CEM Requires Clear Strategy; Right Tools
Enabling a company’s Customer Experience Management Vision requires the right technology and the recognition that the entire organization needs to be involved, according to experts who discussed during a recent Loyalty 360-sponsored webinar, Essential Solutions you need to Enable your Customer Experience Management Vision.
Customers are empowered more than ever, said Bernard Chung, SAP senior director, solution marketing. “Almost everyone seems to be walking around with smartphones accessing information, sharing information, gathering information. All of that information generates more information. So a lot of marketers are dealing with Big Data."
Companies have to look beyond just the products they offer, Chung added. “You have to look outward. That’s when customer experience is important.”
For example, Apple provided a full customer experience around digital music. Apple provided a great way to listen and to buy the music. The firm had a great pricing model per song, and an easy way to share music. The true innovation Apple offered was revolutionizing the digital content experience, not just the ability to play MP3 files on a headphone.
“Apple got the idea of delivering the whole customer experience, not just the technology,” Chung said. “That’s something we need to do if we want to be a full CEM organizations.”
According to an in-Webinar poll, 60 percent of attendees said their firms were in the early stages of adopting a comprehensive CEM strategy, 40 percent said they a good handle on it.
SAP research showed that 80 percent of companies across different industries said that delivering customer experience management as a strategic objective. The research further showed that respondents considered customer experience management to include:
- Reliability, including high-quality products, on-time delivery, accurate orders and invoices, great after-sales service and knowledgeable people
- Relevance in the context of marketing, including accurate segmentation, personalized offers, product and service bundles, real-time offers and meaningful pricing
- Responsiveness, which includes flexible demand planning, co-development, predictive defect management, remote diagnostics, mobile workforce and workforce planning
- Convenience, including the ability to communicate at any time, from any place and from any device, fully empowered employees, predictive and proactive, transparent and open
Fewer than 20 percent of companies believe they are doing a good job at pulling together all of this information throughout the organization. Some of the key reasons that most companies are falling short are:
- Organizational silos within the company (cited by 27 percent in a Bloomberg Businessweek poll)
- A large number of disconnected tools, technologies sad applications (26 percent)
- Lack of coordination across all channels to ensure consistency (19 percent)
- Lack of complete view of the customer to understand their needs and make interactions more relevant and customized (19 percent)
“The right technology is the secret sauce to enable the seamless customer experience that you want to be able to provide through multiple channels,” Chung said. It needs to provide real-time data and analytics, multichannel capabilities, collaboration opportunities and simple end-to-end processes.
So SAP has developed what it calls “a framework of excellence,” built on the three pillars of decision excellence, operational excellence and interaction excellence.
Decision excellence is the ability to gain insight and analysis to the right people in the organization who are empowered to take action.
Operational excellence concerns the internal processes, including efficiency and integration.
Interaction excellence is covers how well the company interacts with customers and how well those integrations are coordinated across channels.
Amazon has done a great job of incorporating a framework of excellence, according to Chung. Best Buy, on the other hand, hasn’t successfully put together all of the pillars of the framework.
“Technology tools will enable the framework of excellence,” according to Vikas Venugopal, SAP solution manager.
“Customer experience management is not something that is delivered by one group in an organization,” Venugopal said. “It is something that is an organization-wide effort.”
The right technology is critical for a company to be successful. The technology includes customer insight and analysis, operational and engagement elements.
Customer insight includes predictive analytics, sentiment analytics, segmentation and a customer intelligence database. The operational element includes collaboration and marketing productivity tools, marketing asset management, planning, budgeting, performance management and calendar and simulation and optimization. Engagement happens across multiple channels, so a company needs tools for offers, lead management, loyalty management and campaign management.
For example, LEGO, started by determining who its customers were. The company concluded it had a pyramid of customers. At the base was regular users, above that were communities who were engaged, then above that were customers who engaged in interactions with the company. At the top layer included customers who worked with the company to develop new toys.
LEGO’s goal was to drive customers from the base of the period to the top of the pyramid, according to Venugopal.
Technology enablers for such a shift include a centralized customer intelligence database with transactional information, behavioral information and capable of handling Big Data; sentiment analysis, segmentation and predictive analytics.
In another example, TMobile wanted to understand how effective the carrier’s campaigns were.
The company started with a marketing calendar and productivity tools, marketing planning and budgeting, marketing asset management, marketing performance management, collaboration tools and simulation and optimization of information, which helps identify which customers are the best for which campaigns.
For a limited time, access playback to the webinar, Essential Solutions you need to Enable your Customer Experience Management Vision, presented by Bernard Chung, Senior Director, Solution Marketing, and Vikas Venugopal, Solution Manager, SAP.