The purpose of asking the measurement question is to stop and consider purpose. Did you make a conscious decision about the metric you need to track? Do these metrics help you reach your overall CEM goals and objectives? Do you need them to be lead indicators or lag indicators?

And lastly, what do you need to measure to come up with these metrics?

Improve the CEM implementation

Question 4: How do the Customer Experience Management results compare with the performance of your competitors and other organizations with similar offerings?

As soon as you start executing your CEM strategy, it’s important to think about ways to continually improve the results but also the processes used within CEM. Because CEM is all about the Customer Experience, you are ultimately trying to create brand advocates and loyal customers.

This is where benchmarking becomes important. Not only do you need to look internally for improvements, you should also know how you compare to the rest of the industry and your competitors. After all, if your customer doesn’t fully enjoy the overall experience, he or she will go elsewhere. What do you need to do to keep your customers loyal to your brand but at the same time stay within the company’s goals and (financial) objectives?

You can only ask this question after you’ve identified the answers to question 3 (metrics and what to measure) to avoid comparing apples to oranges. When you’re benchmarking, make sure you compare the right data.

Sustain CEM in the organization and plan for the future

Finally top question number five is all about future-proofing your CEM processes.

Question 5: What are the top 3 things at the forefront of our OSS BSS Customer Experience Management agendas for the next 3 years?

Your company will have a long-term strategic plan that is split up into a 3-5 year plan, annual strategic plan all the way down to quarterly, monthly and weekly goals.

Where does CEM fit into this overall business strategy? And do we have clarity on the top three things that we want to work on strategically to help support the business objectives?

Answering these five questions will help you create a solid start to your CEM efforts. It by no provides means a complete picture, but at least you’ll know that all your CEM activities will be done in line with the company’s strategic goals and objectives. And you will have a clear understanding of what CEM means to you in the context of the business. You’ll also know what is important to your customers so you can utilize the most effective resources to gather this data to analyze and turn into manageable metrics which can be looped back toward the overall strategic goal. This in itself will help you understand how to build a perpetual system of ongoing improvement to keep your customers loyal and attached to your brand moving into an uncertain and unknown future.

For all these questions the same principle applies: if you don't know the answer yet, it's not necessarily a bad thing. At least you are consciously aware of this fact and can work on finding the answers that help improve the results your business gains from CEM.