Customer Experience Management (CEM)
What is your Customer Experience Rating?

It’s a buyer’s market. Online and offline, customers are looking for you to make their shopping experience easy, rewarding and even fun. They don’t just want you to supply what they’re looking for; they also want you to help them select it with research, rankings and customer feedback. They want you to anticipate their needs, and offer them something new and of value to them. They want you to remind them to purchase their usual items. Further, they want short, simple transactions and low-effort returns. And if you really want them to come back again and again, they want to be rewarded for their loyalty and repeat patronage with special offers. The operative word here is special. Dollars are difficult to part with these days, so customers are looking for something extra to make them feel like you’re going that extra mile for their business and they are getting a bit more for their money than the other guy. Customers want that special treatment regardless of the channel they use. Web, telephone, or storefront – they want you to know who they are and all the business they do with you. And the more they see that they get from sticking with you, the more they will buy from you. So even if some customers are spending less this year, you can still grow your sales by getting more of their business.

In fact, several large corporations are working with firms and/or internal resources to better pull their customer and sales data together so that they can get a more accurate and actionable handle on the current customer experience, design strategy to improve it, deliver more appropriate messaging, tools and offers that lead to additional sales, and develop a culture that continuously and consistently delivers a customer experience that gets customers to purchase more. Such measures have given these corporations huge differentiation in the marketplace.

Take a look at Fresh Direct, for example. Recently featured in CRM Magazine, Fresh Direct increased its sales by integrating customer data, product data, feedback data, and purchasing data to improve how they sell to customers. So rather than spending a fortune to acquire new customers, they spent a fraction of that cost increasing the business they did with existing customers by improving the customer experience. Here are just a few examples of what they did:

1.     After a customer feedback data analysis, the online grocer upgraded how it selected produce for the store and added online produce quality ratings to address customer concerns about purchasing fresh fruit and vegetables sight unseen. Now, customers know if a certain fruit gets a 3-star rating, it’s going to look and taste really good. A lower rating suggests that the fruit is not as reliably delicious and bruise-free. These changes both improved the store product and its sales.

2.     When customers select a product, they are automatically offered items that compliment the selection. This exposes customers to more products and prompts more sales.

3.     At checkout, customers are reminded of a few of their most common previous purchases (those which are absent from the customer's cart) and given the opportunity to add them into their carts.

4.     Almost every item for sale is shown with a detailed description and its nutritional information. You can even shop by certain nutritional attributes, like protein- and Omega 3-enhanced foods. This makes online shopping even easier and more efficient than in-store shopping.

Also recently highlighted in CRM Magazine was Epson. Last year, the consumer electronics firm combined purchasing history, customer behavior, email, click-through’s, and “pathing” information. The company initiated an extensive append project for matching lifestyle data to the customer base to develop a fuller customer profile and understand what matters to them. Now Epson has a much clearer idea of who its customers are, what triggers a sale and when to communicate with customers with regards to their buying cycles. Such personalized efforts reportedly increased revenue 27% from last year and 45% for the month of July from 2008-9.

With all the data available today, it’s no longer a question of getting information. It’s all about getting the right information and using it to make your customers feel like the smartest and easiest thing they can do is buy everything they can from you. Show them that you know what they like, when they want it, and can deliver it to them easily and affordably. If the customer experience is rewarding you can increase your share of wallet, no question.

Want to get started right now? Let DB Marketing Technologies integrate all of your data points, reveal and rate your current customer experience, identify opportunities to improve the customer experience, implement desired changes and increase your sales.  DBMT brings the domain expertise necessary to integrate data, evaluate the customer experience, develop a CEM plan, and execute on that plan. Let DBMT be your CEM partner and watch your customer sales jump in 2010.