What is customer experience management?

Customer experience management refers to the collection of processes a company utilizes to track, oversee and organize every interaction between a customer and the organization throughout the customer lifecycle. CEM aims at optimizing customer experience through gaining the loyalty of the customers in a multi-channel environment. A company needs to create a strategy that encompasses all customer interactions in order to manage the customer experience.

Customer experience management
Customer experience management

CEM depicts a business strategy designed to manage the customer experience. Moreover, it provides benefits to both retailers and customers. Customer experience management can be monitored through surveys, targeted studies, observational studies and other such methods of research. 

CEM monitoring process
CEM monitoring process

Customer experience management can be related to customer journey mapping. Journey mapping is a design tool used to track customers’ movements through different touchpoints with the business in question. It shows the track starting from the first encounters people may have with the brand continuing through all the different route people can take through the different channels or marketing. Other strategy involved in CEM is integrated marketing communications which involves sending a consistent message amongst platforms such as advertising, personal selling, public relations, direct marketing, and sales promotion.

Customer journey mapping
Customer journey mapping

CEM holds great importance in terms of research. In order to leverage CEM, development into the conceptual and theoretical aspects are needed. The reason behind the interest in CEM increasing so significantly is that businesses are looking for competitive differentiation that makes them stand out of the crowd.  Therefore, they inculcate CEM in order to be more profitable. That is why businesses want to offer a better experience to their customers and want to manage this process efficiently. Researches prove that in order to gain success as a business, customers need to be understood. Academic research along with recognizing past customer experiences can help manage future experiences.

Businesses utilizing CEM
Businesses utilizing CEM