The Customer Experience Challenge Met: Allegiance Comes to the Plate

Note from PG: I can't say that I spend a lot of time with Allegiance. I track them regularly, talk to analysts and media about them, but our interactions are only occasional.  However, what I know is that they are a company with a good product that used to categorically be EFM - Enterprise Feedback Management.  However, like the other companies on the challenge list, they are claiming customer experience management now.  EFM only appears on my browser tab ID, the word "customer" everywhere with Voice of Customer, customer experience and customer service being the predominant primary theme.  Here's a picture of their home page.

So, we're giving this over to Andrew McInnes, the Allegiance Director of Product Marketing, who has had plenty of background in the world of customer experience, having been an analyst at Forrester Group in that very domain. 

Okay, Andrew, the floor is yours.

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CEM is a business discipline, not a technology. Fundamentally, it involves every person, process, and technology in an organization, because all of those things ultimately affect how customers perceive and, in turn, behave in relation to the organization.

Allegiance helps firms operationalize CEM by continuously collecting customer feedback, combining it with other data to tell a business story, and putting the right mix of the resulting insight into the hands of people who can use it. That enables better decision-making, performance management, and customer intervention. Those activities lead to higher retention and revenue and lower cost-to-serve.

 Despite the benefits, the work we support isn’t the entirety of CEM. It’s just the fuel. Firms need to actually fix problems and address opportunities in order to improve customers’ experiences. They also need a variety of other systems to truly manage those experiences over time. Again, just about every system touches customers somehow. That’s why we don’t use the term CEM to describe our technology. We offer solutions for dedicated CEM practitioners, who tend to lead customer insight efforts, but we don’t offer CEM itself.  

The firms that do market CEM technology by name also play important roles, but the name rightfully confuses people for two reasons: 1) Like Allegiance, “CEM” vendors only tackle pieces of the customer experience puzzle, which can’t be addressed by technology alone, never mind by a single tech offering; and, 2) they tackle very different pieces, ranging from CRM to digital marketing optimization to surveys.

For these reasons, we highlighted “CEM” technology as a major threat to the CEM discipline in our most recent book, Delivering Customer Intelligence. You can see an excerpt of the relevant chapter here on our blog.  

As the space shakes out, we’ll be able to focus less on labels and more on the good things that are driving the CEM craze in the first place – a renewed belief in customer focus as a business imperative and a new desire to understand and interact with customers more coherently across channels and time. That will benefit everyone.

Thanks for pushing us along.

Andrew McInnes