The phrase “customer experience management” (CEM) gets thrown around a lot these days. While everyone who works in the context of the contact center has heard the phrase, not everyone could tell you precisely what it is.

Blogging for Avaya (News - Alert) recently, Sabio’s Head of Consultancy Stuart Dorman offered an excellent definition: “CEM is the discipline of managing and treating customer relationships as assets, with the goal of transforming satisfied customers into loyal brand advocates. CEM must balance customers’ needs (such as resolution, value, competence, and convenience) with the organization’s needs for growth and revenue, efficiency, and obtaining the highest customer lifetime value (CLV) possible.”

Done properly, CEM allows you to anticipate customers’ needs, using outbound communication skillfully and selectively to stay in touch with customers and offer them the information and options they need before they even realize they need it. Dorman notes that accomplishing this requires an understanding of every customer touch point, “every moment of truth when a customer interacts with the organization and forms an impression—negative or positive. It is essential to understand those moments, anticipate them, and take pre-emptive measures to ensure a positive experience.”

Since customer experience management requires understanding, this means it’s a concept that asks a lot of the contact center. Since contact centers are made of people, there is no CEM without a robust, engaged workforce. One might say that customer experience management cannot be attained without employee engagement. Employee engagement comes from hiring the right people, training them properly and motivating them.

In essence, the first step to effective CEM is to hire and train high quality contact center employees. This is bad news for companies that wish to take short-cuts to CEM (Because there are no short-cuts to CEM).

In a recent article for TMCnet, Susan Campbell outlined a Forbes article that discussed something called “anticipatory customer service.” This includes finding the right employees who can work empathetically with customers. Beyond that, they must be trained to anticipate the expressed and even unexpressed wishes of customers. This skill must be applied one customer at a time and one situation at a time.

There is no question that, today, the stakes have been raised for contact centers when it comes to agent training. A slap-dash approach will never do (if it ever did). Smart companies are building more permanent, formally structured training foundations within their contact centers. Others who might lack the resources are turning to professional organizations to train better agents. It’s not only the best route to attaining customer experience management, it’s a way to retain agents for longer, keeping costs down and efficiency high.