Have you seen The Customer-Focused Marketing Playbook?

This comprehensive and practical guide to the latest ideas in customer-focused marketing hands you over 200 packed pages of strategy, best practices, do's and don'ts, practical know-how, facts and figures, and ideas to optimise your marketing strategy, boost sales, market share, increase ROI and profit.

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Temkin report forecasts evolution of CEM

The research examined how customer experience management (CEM) has evolved and where it is heading, and found that 59% of large companies have ambitions to be industry leaders in customer experience within the next three years.

At the same time, Temkin Group estimates that there are more than 100,000 people in North America employed in full-time customer experience roles. Based on this significant ambition, and the development of customer experience tools and techniques by the growing pool of customer experience professionals, many companies are already building strong customer experience management capabilities.

"Customer experience has reached a tipping point, with a critical mass of professionals defining repeatable best practices and delivering strong ROI to their firms," noted Bruce Temkin, author of the research and managing partner for Temkin Group.

The report also revealed that companies are being motivated by a clearer understanding about the link between good customer experience and stronger business results. Temkin Group completed a study of 10,000 consumers that shows a strong correlation between customer experiences and loyalty across 18 industries in the US. In fact, a company with US$1 billion in annual sales can generate more than US$300 million more over three years with only a modest improvement in customer experience.

As organisations improve, the report suggests that they typically evolve through six stages of customer experience maturity:

1. Ignore
   The company does not see customer experience as a key differentiator.
2. Explore
   An ad-hoc group is established to understand how the company can improve customer experience.
3. Mobilise
   A full-time executive leads the effort to improve customer experience and the company establishes a cross-functional governance system.
4. Operationalize
   The company redesigns many of its operational processes using clear insights about customers.
5. Align
   Customer experience behaviours are widespread across employees and they are supported by the company's standard measurement and incentive systems.
6. Embed
   The company delivers great customer experience without focusing on it explicitly. It comes as a result of the entire organisation being committed to the company's clear sense of purpose.

While companies are gaining customer experience maturity, new technologies and processes are enabling more innovative practices, and the report goes on to identify and explain eight emerging customer experience skills that companies will need to master over the next several years: journey-centric alignment, mobile-infused experiences, predictive personalisation, distributed contextual insights, federated customer experience capabilities, business rhythm integration, rejuvenated purposefulness, and promoter activation.

The report has been made available via the Customer Experience Matters blog - click here.

Have you seen The Customer-Focused Marketing Playbook?

This comprehensive and practical guide to the latest ideas in customer-focused marketing hands you over 200 packed pages of strategy, best practices, do's and don'ts, practical know-how, facts and figures, and ideas to optimise your marketing strategy, boost sales, market share, increase ROI and profit.

Learn the insider's tricks and techniques to turn every customers into a 'super spreader' for your brand. It's better than free advertising. Once you start this ball rolling, your brand can grow rapidly through word-of-mouth, advocacy, influencers, and customer loyalty. Super-charge your company's marketing strategy, build up your market share, and make more sales through repeat business and customer loyalty.

Find out what works - and what doesn't - and who's succeeded, and how they did it. See how the world's top brands keep their competitive edge against all odds.

The Customer-Focused Marketing Playbook walks you step-by-step through the techniques, metrics, reporting, analysis, marketing models, technologies, tools and innovations for successful marketing strategies - both traditional and emerging - with expert guidance from thought leaders in every major market. Find out the best ways to gather, analyse, and act on customer data to increase profitability, build your brand, empower your customers, beat the competition, reduce churn, and increase customer profitability. This is a marketing book you simply can't afford to be without.

This book aims to hand you all the facts, figures and research data you need for the best decisions for a more profitable, more engaging marketing strategy. It also highlights all the facts, forecasts and trends identified by our experts from the global Marketing Factbook's vast database of market data, news, studies, research and articles, and presents you with an invaluable library of ideas and practical support you can call upon at will.

With The Customer-Focused Marketing Playbook at your side, you'll have instant access to a true goldmine of easily adaptable and up-to-date strategies, walk-throughs, trends, research and market data, plus all the supporting arguments you need to build a solid, profitable marketing strategy.

Get it on Amazon (Kindle/Print)