A Report by Harvard Business Review Analytic Service – Lessons from the Leading Edge of Customer Experience Management – 2014.

“CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE MANAGEMENT — the collection of processes an organization uses to manage customer interactions across the enterprise—is more important than ever. The days of the single customer touch point are long gone. Today’s companies must optimize the customer experience across multiple channels and product lines while still meeting demands for real-time, increasingly customized execution. Yet too few companies are creating effective customer experience practices. Less than half of companies view customer experience management as a strategic priority. Most are struggling to develop clear and consistent customer experience strategies, support, processes, and metrics across their organizations. Leading-edge companies, however, are making the changes necessary for effective customer experience management throughout the enterprise and gaining a clear competitive advantage as a result of their efforts. These are among the findings of a new Harvard Business Review Analytic Services study of more than 400 executives around customer experience management—research that features in-depth interviews with several best-practice company leaders. There’s no question that customer experience management is hard. First, it is difficult to prove the ROI of customer experience efforts and tie such endeavors to business outcomes. Second, integration and data issues can thwart attempts to deliver a single view of the customer. Finally, cultivating a customer-focused culture is a change management challenge. Leading-edge companies face these same customer experience struggles as the laggards do but differ in how they respond to the challenges. They aren’t waiting for someone else to solve these problems for them. They’re dedicating the resources to figure them out for themselves ahead of the competition. Armed with an intrinsic belief in the business value of customer experience excellence, they’re putting the funding, processes, and strategy in place to overcome these hurdles. And as a result, these leading-edge companies perform substantially better across the whole range of business measures, from profitability to customer retention rate…”