Customer Experience Management: A Revolutionary Approach to Connecting with Your Customers

by Bernd H. Schmitt

In Customer Experience Management, renowned consultant and marketing thinker Bernd Schmitt follows up on his groundbreaking book Experiential Marketing by introducing a new and visionary approach to marketing called customer experience management (CEM). In this book, Schmitt demonstrates how to put his CEM framework to work in any organization to spur growth, increase revenues, and transform the image of your company and its brands. From retail buying to telephone orders, from marketing communications to online shopping, every customer touch-point offers companies an opportunity to maximize the customer experience and establish a bond that will never be broken. Customer Experience Management introduces the five-step CEM process, a comprehensive tool for connecting with customers at every touch-point. This revolutionary marketing guide provides cases of successful CEM implementations in a wide variety of consumer and B2B industries, including pharmaceuticals, electronics, beauty and cosmetics, telecommunications, beverages, financial services, and even the nonprofit sector.

A must-read for senior executives, marketing managers, and anyone who wants to drive growth, increase income, and spur organizational change, Customer Experience Management demonstrates the power of collecting truly relevant customer information, developing and implementing winning strategies, and measuring their results.

258 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2003

Reviews

[Kumar · Rating 3 out of 5]

While the examples and content are getting a bit dated the idea that marketing should be centered around customer experience remains very relevant.

Bernd proposes the Customer Experience Management framework. This starts off with analysis of the customer's experiential world - identifying the targeted customer, understanding their experiential world (socioeconomic context, consumption, product category experience, brand experience), tracking the experience through all touch points and reviewing the competition. He emphasizes qualitative techniques that observe customers in their natural habitat, proposes use of stimuli like 3D display boards and assess desirable future outcomes.

This research then feeds the strategy step focused on developing the experiential platform - the experiential positioning, the experiential value proposition and the overall implementation theme.

This platform in turn informs the three implementation steps - the brand experience, customer interface and continuous innovation. The Brand Experience components include the product experience (focused on the experiential features), the look and feel or brand identity and the experiential communications (ads focused on ESP: Experiential Selling Proposition). The customer interface should focus on appropriate and integrated essence and flexibility, style and substance and time. Innovation be it a major one, a small/experience innovation or a marketing innovation, should put customer experience at the center.

Emphasis should be given to integration and overall organizational structure that supports the CEM project.

[Stephen · Rating 4 out of 5]

READ DEC 2013

Good piece on CEM.