A hybrid approach to integrate customer experience management (CEM) & customer relationship management (CRM)

Experience, defined as the subjective response of customers to any direct or indirect contact with a company, has been considered as a critical factor in connecting customers emotionally and in turn achieving customer retention. A most critical source of experience is the service delivery process encountered by customers. Nevertheless, existing tools for depicting service focus mainly on the activities involved without showing the emotion aspects of customers. The information and knowledge exchange process in providing excellent customer experiences has not been fully addressed. Another critical successful factor that affects the overall experience of a customer is his or her relationship with the company. The effect of service activities will be totally different if the relationship between a customer and a company is different. For instance, a new customer may feel good about even a simple greeting. On the other hand, an old loyal customer may expect a frontline worker to address him or her personally and a simple greeting is not good enough to create delightful experience. Leung & Kwong (2009) has proposed a structured approach to describe service using different tools to depict both emotional and information aspects of services. However, the proposed approach does not address the impact of the relationship between a company and a customer. To keep creating delightful experience continually, a company must be capable of capturing and distributing the response of a customer to the service and maintaining strong relationship with customers. To further strengthen the relationship with a customer, a company must be able to maintain the critical information of customers so that more customized service can be provided. Thus, both customer experience management and customer relationship management must go hand in hand. In this paper, we propose a hybrid approach that integrates object and structured based analysis to model service. With this new approach, the relationship between a customer and a company can be incorporated into the service or experience model proposed by Leung & Kwong (2009). We first develop an object model which depicts the key personnel (objects) involved in the service process at the highest level. Then, the key information and attributes of a customer (an object) that are essential for creating customized service are identified. The attributes that are identified for delivering customized service are shown. The original emotion-transition diagrams proposed by Leung & Kwong are used to depict the emotional effect of different customized actions based on the characteristics (attributes) of an individual customer identified by the object model. Using this approach, the customized service generated through CRM can then be integrated with the emotion transition diagram for creating delightful experiences. Thus the opportunities and actions for creating delightful experiences arisen from CRM can be more effectively identified and implemented