Experience management is an effort by organizations to measure and improve the experiences they provide to customers as well as stakeholders like vendors, suppliers, employees, and shareholders. The concept posits the notion that experiences comprise distinct economic offerings that create

economic value In economics, economic value is a measure of the benefit provided by a goods, good or service (economics), service to an Agent (economics), economic agent. It is generally measured through units of currency, and the interpretation is therefore ...

and

competitive advantage In business, a competitive advantage is an attribute that allows an organization to outperform its competitors. A competitive advantage may include access to natural resources, such as high-grade ores or a low-cost power source, highly skilled ...

. Organizations have begun to collect experience data in addition to operational data, since experiences are seen as a

. Experience management platforms provide various services to automate the process of identifying and improving experiences across an organization. Broader than

customer experience Customer experience (CX) is a totality of cognitive, affective, sensory, and behavioral consumer responses during all stages of the consumption process including pre-purchase, consumption, and post-purchase stages. Pine and Gilmore described the ...

, experience management now encompasses customer experience along with other areas, such as brand experience, employee experience and product experience, which are all seen as interrelated.

History

In 1994 Steve Haeckel and Lou Carbone collaborated on a seminal early article on experience management, titled "Engineering Customer Experiences", where they defined experience as "the 'takeaway' impression formed by people's encounters with products, services and businesses a perception produced when humans consolidate sensory information." They argued that the new approach must focus on total experience as the key customer

value proposition In marketing, a company’s value proposition is the full mix of benefits or economic value which it promises to deliver to the current and future customers (i.e., a market segment) who will buy their products and/or services. It is part of a c ...

. The concept reached a wide audience in 1999, when it was popularized by B. Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore in their book '' Experience Economy''. In the same year,

Bernd Schmitt Bernd Herbert Schmitt is a professor of international business in the marketing department at Columbia Business School, Columbia University in New York. He is known for his research, books, speaking and consulting on customer experience, customer ...

published ''Experiential Marketing: How to Get Customers to Sense, Feel, Think, Act, and Relate to Your Company and Brands.'' In the 2000s, experience management emerged as a complex field unifying the experiences of brands, employees, products and more. It was acknowledged that generating new experiences for end customers requires designing better experiences for internal players of an organization. Value is created by focusing on the experiences of everyone involved in or affected by a new offer, such as customers, employees, suppliers, and other stakeholders.

Management

To create and manage the experiences, businesses must evaluate, implement, integrate, and build experiences from a fragmented landscape. Such needs are met by experience management platforms, which help automate the process of measuring and improving experiences across an organization by coordinating content, customer data and core services, and unifying marketing, commerce and service processes. Experience management platforms compare multiple layers of data and statistics to enable organizations to identify any experience gaps. They connect operational databases with human feedback, analyzing respondents' emotions, beliefs, and sentiments for a holistic view of the experiences they provide. Their methods include

artificial intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by animals and humans. Example tasks in which this is done include speech r ...

predictive analytics Predictive analytics encompasses a variety of statistical techniques from data mining, predictive modeling, and machine learning that analyze current and historical facts to make predictions about future or otherwise unknown events. In busin ...

, and

statistical models A statistical model is a mathematical model that embodies a set of statistical assumptions concerning the generation of sample data (and similar data from a larger population). A statistical model represents, often in considerably idealized form, ...

Other uses

While the term ''experience management'' is predominantly used in business, it has another meaning. It is used for a special kind of

knowledge management Knowledge management (KM) is the collection of methods relating to creating, sharing, using and managing the knowledge and information of an organization. It refers to a multidisciplinary approach to achieve organisational objectives by making ...

that deals with collecting, modeling, storing, reusing, evaluating, and maintaining experience. In that sense, the term is interchangeable with ''expertise management''.

References

{{reflist, 2 Corporate governance Customer experience