Bob Thompson

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...

This week I was honored to present to the annual conference of the CRM Association Japan, organized in Tokyo since 2003 by founder and Chairman Jack Fujieda. It's quite a remarkable achievement, especially considering Jack is also quite active in the open source movement as Chairman of The Open Group Japan. Fujieda is one of those rare people that can balance discussions about business strategy and technology trends with ease.

This time I spoke about what I call CBM - Customer-centric Business Management -- a holistic approach that integrates processes (CRM), experiences (CEM), analytics (VoC and more) and social/collaboration (Social Business). Attendees were quite taken by my characterization of CRM as a "left brain" and CEM as a "right brain" approach to customer relationships, as you can see in this chart.

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Is it my imagination, or is the lifespan of buzzwords shorter these days?

"Social CRM" was coined by Oracle in 2008 to mean collaborative sales using Web 2.0 technologies. Since then, other vendors, consultants and analysts have jumped in like sharks after chum in the water. The culmination: Early this year Gartner predicted a $Billion Social CRM market by 2012.

Really? Can you call something a market if the participants don't want to be in it? Even as interest in social computing applications is accelerating, software marketers are increasingly using "customer experience" or, less frequently, "social business" to peddle their wares.

The problem with Social CRM is two-fold:

1. Tacking "social" on the front of CRM doesn't change the market perception that CRM is about front-office (mainly sales) automation. Salesforce.com is the classic example of a CRM vendor, and is nearly always the first vendor named when I bring up the term "CRM" in conversations...