Customer Management: The Key Differentiator (Cont'd)

• Failure to listen to customer preferences on cost versus service and what form that service should take.
• Loss of control of the customer experience through outsourcing major points of interaction such as retail or the contact center.
• Industry consolidation that leaves the survivors with multiple, incompatible systems.
• Failure to manage customer expectations. For instance, if the support center is not equipped to handle e-mails or IMs in a timely manner and integrate them with phone conversations, the organization should not provide e-mail links to service on its Web site.

Focus on Service Excellence
The keys to strong customer service are an enterprise-wide, consistent focus on service excellence that comes from the highest levels of corporate management and is backed with financial investment, supported by a strong CRM solution. Fortunately, today sophisticated CRM solutions are available in the marketplace, eliminating the need to gamble on untested, custom-written software. The CRM marketplace is experiencing a dual evolution. Experts agree that the sale of Siebel Systems, long one of the leaders in the development of complete CRM solutions, marks the end of the stand-alone CRM marketplace. Smaller CRM vendors are rapidly disappearing, many snapped up by larger business systems vendors, while others, such as SAP, are developing their own integrated CRM modules in-house. Enterprises will look to their accounting, ERP, or other central business systems vendor for the functionality they need to support their customer service initiatives.

Customer Experience Management
Simultaneously, CRM is evolving to the next level, customer experience management (CEM), which Johnson terms, “…the final shift from art to science.”

Seen as the key to targeted customer retention, the CEM vision is consistent customer experience across all channels from advertising through sales and support. “If your brand's message is cheap and fast, then you need to be cheap and fast all the time, in every interaction with every customer,” says Woody (Woodruff) Driggs, managing partner of operational CRM at Accenture. “If you are high-end, you need to always be high-end.”

CEM is not simply a technology. It must be a corporate-wide management initiative to break down the silo walls that still divide many organizations. “CEM ...

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