A recent webinar still available for listening, “Cohesive Customer Experience Management: Strategies and Plans for Success,” focused on how organizations can marshal their resources for a cohesive customer experience management (CEM) process, including successful strategies, a cross-organizational blueprint and key elements for a successful start.

Presenting was Sid Bannerjee a Greater Washington Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year in IT services, The CEO and Co-Founder of Clarabridge (News - Alert), Bannerjee is a well-known expert in customer experience, business intelligence, and text mining.

Also presenting was Chris Zinner, an executive in Accenture’s (News - Alert) Management Consulting Practice and leads Accenture’s efforts in developing thought leadership on how organizations apply Social Media in their Customer Relationship Management (CRM) efforts.

And presenting was Paul Hagen, who returned to Forrester (News - Alert) after eight years of running his own consulting business, which provided business, marketing, environmental sustainability, and technology planning services to executives at a broad range of organizations.

Companies can have radically different customer experiences yet still equally please their customers, Hagen said, using the seemingly polar opposites of Costco and Apple (News - Alert) – long lines and low prices for the one, personalized service and high prices in the other, both with steady streams of satisfied customers. It’s up to you to decide if the Costco or Apple model is more of your company’s style.

(Interestingly, Hagen noted that Costco, in fact, does a better job delivering on their customer experience than Apple does. Didn’t see that coming, did you?)

The webinar also found that the lack of a clear focus on exactly what kind of customer experience a company wants to present is a big part of the problem – in the previous example, obviously a customer is treated better in an Apple store than in a Costco, but the point is that customers don’t expect red carpet treatment in a Costco, they expect low prices, and boy does Costco deliver on that one.