What Is Customer Experience?

All of these terms are subsets of customer experience management. Here are some helpful definitions for Customer ...

...Experience: journey from realization of a need until the need no longer exists.

...Experience Management (CEM): organization-wide customer-centricity aimed at optimizing experience, value, and equity.

....Satisfaction: perception of reality compared to expectations.

...Loyalty: preference for, or insistence on, a specific brand.

...Retention: duration of relationship with a brand.

...Churn: defection from a brand; switching to an alternative solution.

...Affinity: how attractive a brand is.

...Advocacy: effort to represent the customer's best interests.

...Centric: customer's best interests are top priority.

...Relationship: breadth and depth of interactions.

...Relationship Management (CRM): effort to optimize relationship, usually with the help of a database that contains data about clientele and interactions.

...Touch Point: any interaction with a brand; it is always an opportunity to adjust opinion of a brand.

...Value: perceived total benefits less total costs.

...Lifetime Value (CLV): sum of profit from a customer over a lifetime of purchases.

...Equity: sum of all lifetime values for a brand.

Other related terms are:

Experiential Marketing: providing an extraordinary experience as part of a marketing campaign.

User Experience: intuitive and functional aspects of interfaces between a customer and technology.

Relationship Marketing: effort to optimize customer relationship through personalized and long-term oriented marketing activities.

Loyalty Marketing: effort to optimize customer loyalty, usually with the help of purchase frequency incentives, experiential marketing, relationship marketing.

Now that you know the differences in these non-interchangeable yet complementary terms, you can gain appreciation for the value of CEM as the overall concept for high-profit management of a business. By pulling all these things together, synergies create hard-to-copy differentiation and happier stakeholders.

The absolute most important aspect of customer retention is culture - the way things are thought about, talked about, and done. If trust is the basis for any long-term relationship, then a culture of trust is essential. Show that you really read and digest customers' feedback, and show that you have followed their advice in making improvements. By closing the loop with customers, you can re-set their perceptions, so they don't feel compelled to carry around negative baggage of past experiences. They can re-set their perceptions to better meet your current realities of improved policies, business processes, and experiences.

One of the great things CEM does - thanks to organization-wide customer-centricity - is remove wasteful and non-customer-friendly policies and practices. An entity that invests in communicating its value proposition can only reap full return on investment when it lives up to its claims from customers' viewpoint. It naturally builds retention by managing expectations and consistently delivering the brand promise.

Lynn Hunsaker mentors executives in Customer Experience Optimization, to deliver brand promises, prevent customer hassles, minimize churn, & heighten sustained profit. Specialties include customer value guidance, touch-points, loyalty behaviors, internal branding, customer experience innovation, experience panorama, survey ROI, customer relationship skills, marketing operations, predictive dashboards, team recognition. She is author of 3 e-handbooks: Metrics You Can Manage For Success, Customer Experience Improvement Momentum, and Innovating Superior Customer Experience.