Design and Development of the CEM-Dashboard: A Diagnostic Tool to Determine Your Current Position and Improvement Directions in Customer Experience Management

Customer experience management is gaining attention from companies in the latest years. Companies realize that it is not anymore sufficient to only meet customers’ functional demands but that customers are also in need of a pleasant treatment, personalized attention and communication, trouble-free and smooth operations, and good feelings from interacting and transacting with companies. We call this total set of positive emotions that customers are looking for the customer experience. This customer experience can be managed as many researchers and practitioners have stated. For this, several model-based approaches for customer experience management have been developed by academics and practitioners, but usually they prescribe actions on a high strategic level and omit to close the PDCA loop with an assessment of the results. Organizations that are looking for specific actions and their effects because of their closeness to the customers, like customer contact centers, mass customization producers, web retailers, and service providers, therefore feel neglected and surpassed by these models. To fill this gap, we designed and developed a diagnostic and benchmark tool, the CEM-Dashboard, for such companies to determine their current position and improvement directions in their efforts to implement customer experience management in the company and its processes.