Going Beyond CRM to Strengthen Customer Loyalty and Improve Revenue

To drive growth, C-level
executives at Global 2000 companies are working to increase customer
satisfaction, improve market agility, and strengthen their brands
across global markets. In recent years these executives used CRM
systems to optimize sales transaction processes, but now their
challenges are greater. To reach their goals for growth, executives
today are finding they must go beyond CRM to create and optimize a
comprehensive customer experience strategy.

Think of customer experience
as the collection of all interactions a customer has with a company,
its products, and its partners, across all customer touch points (the
channels for customer interaction, such as mobile devices, contact
centers, email messages, Web sites, printed pieces, and retail stores),
across all geographies, and throughout all stages of the customer
lifecycle, from initial customer attraction through fulfillment to
retention.

Customer experience is
central to each of the three corporate goals mentioned above. Customer
satisfaction, for instance, is improved by delivering a relevant,
personalized, and consistent customer experience across every customer
touch point. Market agility is enhanced by accelerating the delivery of
new brands, messages, and promotions to customers. And delivering a
consistent customer experience across world markets and languages is
essential for building a strong global brand.

But an optimal
customer experience is easier to describe than to deliver. In practical
terms companies must coordinate numerous content creators worldwide,
combine the content they create with centrally controlled and approved
digital assets (electronic documents, images, PDF files, or other
digital media that constitute an asset), localize it for specific
markets, personalize it for specific customers, and publish it across
the full range of customer interaction touch points.

To date, few
companies have optimized this entire create-to-publish customer
experience process. The lack of an enterprisewide strategic approach
undermines the very objectives executives are seeking to achieve,
causing:

Decreased customer satisfaction: Inaccurate,
out-of-date, or incomplete customer information prevents people from
understanding companies and their products, and can drive customers
away.

Sluggish market execution: Labor-intensive
manual processes require months-long lead times to roll out brand
changes, new products, and new campaigns, delaying launches and
weakening competitive advantage.

Diluted brands and
messaging: Without the capability for centralized control, brands and
messages become distorted as they are altered for the requirements of
different touch points and diverse global markets.

At the same
time, another penalty is incurred, because customer experience
inefficiencies increase the costs of each customer interaction,
damaging the bottom line.

Solution: Customer Experience Management
Piecemeal
attempts to resolve these widespread problems simply do not work.
Focusing on one particular type of customer interaction or on one
customer touch point may improve one aspect of the overall customer
experience, but will also likely result in duplication of content,
inconsistent content usage, and redundant processes, which only
compound enterprise-wide difficulties.

A far more effective
approach is customer experience management, the combining of an
enterprise’s entire create-to-publish customer experience process
within a single ecosystem, uniting content management, digital asset
management, localization, content distribution, and more. With a
systematic approach, a company can consistently deliver persuasive,
customer-facing content through all customer touch points to:

Strengthen
customer loyalty: A customer experience management solution provides
capabilities for personalization and interaction management so
companies can anticipate and meet the specific needs of each customer
for each interaction. The automation of manual processes prevents
misalignment across channels and improves customer satisfaction.
Accelerate
worldwide product launches and promotions: By supporting all processes
from collaborative creation through global publishing, customer
experience management enables an enterprise to create customer content
that can be used immediately around the world. Business units can
eliminate IT bottlenecks by rapidly generating and deploying their own
marketing assets without risking misalignment with enterprise-level
business objectives.
Achieve unified brands, messages,
and corporate image: A customer experience management solution provides
business units around the world with a library of approved, localized
brand messages and marketing assets. By combining local authoring with
centralized control, customer experience management helps companies
move quickly in every geography while projecting the brand in a
consistent light to build customer loyalty.

In addition to these
strategic benefits, from an operational perspective the automation of
manual processes prevents redundant work and optimizes efficiency,
often enabling enterprises to substantially reduce the costs of
providing customer information.

CRM is essential for managing the
transactional aspects of the customer relationship, but it is no longer
enough. Executives seeking to build customer loyalty, improve market
agility, and manage their brands across global markets are finding that
customer experience management offers both a solution to address the
challenges of today and a platform to improve competitiveness moving
forward.

About the Author
Bill Seawick is CMO at Interwoven.