CEM (Customer Experience Management) Best Practices
Posted by Rod Morris on Thu, Jul 16, 2009
Last month we completed new research that shows that business leaders are placing more importance on customer experience management during the global economic downturn. Forty-seven percent of respondents said that customer experience management (CEM) was important to them in 2008, and for 2009 this number increased to 63% of respondents. This is evidence that the recession has driven many organizations to focus more closely on understanding how customers are interacting with them, putting increased attention on CEM and Voice of the Customer (VOC) programs.
With our partner CGA, a customer-experience consultancy in the United Kingdom, we surveyed more than 200 organizations between May 20 and June 2, 2009, to determine what the most successful organizations are doing to achieve measurable improvements in customer loyalty.
The results of the Vovici/CGA Customer Experience IQ study strongly show that CEM and VOC programs can be effective at maintaining and increasing customer loyalty even in a very difficult economic environment. We are hosting a webinar on the results of this study, highlighting the seven best practices of organizations with highly loyal customers; you can sign up for this one-hour webcast, Improving Your Organization's Customer Experience IQ, which will be on Tuesday, July 21st, 2 PM ET/11 AM PT: http://www.vovici.com/webinars/20090721.aspx
Research findings from the Customer Experience IQ study also reveal that, out of 24 best practices that were surveyed, possessing a formal customer experience strategy with tactical plans to execute against it is the best practice most highly correlated to high customer loyalty. And what better way to create such a plan than to look at the seven best practices with the highest correlation to customer loyalty?
1. Creating a formal customer experience management strategy and executing against it
2. Integrating customer relationship management data into feedback efforts
3. Including customer ideas for both strategic initiatives and tactical process improvements
4. Defining planning cycles to include formal processes for obtaining customer input
5. Systematically sharing feedback with customer-facing employees
6. Engaging customers in co-creation
7. Sharing Voice of the Customer data across organizational boundaries
These findings help us narrow our advice to organizations seeking to improve customer loyalty. Every organization has finite resources; while it would be wonderful if an organization adopted all 24 best practices, they need to prioritize those that they are not currently doing that will have the biggest impact.
The Vovici/CGA study also shows that organizations with the highest customer loyalty share CEM (Customer Experience Management) and VOC (Voice of the Customer) feedback freely throughout the enterprise. By coordinating feedback efforts, organizations are less apt to repeatedly contact customers with redundant requests, thus eliminating feedback fatigue and keeping customers engaged. Solutions such as Vovici v4 address this by offering a common platform that enables individuals to obtain feedback and easily share it throughout their organization.
Look for more to come from us in the coming weeks as we continue to analyze and present this important research.