LONDON, September 22, 2011 /PRNewswire/ --

In recent times, customer experience management (CEM) has undergone a series of massive transformations as companies increasingly recognise that there is more to satisfaction than simply providing a good product or service.

Faced with highly-penetrated markets, decreased consumer spending and growing internal pressure to cut costs, more and more businesses are shifting their focus from customer acquisition to retention. It is now a widely-accepted principle that measures driving repeat business are invariably cheaper to put in place than programmes to recruit new customers.

Bruce Temkin, former Forrester Research principal analyst and author of the Temkin Group report titled Customer Experience Correlates to Loyalty explained how the CEM agenda was changing. "Since new customers are harder to come by in an economic downturn, firms need to pay even more attention to building loyalty with their most important customers. If firms lose pace with competitors' customer experience, they may end up attenuating the negative impact of the economic downturn."

A recent Customer Management Exchange survey, conducted ahead of the Customer Experience Exchange 2011, revealed that encouraging loyalty was currently a main objective for almost two-thirds of customer experience managers.

The research revealed some of the prevailing trends concerning CEM professionals in 2011. Delegates representing virtually all key industries, from retail banking to telecommunication, IT and healthcare, were involved in the study. When asked to disclose their personal annual customer experience budget, almost three-quarters of respondents admitted to having less than €1 million (£875,000) to spend this year.

Customer Management Exchange also examined the economic trends that have had the biggest impact on CEM professionals' role in recent months. Quite interestingly, it was increased customer demands that accounted for the largest proportion of the vote, with 67.2 per cent of delegates choosing this response. Customer loyalty emerged as one of the key focus areas, which along with customer satisfaction was cited as a priority by 58.6 per cent.

Almost three-quarters of respondents said they were first and foremost looking to deliver a holistic and integrated customer experience. Exactly half of those surveyed said their main aim was to be able to demonstrate the ROI of customer experience within their organisation.

The full report on the results of the survey is available here: http://bit.ly/mTY6MO

The importance of Customer Experience Management will also be discussed at the Customer Experience Exchange taking place 29 November - 1 December 2011 in Berlin. More information about the event can be found here: http://bit.ly/nc9PEj

Contact: Customer Experience Exchange  +44(0)207-368-9484, exchangeteam@iqpc.com

SOURCE IQPC Exchange