CXM! What the Heck is That?

In his recent very readable article ‘iCXM Comes of Age – Using AI to Know, Engage, and Server Your Customers Better’, CustomerThink.com founder and chief editor Bob Thompson explored how Artificial Intelligence can improve Customer Experience Management – and with iCXM created a new acronym, jokingly noting that the industry is running short on buzzwords.
The possibilities that Bob identifies are
·      Knowing your customer
·      Engaging your customer
·      Serving your customer
While this is all true, I contend that none of this is about customer experience management, simply because customer experiences are living in the perception of the customer, and hence are solely managed by the customer, not by any company. I wrote about it earlier in my article There is no customer experience without customer engagement.
According to Wikipedia, customer experience ‘is the product of an interaction between an organization and a customer over the duration of their relationship. This interaction is made up of three parts: the customer journey, the brand touchpoints the customer interacts with, and the environments the customer experiences … ‘. Therefore customer experience ‘implies customer involvement at different levels – such as rational, emotional, sensorial, physical, and spiritual.  Customers respond diversely to direct and indirect contact with a company.’ Lastly, customer experience ‘can be defined as the internal and personal responses of the customers …”.
A employer, supported thru the software program it uses, can have interaction clients in a way that the ones customers have a high-quality ? Or terrible ? Revel in.
What now could be consumer revel in control?
Friend and CRM Godfather Paul Greenberg, in a seminal article clarified on the definitions of Customer Relationship Management, Customer Engagement Management, and Customer Experience Management, writing that ‘CXM is a business science that has the purpose of determining the strategy and programs that can make the customer feel good enough about the company to want to continue to do business with the company.’
Techtarget defines it as ‘the collection of processes a company uses to track, oversee, and organize every interaction between a customer and the organization throughout the customer lifecycle. The goal of [Customer Experience Management] is to optimize interactions from the customer’s perspective and foster customer loyalty. To manage the customer experience, a company needs to create a strategy that encompasses all customer interactions.”
There we're.
Strategy.
Not a machine. Nor a software program program class.
So, be wary if a vendor comes to visit you and tells you about their great CXM software. And, yes, this includes big names like Oracle, or Adobe. And then there is a raft of smaller solutions that drives on the CXM label. By the looks of it Microsoft, Salesforce, and SAP got it and are more about ‘Engagement’, which is a prerequisite for experiences.
So, what are the cornerstones of CXM as a method?
I do see 3:
1.     An outside-in view that defines the success of the company as a result of customer success, or in other words the ability of giving the customers what they need and want.
2.     Processes that are designed to deliver customer success with minimal friction.
3.     Data, lots of it, to build individual customer profiles and to be able to engage with them in relevant conversations – using the right message, at the right time, using the right channel. And ultimately being able to offer the right products and services.
Software enables a number of these three cornerstones. But, what this software program does is permitting engagement, each right now, as in advertising and advertising, profits, service, or in a roundabout manner, as in analytics, operations structures, content material manipulate structures, and so forth.
Until we get a software program machine this is smart enough to decide a patron?S mood and conditions whenever in actual time and this is capable of reacting therefore and adapting its part of the verbal exchange correspondingly, we're capable of no longer have Customer Experience Management software program, or a class of this software program.
But AI might also help us having one.