Page 212 - DMGT308_CUSTOMER_RELATIONSHIP_MANAGEMENT

Unit 8: Managing Customer Relations

“At a broad level, [CRM and CEM] are similar,” said Bernd H. Schmitt, professor of international Notes
business at Columbia University and author of five books, including Experiential Marketing
(Free Press, 1999) and Customer Experience Management (Wiley, 2003). To Schmitt, CRM is
supposed to focus on customer loyalty and making sure customers are treated well. To that end,
businesses can turn to their CRM systems to find out whether the contact centre treated customers
well, contacted them when they wanted to be contacted and fixed a problem.
But, Bernd says, CRM falls short of the emotional connection that is at the heart of Customer
Experience Management. “I would say CEM is a bit broader. I don’t think people will talk about
the aesthetic aspects of the product or design [when talking about CRM], but that’s part of the
experience.”
Beyond Philosophy’s Dibeehi agrees. “Where CRM had to be in large part inside-out in perspective
(i.e., viewing the company from the inside) to begin to set a foundation for customer-centric
action within the business, CEM is outside-in (i.e., viewing the company from the point of view
of the customer) to make certain that the actions of the business resonates with customers in a
positive way.”

Step Back and Stop Managing

Some people are so emphatic about the importance of looking at the business from the customer’s
point of view that they cringe at the reference to “management.” Paul Greenberg, author of
CRM at the Speed of Light: Essential Customer Strategies for the 21st Century, (3rd Edition
McGraw-Hill, 2004), and a big proponent of focusing on the customer experience, warns against
approaching that experience as something you can “manage.” “What the customer needs is to
manage their own experience; they don’t need to have it managed for them,” he says. Instead,
you must examine the customer and his or her experience with your business carefully, mapping
out every point at which the customer touches your organization and then tailor your business
to accommodate what you’ve found out.
As Rance of customer-experience specialist Round says, “Customer Experience Management
attempts to define how all the customer management capabilities within an organization, such
as the brand, marketing, business rules, processes, decision-making authority, training, employee
engagement customer data and metrics, etc. combine to influence the customer experience.”

Yin and Yang

Previous CRMGuru-sponsored studies have found that customer-centric planning—taking an
outside-in approach—is the No. 1 driver of CRM success. The emergence of CEM brings new
focus to the often neglected task of examining the customer value proposition.
Customer strategy expert Jim Barnes believes that you shouldn’t neglect some basic principles
of CRM when you turn to Customer Experience Management. “Maybe we should approach
CEM, as we should CRM, from the customer’s viewpoint. What will customers consider a
genuine positive experience? I believe it will have to appear genuine, not staged or synthetic.”
Put it all together, and it seems the CEM and CRM have more in common than differences. After
all, relationships are developed through a series of experiences over time.
Perhaps we can sum up by saying that CEM and CRM are the Yin and Yang of customer-to-
business relationships. The Yin-Yang concept originates in ancient Chinese philosophy and
describes two primal opposing, but complementary, forces found in all things in the universe.
There’s no record about whether the Chinese found it necessary to turn every concept into a
Three Letter Acronym (TLA).

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