Customer Experience Management:
5 Keys to Employee Engagement for Improved Momentum

Best-in-class customer experience management (CEM) practitioners enjoy 15% year-over-year improvement in customer retention - significantly higher than results for industry-average and laggard CEM practitioners. Even among the best-in-class firms, top challenges are cross-channel CEM, organization-wide focus on customer service differentiation, commonly agreed-to metrics, and a 360-degree view of customers. All of the recent CEM studies report broken linkages between multiple voice-of-customer sources, data versus actions, incentives versus behaviors, what's promised versus what's delivered, and survey results versus business results.

Nearly half of senior marketers admit that high-profile negative customer experiences have compromised their brands. And currently, 84% of customers will register a complaint or tell others of a bad experience - this tendency is rising from 74% in 2007 and 67% in 2006. Clearly, profitability is at risk due to lack of cross-organizational cooperation and alignment with customers.

Effective employee engagement is at the heart of these issues. Tendencies to focus on IT solutions, simplified metrics, customer acquisition, or isolated opportunities have overshadowed the realities of people and processes and culture as the most important determinants of customer experience.