention. The characteristic defined in this article is: Duration — Customer experience encompasses the point from which customers become aware they have a need until they say that need is extinct.

Customer engagement is really what many of us think of when we use the phrase customer experience management. During the past 15 years, customer-focus efforts have largely emphasized service excellence in contact centers, up-selling in CRM, or affinity-building in NPS or communities or references. While these customer engagement endeavors are subsets of...