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Measuring Customer Engagement, Experience, Expectations
Recently we spoke with Elizabeth M. Carducci, Director of Client Services at Medallia, a customer experience management company, which helps organizations track how they are doing with customers on a day-to-day and even minute-by-minute basis about how companies can better integrate and adopt CEM practices.
The more we explore the concept of CEM, the more we learn that "E" can stand for many things: Engagement, experience and expectations. All are relevant to how companies can begin to measure the way their customers influence the way they develop products and deliver services.
However, unless any or all aspects of CEM are ingrained in the enterprise environment, the true benefits cannot be felt. Carducci says that the companies that come to Medallia, where CEM has been embraced as an essential part of company culture, perform better than those where transparency isn’t a best practice.
Five Steps to Driving Customer Excellence
At Medallia, its feedback management platform incorporates five actions designed to capture users’ attention so companies can develop clear solutions that motivate employees to act:
- capture
- share
- recover
- discover
- improve
While not all companies start out performing all five steps, Medallia helps them get the right tools into place -- both technologically and culturally -- so that eventually all five actions are incorporated into their business models.
Shifting Cultures to Enhance Customer Experiences
As company cultures shift from top-down improvements to bottom-up innovation, CEM is thought to drive revenue, rather than costs, making it a part of long-term solutions focused on customer cultivation and company collaboration.
Companies like Medallia are helping companies remain proactive and competitive in the marketplace, rather than complacent and reactive. Organizations know that the early bird catches the worm, er, customer, so it serves them well to keep their eyes and ears to the ground so they can effectively engage with and report back on customer experiences.
