Customer Experience Management (CEM) is all about relationships

“Every relationship requires listening no matter the nature of relationship” – this is the key take-away that stuck with me from a webinar I attended about the importance of Artificial Intelligence.

I want to focus your attention on the listening aspects of relationships, especially empathetic listening. Being an empathetic listener is important in both personal and professional relationships because people are valuable and simply need to be treated as important. A lack of empathetic listening in professional relationships can lead to distrust, decreased productivity, and poor morale.

A good customer experience management (CEM) framework will ensure companies don’t lose sight of this very important factor because empathetic listening considers multiple dimensions of the customer’s journey including emotions, expectations, preferences and behavior. A CEM program will not push technology for the sake of itself or even new buzzwords like robotic process automation (RPA), without having a clear view of the future state of the customer journey and the desired customer behavior and outcomes.

I have seen many interpretations and definitions of customer experience management, but I still feel that it is the systematic designing of high-valued and consistent delivery of customer experience management that determines the winners from the losers. At the same time, the influence of unconscious sensory and emotional elements of consumer preferences needs to be considered. Put simply – it is to manage your customers’ relationships (CRM), but not the technology. The technology you ultimate choose to enable will your customer journey, will contribute to how well you manage your customer relationships and ecosystems.

This article was posted on Linkedin.com