Feature Article: The Evolution Of CRM To CEM

By Sid Banerjee, co-founder and chief executive officer, Clarabridge™

CEM is the process by which a company strategically manages a customer's entire experience with its product, service or company. Through CEM initiatives, a company actively listens to its customers through a variety of listening posts, analyzes what they are saying to make more savvy business decisions and monitors the impact of those decisions to improve operational performance and customer loyalty.

Where CRM focuses on structured data that assesses past transactions, CEM goes further to also leverage unstructured, textual information. With CRM systems for sales automation, telephone and email support and campaign management already in place across the enterprise, companies already capture raw, soft data about customer experiences. CEM enables a company to efficiently leverage this information, plus new Web 2.0 and other non-CRM sources of insight.

Improving on, extending and leveraging a company's CRM programs to include CEM capabilities offers the deepest possible insight into customer sentiment to drive business success. The "secret sauce" behind effective CEM is text analytics.

Many companies have some manual capability for broadly categorizing the products, sales and support issues that CRM systems capture; however, they have no real means by which to effectively quantify and analyze this textual information in real time to generate actionable insight.