Capital Markets CRM and Customer Experience Management

Comparisons of CEM with CRM typically point to CRM aligning the view from the company to the customer, while CEM is oriented towards how the customer perceives the company through multiple touch points. Or, put another way, CRM is how a firm sees a customer; CEM is how a customer sees its supplier.

CRM systems generally focus on ensuring that staff perform interactions with customers as efficiently as possible and that key information is captured and shared to ensure profitable management of the business. The focus for CEM is not the system user, but ensuring that the experience for the customer is consistently efficient and effective.

CEM applications are based upon the premise that every time there’s an interaction between a company and a customer, the customer learns something about the company. So there’s always a chance that the customer’s opinion of the company could change at any time.

In practice the disciplines are wholly complementary – some sell-side firms are already building competitive edge by applying CRM across their organization with systems that provide greater visibility of the buy side experience.

In Singletrack’s case we didn’t set out to apply CRM (or CEM) to capital markets. We began with a sell-side perspective of the business issues and developed applications that would embrace customer engagement, research distribution and consumption while facilitating close inter-departmental cooperation with full visibility and measurability of the whole. It’s an integrated approach which enables sell-side firms to maintain the crucial balance between delivering exceptional customer service and realising maximum profitability.

Neither ‘CRM’ nor ‘CEM’ adequately describes a system with the potential to deliver such high levels of business value, but until the industry adopts a new acronym that reflects the extent to which customer data can be leveraged to achieve exceptional levels of ROI, Singletrack will continue to trade under the capital markets CRM banner.