- Saurabh Sharma, Country Manager, Spire Research and Consulting
"Customer Experience Management (CEM) is seen as a priority in most service-based businesses, such as companies in telecommunications, financial services and retail industries".
According to a research, the global CEM market is expected to grow from USD2.68 billion in 2012 to USD6.61 billion by 2017. Stemming from this prediction, it is vital for companies to recognize the importance of retaining customers through repeat purchases, as this customer segment is too important to be left unattended or left to chance. Nowadays, not only do customers want to enjoy good products and services; they also wish to experience good customer service. Should all these attributes be in place, customers would be more likely to recommend their friends and family the products and services they are satisfied with; leading to increased product and service sale for the companies.
As such, companies must plan and develop a continuous holistic CEM program and communicate at all levels (i.e. sales, marketing, operation, customer services). Companies today are starting to adopt a two-prong approach – top-down customer research and bottom-up customer research.
The top-down approach refers to conducting interactive surveys to ascertain the customers’ experience, whereas the bottom-up approach refers to deriving insights on customer experience through observation.
A top-down approach is mainly adopted in companies which want to gain more insights on new product usage through engaging customers and garnering their feedback. This would allow the companies to better understand the level of market acceptance, which would aid in product improvement prior to actual launch.
On the other hand, with a bottom-up approach, the advancement of cloud technologies would allow the CEM tool offered by cloud CEM providers to provide automated customer insights. Companies can obtain valuable customer experience insights through text analytics and voice analytics, via social media and customer service IVR respectively; which would lead to actionable strategies.
According to a source, tablet sales in India has grown from 360,000 to 1.9 million units from 2012 to 2013; registering a growth of 400%. Besides, smartphone sales in India have also crossed 15 million units in 2013, as compared to last year’s figure of 9.5 million units. With such a high penetration rate of mobile devices in India, it is predicted that 1 out of 4 people would be shopping through a mobile device by 2013. As such, marketers can also gather CEM insights via mobile devices.
With the large volume of data that would be generated through this holistic automated CEM program, it calls for a need for reliable analytical tools to put them into good use.
In the near future, with the use of facial analytics jumping into the bandwagon, it is evident that CEM would be the first-mover in Big Data.
Links to coverage:
GoArticles:
DigitalMediaNet:
Comments
Post a Comment