Lifelong customer loyalty is the ultimate frontier for true market leadership in today’s competitive marketplace. Vivek Dayal explains how Customer Experience Management can be used as an effective means to achieving this end

There is a new business strategy supported by an integrated technology platform that promises to enable organisations to capture and understand their customer experiences and build lasting brand loyalty. Simply put, it involves ensuring a uniform (pleasant) experience for customers across all touch points by “listening”, “responding” and “leading”. This is what Customer Experience Management is all about.

What it effectively does is to capture, evaluate and analyse the customers’ experiences, thus allowing organisations to continuously improve and suitably tailor their business processes so as to establish sustainable competitive advantage. It utilises the information provided during customer interactions and helps them provide a holistic approach in order to create and develop a stronger brand through enhanced customer loyalty.

CEM promises to redefine the traditional competitiveness of the 4Ps of the marketing mix and cement Customer Loyalty as the ultimate frontier for true market leadership.

Powerful tool
What CEM has given the industry is a powerful tool aimed at making every interaction a memorable experience where both “substance” and “style” are important as means to an end of generating lifelong brand loyalty.

The benefits are manifold. Not only does an organisation become a “listening” organisation but also a place of continuous progression. This results in both short-term and long-term benefits:

• Management becomes closer to its customers by understanding their needs. It helps them manage their business better by making informed decisions.
• Customer management gets a fresh lease of life and customers’ expectations are matched with great finesse.
• Service agents become more responsive to customers’ requirements, making every interaction perfect.
• Interaction centre agents, empowered by tools, techniques and practices are free to take decisions for additional needs to leave maximum impact.
• Data becomes a knowledge bank.
• Companies gain a “360 degree” view of the customer experience, through a combination of internal analysis and external customer surveys.
• There are improved business processes within the organisation.
• Loyalty of customers is enhanced.
• There is increased top-of-mind recall.

Who’s it for?
Who then should be responsible or concerned about CEM? The answer is simple. Any decision-maker, who has the powers vested in him, must have information of the customers’ experience in order to take better and informed business decisions. Therefore, just about everyone who is in the business is a CEM stakeholder. Those who have the difficult job of nurturing customers, ensuring their optimal satisfaction and loyalty, should religiously be CEM practitioners.

What types of organisations should implement CEM? In this age of cutthroat competition, where the level of customer loyalty cheers one—every organisation, whose commitment to quality customer service is a priority, should be the foremost proponents of CEM. Those who implement CEM will derive the benefits. Those who choose not to implement it will suffer competitively and lose the race in the long run.

The implementation of CEM should be an integral proposition in every organisation’s business map. It will help serve all the strategic goals and will be a key component in building a fast, formidable, responsive and effective business edifice to meet the challenges of the new millennium.

Choosing a CEM system
The challenges in choosing the right CEM system are of equal importance and should be met with the right mix of considerations. Important considerations include:

Personalisation: The usage and preferences of a customer should be taken into consideration to immediately provide what he/she wants. By design, multi-language content and content based on demographic needs must be provided. The CEM system will need to be pro-active and even provide a differentiated service to those customers who show brand loyalty and keep coming back.

Multi-channel capability: The system should be able to cater to customers coming through different touch-points. The ability to deliver information must not be hindered by the customer’s interface. This multi-channel facilitator must ensure a pleasant, uniform and enjoyable experience.

Immediate gratification: The CEM system must be able to dynamically provide content that is relevant to the customer and keep up with the speed of change in the marketplace.

Integration & interoperation: These are required in terms of technology as well as workflow. The CEM solution one chooses must enable seamless integration with the existing IT and Telecom systems. It should not be left to perform as a stand-alone, non-integrated element in this environment. It should support and enhance the current business workflow, and not necessitate a fundamental change or re-design.

Modularity and extendibility: The solution should offer a wealth of functionality, but only if or when you need it. There is no reason to invest in functionality that one will not be using in the coming two years. The CEM system must have the ability to make functionality available when it is needed. Alternatively, the process of adding functionality should be simple, natural and quick.

Scalability: The solution needs to be scalable so that as your business grows it continuously scales to serve you and doesn’t require a complete makeover or replacement to support your environment.

Leadership, strength and innovation: More than just a technical solution, CEM represents a business approach as well. So any vendor of CEM needs to deliver both ends of the stick. The vendor should have a sound, leading-edge technological product and vision, with the ability to provide support throughout the implementation process, both on the product as well as business side. The vendor should also have a sound financial background that one can count on for future investment and growth.

Durability: As CEM becomes an element with growing importance to the business, it is increasingly important that the CEM solution be durable and designed to offer 24/7 availability, 365 days a year.

Established client services: As technology leads the applications, Client Services plays an increasingly important role in the implementation of a CEM solution and in ensuring that the business is continuously benefiting from it. Client Services no longer means just customer support. It should encompass professional services to tailor the product to one’s unique requirements, consulting services to ensure that the implementation of CEM is optimised for the environment and needs, and training services to guarantee that the solution is being pushed to its extreme.

Conclusion
It is high time companies start seeing the world through their customers’ eyes in order to maintain the competitive edge. Once this is done, it’s amazing what can be discovered. In today’s world, CEM is one last secret weapon that sharpens the ability to influence customers’ hearts and minds to favour one brand over another. Building lasting customer loyalty provides a true, sustainable competitive edge. No wonder then that Customer Experience Management features as one of the important business imperatives today.

Vivek Dayal is global head for corporate communications at the MphasiS BFL Group. He can be contacted at vivek.dayal@mphasis.com