Remember the benefits of Social Business when planning your Customer Experience Management (CXM) strategy

The importance of managing customer experience is becoming increasingly acknowledged by companies and industry analysts alike. What is also clear is that digital has an increasing role to play in both providing many of the touch points of customer interaction and managing the data that can inform and drive better customer experience across all touch points. The recent emergence of CXM as the digital counterpart to Customer Experience Management (CEM) makes complete sense because this digital element clearly needs special focus and attention. All credit to Forrester for bringing the threads of this phenomenon together in their recent report.

It is great to see Alterian’s vision come good as the market catches up with their vision to provide all the essential elements of CXM in one integrated technology stack. The other potential players in this space such as Adobe, IBM and Oracle are now playing catch up with Alterian through acquisition, but consolidation of these acquisitions will take time. Meanwhile Alterian have been through this painful cycle and are now a fair way along the integration of the key pieces of CXM into one technology platform.

One area where there seems to be a lack of discussion is the role of Social Business for CEM. Social Business has become key to successful organisations because, as well as being an increasingly important medium for customer engagement, it is widely now recognised that data-centric systems on their own are limited in terms of the resulting decisions and actions that organisations take from their analysis.

This is even the case when data is consolidated into a single view as is the aspiration of CXM. This data is excellent for automated personalised engagement with customers and for generating deeper insights; we are already seeing the benefits as we have we have started to use different elements of the Alterian product stack in conjunction with Alterian Content Manager. What is also needed though is the ability to collaborate around this data to enhance insights across the whole organisation and to quickly make effective decisions and actions as a result. This was the key lesson learnt through the shortcomings of Business Intelligence which is now quickly evolving into Collaborative Decision Making (CDM) as it leans towards social tools for further leverage. CXM can learn from this and incorporate Social Business from the start.

What Social Business does is enables organisations to collaborate more effectively and transparently around the data so that better conclusions are made and the organisation can be more responsive to the needs of the customer. Only by combining this collaboration method with the deeper insights that CXM will bring will an organisation be able to transform itself from the inside out to have a truly customer-centric culture.

To learn more about Customer Experience Management look out for our white paper which will be released in October.