Download the emergence of customer experience management (CEM)

D8
Tuesday 9th December
Session D
15.45-16.15
Programme number: D8
Research Domain: Management, leadership and governance
James Seligman, John Taylor
University of Southampton, United Kingdom
New approaches to higher education marketing: the emergence of
customer experience management (CEM) (0363)
In recent years, the emergence of new competitive forces within higher
education and the idea of the student as a consumer have contributed to the
emergence of marketing as a key management function within universities
and colleges. Geiger argues that “the competition for students, for good or ill,
has bred consumerism – a reversal of attitude from students as clients,
fortunate to attend a particular university, to students as customers who must
be pleased with a variety of amenities – from upscale dormitories to mall-like
shopping facilities – that have little to do with actual education” (Geiger, 2004;
see also Naidoo, 2003, 2008).
Traditionally, marketing activity has centred on the four ‘Ps’ (product, price,
place and promotion), but increasingly the concept of “value propositions” has
taken over (for example, Anderson, Narus and van Rossum, 2006; Chaffey,
2007, Fifield, 2007). Customer (or student) value requires an organisation to
seek out and add value by providing differentiation (making the university
choice easier), segmentation (treating the student as an individual) and
branding (a reason to choose a particular university). An extension of this
approach now beginning to impact on higher education is the idea of
customer experience management (CEM), defined by Schmitt as “the process
of strategically managing a customer’s entire experience with a product or
company” (Schmitt, 2003). CEM seeks to analyse the customer experience at
every “touchpoint”, offering a holistic approach and building a range of data on
the interaction between customer and organisation. For higher education,
CEM is intimately linked with ideas of customer satisfaction and consumer
loyalty.
This paper examines the application of CEM in UK universities. Based on a
survey of corporate marketing and communications departments, the paper
examines to what extent such marketing methods are now commonplace in
UK universities and their detailed forms of application. The paper also aims to
provide a typology of marketing activities and to provide new theoretical and
practical understandings by relating marketing commitments to various other
performance indicators in higher education.