CRM vs. CEM - What's the Difference?

Customer relationship management (CRM) and customer experience management (CEM): how, exactly, are they different, and can an organization use both in their business strategies to generate results?

CRM is the strategy of using customer data and insights to drive sales, marketing, customer service and communication tactics. It's all about the company being smarter with its resources by interacting with customers based on the customer's needs and value and using those insights to determine the best offers and interactions to maintain or increase customer profitability.

CEM focuses on understanding what it is like to be a customer of your organization - from the customer's perspective. So, for example, what is the experience a customer has when calling your service center? Visiting your website to learn more about your offerings or to purchase something? Being called on by one of your sales team members? CEM looks to understand the customer experiences and expectations across the customer lifecycle (awareness, consideration, purchase, existing customer, exiting customer, re-purchase) across all touch points (web, phone, mail, social media, in-person, etc.). Through this understanding, an organization can then identify 1) pain points where customers get lost, confused, frustrated or even defect; 2) opportunities to increase customer "stickiness" and loyalty during an interaction; and 3) points during the customer experience where the organization could be selling.

An organization can focus on CRM and not CEM, and vice versa. However, organizations that marry the two strategies receive the biggest bang for the buck - they're the ones that use customer insights to identify which customers are the most valuable and what their needs are, and they use all customer interactions to create a customer experience that meets those needs and maximizes customer value and profitability.