Customer Experience Management is a term we've seen bandied about over the last 18 months or so as a way to describe new web content management functionality that moves the focus of WCM from pure content creation and management to a greater focus on the customer.

That means giving marketers more than just the means to create and edit content--although that's still a key factor here of course--but it also puts more emphasis on analytics and helping marketers understand the customers as they navigate the company website in order to provide the most meaningful content based on what you know about them.

This ability to shift the content based on the customer's experience on your site, has developed the moniker: Customer Experience Management.

What this comes down to is the customer path through your website should drive the content. As Scott Liewehr pointed out at the Gilbane Conference last month, if he goes to the same restaurant every Friday night with his family, and deals with the same hostess, he has developed a reasonable expectation that she knows him and will act accordingly. If she suddenly acted like she didn't know him and his family it would be off-putting.

For Liewehr the web experience should have a similar dynamic. If you come more than once, your company should develop an understanding of that visitor based on his or her experience on the site and you shouldn't necessarily offer the same content you would for a new person on your site who has never visited.

One trend that is driving this change is analytics. And analytics can give you deeper insight into your customers providing at a minimum, what pages they've visited, what has interested them and so forth, but it takes more information than that to be meaningful.

In fact, there's still a big gap between people's cognitive abilities and a website algorithm. My favorite example of this is Amazon.com, which remembers what you bought and makes suggestions based on that knowledge. Although sometimes that can go too far.

Five years or so ago, my kids were into Star Trek and I made several purchases of Stark Trek merchandise as gifts. To this day, long after my kids have left the Star Trek stage far behind and moved onto other interests, I still get Start Trek suggestions. First of all, it wasn't even for me and second of all, people change.

This would be the equivalent of Liewehr walking into the restaurant with teens and the hostess offering crayons and a kids menu because that's what he needed years ago. Humans can recognize that. So far, computers are not as good at this.

So Customer Experience Management is really just at the very edge of what it could be. Managing customer experience and providing meaningful content makes all the sense in the world, but we need to get to a place where you can make better use of the information you're gathering and delivering the most meaningful content you can. So far, I think the term probably has more juice than the product offerings, but the potential is there is if the technology can catch up with the promise. - Ron