For companies in any industry today, success is driven by the ability to attain and retain customers who share a loyal connection with them. 

 

While keeping customers satisfied is essential, it is important to remember that it is only a piece to the puzzle. When it comes to maintaining and gaining customers, the focus needs to be on the entire experience.

I recently had a chance to speak with Randy Saunders, Marketing Director, Customer Experience Management products, Cincom Systems about CEM and specifically about Cincom's offerings.

 

Cincom Systems delivers software and services to simplify complex business processes and help clients outperform their competition.

 

 

RS: There are many definitions out there, a good way to look at it is as a process or  framework for building an organization’s capability to deliver a distinctive customer experience that defines the brand and drives profitable growth.

RS: Traditionally, CRM systems have been internally or operationally centric--they are about profiling and collecting customer data for marketing and cross selling purposes. Too often the emphasis has been on the company's goals, and not necessarily what the customer wants. CEM is the opposite of that. It is highly customer-centric focused and utilizes systems, technologies, and simplified processes to improve the customers experience with the company.

 

When it comes to CRM versus CEM, Shaun Smith points out in his book, "Managing the Customer Experience: Turning Customers into Advocates," more than $46 billion was spent on CRM systems to help institutions get closer to their customers. Yet, Gartner (News - Alert) Research estimates that 55 percent of all these CRM programs actually drive customers away and dilute earnings--bringing forth this emphasis on customer experience.

RS: Even though people seem to think they are the same thing, customer service is really just a component of the customer experience. According to Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, "Customer experience is bigger than customer service in that it is the full, and end experience. It starts when you first hear about Amazon from a friend and ends when you get the package in the mail and open it."

 

Therefore, customer experience encompasses every customer touch point with your brand, whereas the service is just a component of it.

 

RS: We are dealing with a changing economy right now. We have moved from a product economy to a service economy, and now we’re moving into an "experience" economy-- which adds a level of emotion that the product or service economies did not have. 

 

Many recent brands have been successful by really focusing on the customer experience. So, if you do it right, and you design an experience with your products and services correctly, you generate a lot higher loyalty and advocates for your products-- which is proven to lead to increased company growth and profitability.

 

 

RS: Fred Reichheld, a top speaker on management right now, is proving that advocacy leads to growth and increased loyalty.

 

In his book, "The Ultimate Question," released earlier this year, he proves that exceptional customer experience creates loyalty and that a 5 percent increase in customer loyalty increases lifetime profits by as much as 95 percent. He also proves that companies who are, what he calls, NPS (net promoter score) or customer advocacy leaders, outgrow their competitors by an average of 2.5 times.  So, you can look at this one indicator to find out how many advocates you have for your product -- meaning, how likely are customers to recommend your product or service to a colleague. The more advocates you have, the faster your company grows and the more profitable you are. The reason for this is that the advocates drive the growth of your company in 4 areas:

 

1-     They tend to repurchase.

2-     They buy additional product lines from you.

3-     Referrals-- they tell others about you and give important word-of-mouth marketing.

4-     They provide constructive feedback and are always willing to fill out surveys or responses for the company, which helps to better a product.

 

 

RS: The CEM process audits the most profitable customers to understand what things they really value and what really drives their loyalty. With that collected information, a better customer experience is designed through improvements that ultimately lead to more and more advocates.

 

RS: There was an interesting study in Shaun Smith's book where he shows that 80 percent of all customers who switch suppliers express satisfaction with their previous supplier. This is because customer satisfaction just isn’t enough anymore. Again, as we move into that experience economy, it's more about the emotion and getting to an advocacy level. If not, those who are satisfied, or who may seem loyal because they're repurchasing, will switch to another supplier easily if they haven’t reached an advocacy level for your offering.

 

One of the things we talk about is designing a customer experience that is consistent, intentional, differentiated and valuable to the customer. If you do that right, you can create more advocates from your customers.

 

 

RS: Yes. It helps measure the key drivers that your most profitable customers really value. If you understand what they really value, and can deliver on those things, you are able to attract more customers just like them.

 

RS: Your brand is on trial every time a customer contacts your contact center--   every contact with the center is a test of the organization as a whole. No matter how much money you put into marketing and developing great products, if the call center is the weak link in that total customer experience, then a negative encounter with your contact center, could in fact drive a customer away. Alternatively, a really great experience, where an agent really cared and helped, is also remembered.

 

A contact center’s ability to respond to a customer's problem or request has a very high influence on the overall experience with that company, possibly much more than the product itself.

 

 

RS:  A lot of the CEM solutions out there are consulting solutions. They are really about doing audit work, measuring how you measure against your industry and your competitors in terms of key drivers and number of advocates and help design a unique customer experience.

 

What Cincom does uniquely is help to improve the process aspect of CEM. If you consider your entire CEM is a combination of your people, your processes and your products/services, Cincom puts the Synchrony solution in place to help service reps deliver on a better customer experience.

 

In doing so, we help synchronize all activities across the company. So, if there are different departments that interact with a customer, every department has visibility to the interactions and can deliver a consistent experience. Synchrony also provides quick access to all the supporting applications they might need to access while on the call to answer customer's questions or solve their problem.

 

We can also intelligently route customer interactions to the most qualified person, and a key part of our solution - that is different from many contact center solutions out there - is our comprehensive analytics. They show you not only what customers are calling about, but also information on how quickly problems are solved, where additional training is needed, etc. We are also presenting CEM metrics to find how we are measuring up-- in real-time and on a daily basis, to be sure we're really addressing the things customers really care about.