Customer experience management (CEM) is the collection of processes a company uses to connect with customers. CEM enables to move customers from satisfied to loyal. Managing customers has always been the main focus of CRM (Customer Relationship Management). CEM is a strategy that focuses on the customer need and involves operations and processes to provide an efficient solutions to individual customer. Thus enabling a tool to connect with customers at every touch point.
It is always necessary to build a well balanced customer experience team and deliver consistent customer experiences. Take the customer's point of view and analyse customer emotions so as to improve customer experience.
Good CEM softwares help businesses to identify their biggest customers and categorize them for sending rewards or promotional offers. Thus engaging customers and market specifically to them. Also CEM programs can measure satisfaction and engagement among employees and take steps to improve if necessary.
In general, below are the five ways how businesses can make use of CEM:
Companies that succeed in delivering consistently positive CEM experiences enjoy increased customer loyalty, customer share and repeat business promoting the company in online and offline channels.
CEM and CRM each tackles a different aspect of the business or customer relationship. Although, it is often said that CRM meets CEM. CEM strategies allow managers to control customer experiences using standard CRM tools.
CEM focuses more on a customer's experience rather than the operational and technical approach that CRM processes tend to take and CEM is considered as a process of creating value to achieve business success in the future. I found this statement in an article which provides a clear understanding of the two terms: "While CEM is about creating the best customer experience, CRM is about managing relationships while focusing on maximizing revenues. CRM is tools geared to manage and analyze customer information, while CEM is tools geared to enable and enhance customer interactions."
And when CEM is combined with CRM it creates valuable, pleasant and memorable interactions. With an effective CRM, CEM can change pure transaction into prodcutive interactions. CEM can also go beyond CRM by moving from recording transaction to building relationship with customer. In another perspective, CRM is essential driver for CEM in terms of interaction, monitoring and customer information recording; since, it is a crucial step toward understanding customers experiential needs and managing the customer interface.