From dream to reality: a roadmap for customer experience management implementation

While many organizations are eager to improve the customer experience, industry reports reveal that most initiatives to improve the customer experience fail. A key reason for this high failure rate is that many executives do not know where to start. This chapter offers a roadmap for designing and implementing a customer experience management program. We identify the key projects and activities related to the various phases of the customer experience management program. These phases involve the program identification (i.e., developing a strategy, understanding the brand, generating customer insights), planning (i.e., designing the customer experience, managing people, managing processes, developing performance indicators), and execution (i.e., recovering failed experiences, structurally embedding the customer experience, culturally embedding the customer experience) phases. This chapter integrates various customer experience management aspects in a more holistic framework and can help researchers understand how their research contributes to the effective implementation of the customer experience within organizations.