What Is Customer Experience Management (CEM)?

Customer experience management (CEM) is the practice of creating personalized interactions across physical and digital touchpoints. Customer experience can be broadly defined as how your customers feel about your business and its brand over all of its interactions, digital and offline, during their entire relationship with your company. Customer experience management can be viewed as a company’s proactive investment in delivering the strongest possible customer experience. In other words, top-notch customer experiences don’t happen magically; they are the product of a company’s tireless efforts in ensuring high-quality interactions that meet and ideally exceed a customer’s expectations. It is sometimes abbreviated as CXM.

CEM fundamentally relies on strong customer data analytics to reveal critical insights into customer behavior and expectations, so that changes and new customer experiences can be created and tailored to different customer segments. Today, much of the customer data management and analytics are handled by customer data platforms (CDPs), which use data to help companies deliver highly personalized interactions in the right place and at the right time.

Customer experience is increasingly one of the most important competitive differentiators a business has at its disposal. This is particularly true for consumer-focused businesses such as retailers. Customer experience spans both physical interactions, such as a retail store experience, and digital interactions, such as websites and social media posts.

High-quality customer experiences don’t occur by accident. Without a customer experience management strategy and the proper tools and processes in place, you’re simply hoping for the best—which isn’t an effective plan for promoting loyalty and evangelism among your customer base.