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Customer Loyalty – It’s All About the Experience, Stupid!

Written by: Rob Rush

Article Overview: Article outlines how "Customer Experience Management" or CEM, can help a slick ad campaign...and an even slicker IT application to keep its eye on the prize - customer satisfaction and loyalty. How? By actually DELIVERING on those promised experiences!

Customer Loyalty – It’s All About the Experience, Stupid!

Imagine this nightmare scenario. You’re a sneaker and apparel company that’s undertaken a multi-million dollar Customer Relationship Management (CRM) installation in order to better know – and grow – your customers. The ultimate goal – a marketing campaign aimed at an audience of one. A brand message and experience so fine-tuned to the individual that you can’t wait to tell the world…via an infinitely more expensive ad campaign touting your ability to cater to consumers’ specific needs. So when a customer – let’s call him Joe Hightops – bops into your branded company store in Chicago, your database alerts staff in the Windy City that Joe recently received an e-mail with a special offer for “Air Gordons,” he likes assistance sizing and fitting his shoes, and he enjoys a cold glass of Gatorade while shopping. Your bases are covered, right?

Unbeknownst to you, the store clerks don’t know about the special e-mail offer, Joe is left to his own devices with the shoe fitting tool and injures his arch, and no one offers him the chance to replenish his electrolytes. Joe leaves the store disappointed and underwhelmed, never to be heard from again, and you’re left to wonder why. Clearly, just knowing his unique purchasing preferences and behavior – and telling the world that you have that capability - was not enough to drive satisfaction or, most importantly – retention.

An extreme example? Sure, but for every successful CRM application and the ad campaign that trumpets it, the customer service landscape is littered with projects that didn’t quite hit the mark. In many applications, CRM has a great big blind spot. While CRM effectively pulls information about the customer to benefit the company, it lacks any insight into the customer’s actual experience with that company. No amount of CRM technology lets the company “see” the customer’s experience.

An integrated Customer Experience Management (CEM) program can help fill in those blind spots and complement the potentially powerful data collected in a CRM project. Put plainly, where CRM is weak, CEM is strong. By focusing on the experiences of customers and how those experiences impact behavior, CEM addresses both the quality of the company’s execution and the efficacy of the result. By aligning the customer’s needs with the company’s ability to fulfill those needs, a CEM application can work hand in hand with CRM - and an ad campaign that makes specific promises - to create loyal customers for life.

Much like the robot in “The Terminator” that couldn’t comprehend human tears, a CRM program may miss the elements that are at the core of any customer relationship – a series of very personal and emotional interactions and experiences. Likewise, building a brand and an advertising campaign around that brand is designed to evoke those very same emotions. CEM is designed to examine and understand what drives these interactions and to align the organization so that it can consistently deliver what the customer craves, physically and emotionally.

Mind you, the very best companies mesh the power of technology, brand promise and experience delivery seamlessly. Westin Hotels used data from its award-winning Starwood Preferred Guest program to determine that – surprise! – quality sleep was of primary importance to hotel guests. Thus, the high-profile launch of the Westin Heavenly Bed. Did Westin deliver the promised experience? You bet – guests have been so enamored of the celestial sleeping experience that more than 4,000 Westin customers have purchased a full-loaded Heavenly Bed, box spring to duvet.

With CRM and advertising investments in the millions, it doesn’t pay for a company to turn penny-wise and pound-foolish when it comes to the delivery of the actual customer experience. By investing in the quality of that experience, the company has a far better chance of driving loyalty and – by extension – increased profitability. Though you may have heard the old adage expressed several different ways statistically, it is considerably less expensive to keep an existing customer than to woo a new one.

So after all was said and done, what happened to Joe Hightops? Turns out the sneaker company had a CEM program in place as well. His dissatisfaction was instantly registered in a customer satisfaction e-survey. The survey was flagged by a manager, who soothed Joe’s frayed nerves with free “Air Gordon” wristbands. The team at the Chicago store was referred back to its customer service materials and a trainer flew into O’Hare that night to conduct a refresher course, just in case. And when the mystery shopping team showed up in Chicago two months later - you guessed it – free-flowing Gatorade!

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