Social Media: The Final Frontier in Customer Experience Management

Abstract:     
'Customer Experience Management' represents the discipline, methodology and/or process used to comprehensively manage a customer's cross-channel exposure, interaction and transaction with a company, product, brand or service. Traditionally, the CEM systems have focused on the ability to manage multi-channel interactions like contact center, company website, self service, mobile devices and brick and mortar stores. This has been the version 1.0 of customer experience landscape – which can be also called ‘company centric’.

But lately, there has been a phenomenal rise of a new kind of media – called 'social media' that has proliferated and fundamentally changed the way we communicate. Social media is the online content created by people using highly accessible and scalable publishing technologies. It is a shift in how people discover, read and share information and content; it supports the human need for social interaction with technology, transforming broadcast media monologues (one to many) into social media dialogues (many to many). Suddenly, the customers are empowered to share their product/service/brand experiences in a whole new way and there is a fundamental power shift in the traditional CEM model. The paper aims to explore this paradigm shift: from being 'company centric', to the version 2.0 of CEM which has now truly become 'customer centric'.

Number of Pages in PDF File: 18

Keywords: social media, social media marketing, social networking, customer experience

Accepted Paper Series