Whoa! Back up! What's customer experience management? Why should I care?

It might seem intuitive that you'd want to manage a customer's experience. If you're a caring business person, you want to make your customer's happy. Right?

Well -- not so fast. Good business management is about managing tradeoffs, because we generally don't have unlimited budget (unless you're Microsoft, and even their unlimited budget doesn't mean they're impervious to business tradeoffs). A couple of points:

1. Experiences matter. Sometimes more than anything else you do. Wal-Mart's got the largest civilian satellite system in the world. They've got a great supply chain. They are among the best in the world for managing the products on their shelves. But they got booted out of Germany -- in large part because they failed at customer experience management.

2. You can't make everyone maximally happy. You just don't have the money.

3. You don't WANT to make everyone maximally happy, because you won't be remembered for what makes you different.

Put those three together, and you'll see that the following conclusion is pretty darn inevitable:

Managing customer experiences is a critical part of being understood by your market, and of making your brand memorable, different and competitive.

Add to this the following truism: Satisfaction is what results when experience exceed expectation. Since your marketing department is getting really good at raising expectation (isn't it?), then you are in a pickle if you cannot manage experiences as well. In short, if you grant that marketing should be a core competency, then customer experience management should be a core competency.

Now, in the new book It's All About CEM, I define the customer experience as the provisional disposition customer's have about our company (or product, or brand). It's provisional because they can change their minds based on their next experience with you. And it's a disposition because the experience itself is less important than how it is remembered and assessed. So, when designing experiences, you've got to know a lot about consumer psychology in order to create a memorable experience.

We'll go into that in a later posting, but I wanted to lay out the basic definition of customer experience, and the basic case for customer experience management as a necessary -- and under-appreciated! -- core competency.

Gotta run, Wal-Mart is calling ... :)

Calvin Klein vs Diesel. Who "gets" the new economy?

This case study compares how two apparel companies compete for memorability and positive experiences. It compares how Calvin Klein and Diesel have not only created different brand concepts for the same product (jeans), but exploit customer experiences differently.

Calvin Klein
Calvin Klein was born in 1952 and grew up in the 1960s in America, a culture that loved their blue jeans. He started his first shop in New York City in 1968 selling coats. In 1969 he appeared on the cover of Vogue magazine, a trendy fashion magazine. In the mid-1970s he put his name on the back of his jeans and by 1978 he was able to sell 200,000 pairs of designer jeans in one week.

In 1979, Klein’s TV ads showed a 15-year-old Brooke Shields cooing that "nothing comes between me and my Calvins" and "I've got seven Calvins in my closet, and if they could talk, I'd be ruined." His other ads featured adolescents in sexually evocative poses.



After courting a variety of US and global suitors to sell his company, in 2002, Klein sold his company to Phillips Van Heusen for $400 million in cash, as well as $30 million in stock and various licensing arrangements.

Sure, the ads are old -- but they established a tone for the brand that has since "grown up" with more classically rendered, black-and-white, body-beautiful advertising. They leveraged beauty and desire in a very particular way. And periodically, Calvin has tried to keep the brand relevant to younger people to avoid "Cadillacking" themselves with a great product that only sells to older people. According to Wikipedia, “They also play with emerging technologies. When advertising cKone perfume in 1999, they employed a very unusual and groundbreaking campaign that displayed e-mail addresses in print advertisements, targeted at teenagers (such as anna@ckone.com or nick@ckone.com).



When teens sent emails to the addresses, they would be placed on a mailing list that sent them emails with vague details about the models' lives, with fake details meant to make them more relatable. These mails came at unpredictable intervals, and were supposed to give readers the feeling that they had some connection with these characters. Though the mailing lists were discontinued in 2002, the campaign has inspired similar marketing tactics for movies and other retail products.”

In my customer experience management framework, I define the three faces of a touchpoint (which might include posters, ads and emails in this example) as:

1. Hierarchy of values, time and environment (the "frame" for the experience, both external and internal)
2. Attributes of the touchpoint (things you can point to, measure, fix)
3. Associations related to the touchpoint (this "feels like" something I know, "reminds me" of something I know, "evokes" a feeling or idea separate from the product or brand per se).

NEXT TIME: My ideas about these questions ... and a few words about Diesel.