Shaun Smith's Top Ten Tips for Deploying CEM

This week Shaun Smith posted an article on CustomerThink titled, “Top Ten Tips for Deploying CEM .”

As Shaun points out, execution is the often the hardest part of creating a branded customer experience.  That’s because you must mobilize employees at all levels and align competing agendas, functions and executives.

Drawing on his experience with leading brands across the globe, Shaun has observed a number of mistakes that are all too common in so many failed initiatives.  In this article, Shaun outlines ways to avoid these pitfalls when implementing your own customer experience initiative.  Here are his “Top Ten Tips” for success:

1. Successful deployment requires the active and continuing involvement of leadership
2. Ensuring cross-functional ownership is vital
3. Focus on your most strategically important customers
4. Find out what these customers truly value
5. Design CEM before installing CRM systems
6. Use customer experience to retain customers rather than attempting to lock-in them in through so called loyalty cards
7. Deploy customer experience before allowing your agency to communicate the proposition
8. Provide ‘branded’ training to ensure that employees all understand the brand story
9. Measure the customer experience and align performance KPI’s with it
10. Sustain deployment through measuring customer experience rather than customer satisfaction

Shaun expands on each of these points with his own insights and examples of successful organizations that follow these tips.  So if you want to join these winners, make sure you read and follow Shaun’s advice in “Top Ten Tips for Deploying CEM."