Customer Experience Management (CEM) isn't just a good idea anymore. Today, it's a requirement for reaching satisfaction goals, retaining and growing valuable customers and differentiating your organization from competition. Companies that have paid attention to customer experience, such as Best Buy, Marriott, and USAA, are reaping rewards, while companies that have lost focus have seen disastrous results. Several well-known brands have made headlines and lost customers as the result of a single bad experience.

So, what are companies doing to understand and manage the experience of their customers? To start, more organizations than ever are appointing a dedicated Customer Experience Officer. And, voice of the customer programs are becoming standard, helping companies figure out how to do a better job of listening to — and using — feedback from their customers.

Why don't we see broader adoption of corporate-wide CEM programs? Unfortunately, there are still several hurdles to face:

1. The scope of a corporate-wide CEM program is daunting. Even for newly named Customer Experience Officers, there are typically not a lot of cross-functional resources available to help define and refine the customer experience
2. Most companies are still organized around products, not customers, making it difficult to get the support required across all the touchpoints that impact the customer
3. The business justification for a corporate-wide CEM program takes longer to demonstrate than individual short-term revenue-generating programs. It requires a leap of faith for executives to take on CEM and embrace it as part of the corporate culture

If you look closely, you see that these hurdles are related. In order to break down the barriers and implement a CEM program, you need to demonstrate and communicate impact -- in both corporate and customer measures -- and gain support across all levels of the organization.

But success is within reach for those organizations that are willing to invest both the time and resources. Here are 5 key steps to building the foundation for a successful CEM program.

Building a CEM Program - 5 Steps to Success

Make sure that there is clear agreement on what the customer experience should be. Many functional areas, such as customer service, will already have guidelines and objectives for customer interactions. However, this needs to be expanded so the entire organization has a set of guiding principles that align the brand with the experience - and differentiate your organization from the competition.

Any customer initiative should start with the customer. Leverage what you know and what customers are telling you. Which aspects of the experience are causing customers pain? Which ones actually help move the customer through the lifecycle? Next, identify 'moments of truth,' the interactions that will have the most impact on the customer's future actions, and are most important to manage to your advantage.

Using these 'moments of truth' as your starting point, tie the customer experience vision to clearly defined, measurable objectives.

Using the guiding principles and your understanding of the 'moments of truth,' define a specific initiative aligned with a single customer objective: aligning customer service with marketing, or retaining valuable customers, for example. Identify changes to one or more 'moments of truth' that are points of frustration for customers. Clearly define how you will gauge success - using both financial and customer measures. Remember, anecdotal information, as well as customer behaviors, can be a very powerful way to 'hear' the impact directly from customers.

Prior to rolling out the initiative, clearly communicate the program, goals and objectives, across your organization. Make sure impacted customer touchpoint owners understand their role and any new processes they will need to follow. Alignment of incentives is critical for your success. Establish clear checkpoints prior to launching the program, and consider early findings that provide additional insight into improvement.

Once the initiative is underway and demonstrating positive results, look at other touchpoints or 'moments of truth' where a similar approach can generate impact. Make sure that 'moments of truth,' both positive and negative are based on customer insight. It's important that you have the right mechanisms in place to continually gather and use direct customer insights. These insights will help you prioritize where to focus. Summarize your findings and determine the impact to the customer and financial measures.

Continue to build on the success of the initiative and communicate to all levels in the organization. As initiatives expand and include multiple touchpoints, ensure that there is a constant focus on understanding the experience from the customer's viewpoint. This will help underscore the need for functional areas to work together for greatest impact.

Build a compelling business case that establishes a clear justification for expanding customer experience initiatives. Communication of your successes throughout the organization is important. You want to build momentum from the bottom-up as well as from the top-down.

And, once there is direct impact to the bottom line, it will be easier to prioritize and gain support for a larger scale CEM program.