Achieving an excellent customer experience is a common strategic goal for many companies and organizations, such as retailers and communications
service providers. Leading companies now adopt customer-centric goals and programs to support future growth. For high growth markets, factors such as sales channel experience and network coverage affect
customer acquisition. For mature markets, factors such as customer intimacy, innovative products, and service quality can help protect the customer base. The rewards for attracting, delighting, and
retaining customers are increasingly important. A Bain & Co. study showed that a five percent shift in customer retention can result in a 25% to 100% profit swing.
Every customer entering a retail outlet, for instance, symbolizes the passage across many thresholds to customer intimacy, driven by meaningful and
well-timed communications and recognition, in addition to service performance. Increasingly complex channels and competitive marketplaces require service providers to use more sophisticated means of
understanding what customers are experiencing.
In the past, customer satisfaction was monitored by simply measuring overall network quality. Today, measuring the end-to-end experience and
individual service quality is key. This includes the spatial (where is the retail location located with respect to home and business), temporal (referring to customers' timeline, and lifeline), individual
(referring to a customer's value) , and cultural (referring to ethnic and lifestyle). Customer expectations and perceptions differ under any of these four dimensions.
Traditional network service measurement tools do not provide visibility into the total customer experience. For this reason, leading retailers
and service providers now look to Customer Experience Management (CEM) as a method to understand how customers are engaging end-to-end with the company's services. Issues that CEM addresses include:
- What are the habits of different types of customers?
- What are their experiences with different services or in different locations?
- Which customers are embracing new services?
- How are customers learning about the company's services?
- Are the new services working properly for them?
- What is their experience with customer support?
- Are customers avoiding new services when they experience difficulties in existing areas?
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