Customer Centric is one of the key buzzwords these days…. but what’s behind? It’s a cultural change and much more then just CRM (Customer Relationship Management), or better it’s an active CRM approach which is not only reflecting the past. We need to transform our self from CRM over CEM (Customer Experience Management) up to CIM (Customer Interaction Management).
Customer experience is an future approach which use passed information to predict the next step of a customer and build a wow effect for him today. Let’s get the trusted advisor, the advocate for the customer and leave our company classes away.
CRM is the company view on the customer through the business while CEM is the company view on the business through the customer.
“Gartner defines CEM as the practice of designing and reacting to customer interactions to meet or exceed customer expectations and, thus, increase customer satisfaction, loyalty and advocacy. It is a strategy that requires process change and many technologies to accomplish.” 1)https://www.gartner.com/it-glossary/customer-experience-management-cem
Source 2)https://www.gartner.com/it-glossary/customer-experience-management-cem
It’s not only loyalty we are talking, it’s also advocacy to reach attraction and growth. It’s a 360 degree view.
Let’s have a look at the differentiation of Digital Transformation and IoT:
| IoT | Digital Transformation |
| Products Services Processes (internal @ a brand) Processes (for a customer) | Vision Change Management IT Communication |
| Communication | |
Both have the customer as a base in common. IoT is focusing on products, services and processes while Digital Transformation is focussing on the communication and everything which is needed for this (Vision, change management, IT)
Many topics of this table we see in the circle above. We need to think about the entire communication with the customer. How do we interact with him in a dialog instead of a monologue? We have always focused on the past interaction, we did analysis of what a user did before and then thread him with this interest. Now we need more and more to predict his next step and think about the after sales process.
How do we get the customer to interact with the brand? How does the brand gets the trusted advisor?
CIM is the 2-direction communication between a brand and a customer through marketing, products and services. We know it from direct marketing. Through the digitization there are much more channels available and much more data can be used to understand the customer and predict his needs. This is a big chance but brings also a lot of issues like data-centralisation or the legal aspect (GDPR) on the table.
The first step is CRM, the second step is CEM and the third step is CIM.
This 3 steps transformation process we need to internalize and bring to our colleagues to live it as a company / brand. Let’s shake hands with our customer and be on the same eye level instead of tapping on our own shoulder like marketing did in the past.
Finally let’s have a look at the software vendors (SaaS, PaaS) which offer a “Customer Experience Platform” solution:
Source: Forrester Wave™: Digital Experience Platforms, Q3 ’17 3)https://reprints.forrester.com/#/assets/2/132/’RES137663’/reports
Click here to get the detailed report and how the vendors differentiate.
