The definition of the customer experience Which technologies address customer experience management Related terms and their respective definitions (customer centricity, customer journey, customer lifecycle, etc.) Business drivers and metrics for measuring the customer experience Online resources to help identify relevant technologies that can support your customer experience initiative

1. Entire content © 2014 Gleanster, LLC. All rights reserved. Unauthorized use or reproduction prohibited. Note: This document is intended for individual use.
Electronic distribution via email or by posting on a personal website is in violation of the terms of use.
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Inside a Concept CheatSheet
The Concept, Defined
Related Definitions
Related Business Outcomes
Relevant Technologies
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of Top Performing organizations; why they
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value of their investments.
Customer Experience Management (CEM)
The Concept, Defined
CEM (also commonly referred to as CXM)
is not a technology or even a business
tactic. It’s a discipline (some call it a
methodology) that focuses operations
and processes within your business
on the needs of individual customers.
The customer experience isn’t about
what you want to tell customers about
your products and services. It’s about
engaging them in just the right way
based on what the customer wants or
needs during each stage of the customer
journey – from awareness to purchase
and ongoing service.
CEM must embody every cross-channel
interaction with the brand, product, and
service. Done correctly, CEM should
transform the culture of your firm and
unite all departments and functions under
a common goal: to make decisions based
on the optimal end-to-end customer
experience. Doing this requires a deeper
level of understanding about individual
customers, which leads to more granular
segmentation and targeting strategies in
marketing. Ultimately, it’s about making
customer engagement feel intimate and
personalized for individual customers –
which means data and customer
intelligence is critical to informing exactly
how to tweak and optimize the customer
experience.
You will run into solutions that call
themselves Customer Experience
Management, and many of them are
optimization platforms for the web
experience. In the broader definition,
there are no one-size-fits-all solutions
for CEM, although suite providers like
Adobe, IBM, Oracle, and Microsoft
are starting to move down this path. In
general, any solution that is capable
of dynamically personalizing and
contextualizing a customer experience
could be classified as a CEM platform. At
the same time there are CEM monitoring
tools that are designed to monitor and
benchmark online interactions and alert
users of issues or provide analysis.
Today the biggest impediment to
streamlining processes and identifying
best practices that can be replicated for
CEM is customer data. Nine out of ten
organizations struggle with the quality
of their customer data, according to
Gleanster – it’s fragmented, outdated, or
generally incomplete.
Related Definitions
Customer Experience: The customer
experience is the sum total of all
interactions with prospects and
customers as they encounter and engage
with a company. This may include direct
interactions with the brand through
marketing, sales, and service or indirect
interactions via word-of-mouth, partners,
value-added resellers or competitors.
Customer Centricity: Customer
centricity places customer needs, wants,
and expectations at the core of every
business decision across every business
function in an organization. It’s about
creating a positive engagement before
and after a sale by understanding what
customers need and want.
Customer Lifecycle: The customer
lifecycle is a structured way to describe
the steps a customer engages in
when making a purchase decision and
hopefully becoming a loyal lifelong
customer. The lifecycle approach
encompasses engagement with any
domain or department of an organization,
but commonly involves interactions
with marketing, sales, and service. The
customer lifecycle is often described
through the various stages a customer

2. Entire content © 2014 Gleanster, LLC. All rights reserved. Unauthorized use or reproduction prohibited. Note: This document is intended for individual use.
Electronic distribution via email or by posting on a personal website is in violation of the terms of use.
Concept CheatSheet: Customer Experience Management (CEM) 2
COMPLIMENTS OF:
engages in prior to and after a purchase,
including awareness, consideration,
selection, action (purchase), retention,
and advocacy. Optimizing customer
engagement to maximize revenue across
the customer lifecycle involves multiple
internal functions and stakeholders – a
shift that can be difficult for organizations
that have long operated in departmental
silos. Sound familiar?
Customer Journey: The customer
journey describes the collective series
of interactions a particular segment
or target audience might engage in
at different stages of the customer
lifecycle: an email, an encounter with
a salesperson, subscribing to a loyalty
program, etc. Customer journeys are
typically contextualized around a buyer
persona, segment, or target audience to
define how to engage, when to engage,
and across what channels to engage.
Customer Journey Mapping: This
is a framework or methodology that
helps document the various stages and
interactions within the customer journey.
This exercise helps define specific
areas of optimization for continuous
improvement and in many cases helps
brands isolate key areas of competitive
differentiation. A customer journey map
is used to anticipate how a customer
persona might interact with the brand
across online and offline channels.
Journey maps typically cover everything
from the initial introduction to the brand to
how customers deal with support issues.
Related Business Outcomes
The ultimate goal is customer experience
optimization, which speaks to the ability
to deliver consistent, cross-channel
customer experiences in ways that yield
the best possible results in terms of the
performance metrics that matter most to
the company. These metrics can range
from customer satisfaction and brand
advocacy to cross-sell/up-sell revenue.
Every business offers a customer
experience, but the more aware you are
of your goals with respect the customer
experience, the more likely you will
create a positive customer experience.
Metrics that may be effected from CEM
include:
• Customer satisfaction
• Customer loyalty
• Brand integrity
• Brand reputation
• Share of wallet
• Market share
• Revenue objectives
• Operational efficiency
• Word of mouth
• Response
• Customer lifetime value
• Average order value
CEM also forces leaders to uncover
answer to some of the tougher questions
in business.
• Which customers are most profitable?
• What steps can we take to improve our
customers propensity to recommend?
• Who are our target buyers, what do
they need or want from us?
• What is the ideal process for
onboarding customers, is this different
from our current process?
• Why are my conversion metrics x?
• What steps can we take to improve
overall profitability?
• Why are we missing our realistic
revenue targets?
Relevant Technologies
What technologies support this concept?
Check out the links below to view the
landscape of vendors (and related
Gleanster Research content).
Remember that Gleansights contain
analyst commentary and vendor rankings
(based on end-user feedback) on all the
relevant Solution Providers in a given
Topic Area.
Customer Experience
Management
Web Content Management
Mobile Marketing
Campaign Management
Marketing Automation
Social Media Monitoring