Barney is a CXM Genius!
CXM inspiration from the most unlikely source; a rather cheery purple dinosaur!
The children’s TV programme Barney (you know, the big weird purple Dinosaur!) may not be the first place you would think to go to for business advice. But watching an episode last weekend (with my 3 year old cousin I must add!) I did start thinking about Customer Experience Management (CXM), the new marketing phrase currently doing the rounds.
Barney and his cronies were singing a song about how “everyone is special” and telling the audience “you’re important” and “you’re the only one like you”. I sat there with my cousin, (who was by now not sitting but instead jumping on the sofa with excitement) thinking that Barney had inadvertently done what many experts have managed to make a mess of in recent months, and that is define CXM without any marketing hyperbole or ridiculous buzz words.
CXM is essentially understanding that everyone is different and people want companies to recognise this by providing personalised content at all customer touch points. Customers want to be valued by companies.
Since the early 90’s CRM (Customer Relationship Management) was the main focus when it came to understanding one’s target audience. This essentially involved concerted efforts across the sales and marketing teams to capture, store and process as much customer data as possible. These are worthwhile tasks but the customer would be inclined to ask “what am I getting out of this?”. This is the question that has caused the emergence of CXM. CXM makes providing a great service to the individual customer central to the company’s ethos as opposed to just capturing data.
The market research company Forrester Wave believe that CXM consists of 6 elements (shown in the diagram below). Each element plays a vital role, as webtrends reported in a recent white paper; “What good is content if you can’t find it, buy it, or interact with the
company, or is poorly designed, difficult to navigate, or simply irrelevant to the customer’s needs?”.