What is CEM?
(Axel Schultze)
I believe the term was coined by Paul Greenberg. And as such, this is only my interpretation:
While openness, collaboration, co-creation, exchange, teamwork… doesn’t really look like “Management” and it just doesn’t feel right to “manage” a customer, a company is required to MANAGE their engagement for a better Customer Experience. We are talking about the behavioral changes of our customers but I guess we have to more precise than that. The underlying change is significant: It is the change in the customer education process. Just 5-10 years ago customers where mainly educated by the experts in the respective companies, by their solution providers, analysts and media. Not today. The previous education process and therefore influence is rapidly declining and has just minor importance today. Customers educate themselves over the Internet. But not the Internet from 5 years ago but through their connections in the social networks, blogs, discussion forums, wikis, the whole nine yard. Customers talk to people our sales teams tried to hide: existing customers. Prospects discuss with existing customers what ‘sales’ was trying to prevent – anxious the message might have been bad. Customers are well educated and the influence from sales is more and more negligible. Sales people continue to argue about it, try to keep their “important” position but that is another story. I had the pleasure to talk to roughly 150 corporate executives in the last few months and unlike public opinion, they know the significant change social media is making right now. Improving the CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE is their highest priority. It is not yet another upgrade in an even slicker CRM tool. “CRM is an administration tool to slice and dice numbers, it will remain to be important but doesn’t get us any closer to our customers” one CEO said.
CRM vs. CEM
I trust that traditional CRM or at least major components such as forecasting, revenue planning and alike features will be closer and closer to ERP and other internal tools that have no touch points to the actual customers, prospects, partners or other constituencies of the market. The other part of CRM where we keep customer data, connections, conversations and so much more – and have even trouble to keep it in our old style CRM system are more likely to be a much more open tool. Scott McNealy from SUN said many years ago the network is the computer. The social network is the CRM system. And if CRM 2.0 is CEM Social networks and systems yet to develop will be the final creation of CEM.
CEM Functionality
Since nobody can buy a CEM system, maybe it's a good idea to begin scetching it out: