Chinese enterprises turning to CEM practices for customer retention

China's customer experience management sector is likely to see a growth spurt in the coming years as enterprises make more efforts to retain patrons, according to an industry expert.

According to statistics from IDC, QY Research and Touch Point, China's CEM market will increase to $1.8 billion in 2022, accounting for 15 percent of the global market. CEM, a business concept proposed in the US more than a decade ago, has been catching on in the past five years and is gradually becoming an essential skill for businesses.

The essence of CEM is to focus on the experience of the enterprise's users and transform user experience data into structured data to carry out detailed management.

"As economic growth slows, enterprises are making more efforts to explore existing markets. Therefore, it is necessary to better understand customers, serve them better in their life cycle and increase their retention," said Xi Feng, founder and CEO of Choiceform, a Shanghai-based company specializing in CEM.

Previously enterprises used a customer relationship management system which is more about the operational data of the enterprises. In recent years, CEM has been gradually replacing CRM as companies are receiving more incremental data from consumers.

According to Xi, this trend is becoming more obvious this year. For instance their clients, mostly car manufacturers, said car owners used to change their cars within two to four years in the past. But after strategic market consultation, they found the cycle was really three to seven years.

"As the CEM market is still underexplored, we expect our sales revenue to more than double this year despite the pandemic," Xi said.

Established in 2015, Choiceform has operations in Shanghai, Beijing, Guangzhou and Wuhan, with major clients in automobiles, real estate, finance, 3C and games.

Jing Siying contributed to this story