Customer experience management is a relatively new construct. The term lacks a clear definition, although it is used very extensively, especially in blogs and studies. So it is important to make a definition of customer experience management. When the term emerged, customer experience management was equated with customer centricity. Customer experience was, moreover, often regarded — instead of a product or service sale — as a sale of solutions. Customer experience management is not to be equated with customer centricity and also has no connection to solution selling. For a definition of customer experience management, it should be noted that customer experience management is a further building block of an organisation’s customer management.
As a first step, it is important to delimit brand management and customer experience management from one another. Brand management carries, in its own conception, the brand experience as a dimension — particularly also through brand management’s focus on the behaviour of employees, who are supposed to live the brand and transport it to the customer. Authors therefore rightly point out that a delimitation between brand management and customer experience management is not so simple. From the brand-management understanding set out, brand and customer experience would initially be conceptualised more or less identically. Customer experience management is, moreover, to be delimited from customer-relationship management. From the perspective of customer-relationship management, it is important to optimise the customer value. This also comprises the customer’s experience in acquisition and in the retention or win-back phase. Customer-relationship management, however, addresses less the design of the individual interactions between customer and organisation than the deployment of the instruments over time. Although customer-relationship management also aims at deepening the relationship, it does so rather over time than in the individual interaction. In contrast to brand management, there is, in customer-relationship management, no model for the substantive design of the interaction experience. So it should be noted that the definitions of brand management and customer-relationship management are not free of overlap with the definition of customer experience management, and that they influence one another. One could follow the view that one or two of these approaches would be sufficient.
For a customer-centric organisation, it is advisable to take all three approaches into account, but also to ensure that an overlap-free understanding becomes established in the organisation. Not infrequently, competency disputes can arise precisely between these three specialist departments. For the better manageability of these interdependencies, we recommend distinguishing the following experience dimensions:
1. Brand experience
2. Relationship experience
3. Transaction experience (co-creation experience)
So, in our understanding, customer experience management builds on brand and customer-relationship management and extends both with the additional focus on the specific experience in the respective transaction. Customer experience is thereby viewed from an application perspective, in the sense of co-creation with the customer. It is to be hoped that the high popularity of the topic will lead to a comprehensive empirical investigation, in order to ensure optimal embedding in customer management. Brand positioning and customer-relationship management, in our view, set the framework for the detailed design of the transaction experience.
Definition of customer experience management
Customer experience management (CX) focuses on the individual transaction between customer and organisation. It builds on the brand positioning, is embedded in customer-relationship management, and pursues the goal that the organisation differentiates itself in customers’ perception through the experience during the transaction. The customer experience is to be designed accordingly uniformly at all touchpoints on the basis of the brand positioning.
It is accordingly not expedient for an organisation to change the experience at the touchpoints, or even only at individual touchpoints, without taking the brand positioning into account. Over-investment in as great a purchase experience as possible at the POS (customer acquisition), while simultaneously not investing in customer-retention management, also does not match our understanding of customer experience management. The reduction of customer experience management to the customer / customer-contact-employee interaction is likewise to be rejected. Unfortunately, however, it can be experienced in practice that, due to the novelty of the topic, customer experience management is often conducted detached from brand and relationship management. Investments in a differentiating customer experience can pay off. On average, 85% of customers pay more for a better customer experience. Customers with bad experiences subsequently stay on average about one year; the customers with the best experiences over six years.
Customer experience management is always to be understood from a network perspective. Based on the relational view, the exchange of customer insights has a central importance. So data silos and the lack of intra- and inter-organisational exchange of customer insights are the central challenges of customer experience management in companies.
