Customer Experience Management: A Revolutionary Approach to Connecting with Your Customers [Hardcover]

Bernd H. Schmitt (Author), Bernd Schmitt (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0471237744 | ISBN-13: 978-0471237747 | Publication Date: January 31, 2003 | Edition: 1

In Customer Experience Management, renowned consultant and marketing thinker Bernd Schmitt follows up on his groundbreaking book Experiential Marketing by introducing a new and visionary approach to marketing called customer experience management (CEM). In this book, Schmitt demonstrates how to put his CEM framework to work in any organization to spur growth, increase revenues, and transform the image of your company and its brands. From retail buying to telephone orders, from marketing communications to online shopping, every customer touch-point offers companies an opportunity to maximize the customer experience and establish a bond that will never be broken.

Customer Experience Management introduces the five-step CEM process, a comprehensive tool for connecting with customers at every touch-point. This revolutionary marketing guide provides cases of successful CEM implementations in a wide variety of consumer and B2B industries, including pharmaceuticals, electronics, beauty and cosmetics, telecommunications, beverages, financial services, and even the nonprofit sector.

A must-read for senior executives, marketing managers, and anyone who wants to drive growth, increase income, and spur organizational change, Customer Experience Management demonstrates the power of collecting truly relevant customer information, developing and implementing winning strategies, and measuring their results.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"...demonstrates the power of collecting truly relevant customer information..." (Managing Information, January/February 2004)

From the Inside Flap

From retail buying to telephone orders, from marketing communications to online shopping, every customer touch-point offers your company an opportunity to maximize the customer experience and establish a bond that will never be broken–another opportunity for customer experience management (CEM).

In his acclaimed bestseller Experiential Marketing, renowned consultant and marketing thinker Bernd Schmitt explained why companies that focus on the customer experience are among the most successful and profitable organizations in the world. In Customer Experience Management, he shows you how to put CEM to work in any organization to spur growth, increase revenues, and transform the image of your company and its brands.

This revolutionary marketing guide introduces the five-step CEM process that you can use to connect with your customers at every touch-point. It provides cases of successful CEM implementations in a wide variety of consumer and B2B industries, including pharmaceuticals, electronics, beauty and cosmetics, telecommunications, beverages, financial services, and even the nonprofit sector. These cases demonstrate how CEM offers powerful solutions for virtually any type of business challenge and enables managers to:

• Gain original insight into the customer’s world
• Develop an experiential strategy platform
• Create a unique and vivid brand experience
• Provide dynamic interactions at the customer interface
• Innovate continuously to improve customers’ lives

This provocative treatise provides new insight into perennial marketing and management issues such as segmentation and targeting, positioning, branding, service, and innovation. It also offers a clear and convincing critique of other customer-based paradigms, including traditional marketing, customer satisfaction, and customer relationship management (CRM). It explains why each of them fails to provide genuine focus on the customer and why the CEM framework is the only approach to date that makes a company and its brands relevant to the customer’s life.

Customer Experience Management also demonstrates the power of collecting truly relevant customer information, developing and implementing winning strategies, and measuring their results. It’s a must-read for senior executives, marketing managers, and anyone who wants to drive growth, increase income, and spur organizational change.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Wiley; 1 edition (January 31, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0471237744
• ISBN-13: 978-0471237747
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.5 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.5 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #135,431 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

17 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars What a disappointing jumble of jargon!, December 16, 2005

By 

L. Thompson (Phoenix, AZ) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Customer Experience Management: A Revolutionary Approach to Connecting with Your Customers (Hardcover)

For those individuals who have not been previously exposed to the concept of Customer Experience Management as an alternative to Customer Relations Management, this book might be an amazing eye opener. But that would be strictly because of the exposure to a new idea, as it's certainly not the convulted style of writing which can result in even the most intelligent people scratching their heads.

I purchased this book in order to get very down to earth methods to begin applying the concept to the company I work for. What I found, instead, was a list a mile long of jargon that all began to run together and sound the same. "Experiential platform", "brand experience", "experiental value promise", experiential positioning"... soon enough my mind was preoccupied with trying to remember which was which, rather than being able to absorb the essence of what the author was trying to say. And the crazy thing is that each of those phrases I just mentioned are supposedly the very concrete, measureable phases behind his take on the CEM approach! Getting tangled in the minutia of catch phrases did nothing to help me move forward into CEM.

I've come away from the book disappointed I didn't learn anything of real value, but even more disappointed that I spent the money on the book. Don't bother!

15 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Packed With Knowledge!, June 6, 2004

By 

Rolf Dobelli "getAbstract" (Switzerland) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Customer Experience Management: A Revolutionary Approach to Connecting with Your Customers (Hardcover)

The revolutionary approach that Bernd H. Schmitt is advocating here wouldn't sound so radical to anyone who has ever been in therapy: be aware, see things from other people's point of view, address their concerns. If you've been in $150 an hour territory, this isn't radical, but in the suites of marketing, the author contends, it is brand new. The book is an interesting follow up to the author's earlier seminal work on the broader theory of customer experience. Entitled Experiential Marketing, that work made the case for a customer-experience focus. This book is more of a practical how-to, professorially organized into a neat near-outline format. Here, Schmitt makes the case for dissecting, designing and then improving, the customer's experience with your product. We recommend this book of marketing therapy to anyone selling a product or service - and it is lots less expensive than putting your consumers on the couch.

15 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Obvious concepts with no added depth, August 4, 2005

By 

F Howard (Austin, Texas) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Customer Experience Management: A Revolutionary Approach to Connecting with Your Customers (Hardcover)

I had a hard time putting the book down. I kept reading hoping the book would reveal some item beyond the obvious. Schmitt spends 200 pages explaining that customer experience should be at the forefront when launching a new product or designing a marketing campaign. I dare say Schmitt would be hard pressed to find a CEO that doesn't taut the value of good customer experience or the importance of retaining customers.

Where Schmitt falls drastically short is tying customer experience activities to financial decisions companies make every day. This is perhaps the largest challenge those of us in customer retention or customer marketing face every day. It is great to ascertain that companies should improve customer support to provide a better customer experience to retain more customers. However, how does a manager position a $200,000 call center upgrade vs. a $200,000 product enhancement? According to Schmitt both are valuable in the Customer Experience framework. With limited lip service to "regression modeling" and "customer surveys" there is no valuable guidance to help a customer experience focused manager position their projects against other expenditures within a company.

Schmitt could take a few pages out of Jim Collins' work to better tie customer experience initiatives to corporate financial success.