Play by the Rules with Customer Experience Management

With increased competition and reduced brand loyalty, businesses are searching for unique ways to attract loyal customers. While most organizations already have vast amounts of information about their customers, a huge challenge lies in finding needles of information in a large field of haystacks and then determining how to make the most of it.

That's where customer experience management (CEM) solutions come into play. These solutions help companies reach customers with personalized messages during their "window of desire," enabling them to convert interest into sales and interactions into relationships.

Organizations should keep several things in mind as they look into implementing these customer experience strategies.

Sensitivity and relevance

Rolling out these distinctly customer-focused services requires care and sensitivity. While organizations must access sensitive customer data to offer such a personalized experience, it is imperative that they not misuse it. This is a balancing act: Businesses need to get close to their customers to present them with valuable offers, but cannot get too close, or their customers will feel they have no privacy at all.

The other element to consider is that organizations must present only those offers that are relevant to their customer at the moment the offer is presented, which requires an acute awareness of what offers are relevant at any given moment. The restaurant voucher that arrives long after lunch possesses little relevance compared to the one that arrives the moment after the customer has finished shopping and is contemplating lunch. Similarly, an offer for a discount on clothing purchased from the same department store might be annoyingly irrelevant after your customer just completed a purchase, but would be delightfully relevant if you sent it to him/her the moment he/she arrives at the shopping mall.

The salient question, then, is what does a service provider need to do to achieve timely, relevant outreach?

Customer data: What do you need to make outreach possible?

At a fundamental level, businesses need to have an idea of what kind of information they actually have about their customers. By looking