A recent market forecast predicts that the customer experience management market will continue to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 17.3 percent through 2019. If that statistic rings true, the market will grow to $8.39 billion by that date.

The report breaks down customer experience management into several segments that include customer experience management, customer relationship management, social customer relationship management, social customer experience management, and telco customer experience management, all of which may be part of the same overall group but which also have their own sets of unique characteristics with regard to how businesses handle their customer interactions.

The summary of the report provides distinctions about each aspect as they are broken down above. CEM and Teclo CEM include improving customer management by addressing touch points, CRM uses business intelligence and analytics tools to manage and nurture customer interactions, SCRM and SCEM deal largely with social media communities.

It is the various segments of the overall customer experience management philosophies, software models, and modes of customer engagement and interaction that show the power of what growth in the market is doing. As more companies invest in software and business models to help nurture their relationships with consumers, the submarkets will inevitably continue to grow as niches begin to cater to specific types of businesses. This is evident even within the short list above with the Telco CEM subset.

Customers want to be met where they are, and businesses cannot help but use modern software to help business agents get a complete look at customers' histories and preferences. With information such as calling history, the number of past in-person store visits, complaints files, products purchased, and demographics that relate to their specific persons, among other sets of information, employees from all departments can better know their customers as soon as they begin to interact with them.

Call center agents can have computer screens full of information about those various aspects of their business/customer relationships. Marketers can group people into categories -- such as "males over 50" -- and provide them with announcements of upcoming product deals that relate specifically to them. Moreover, those two departments, and other departments, can converse with one another to make customer experiences even richer than they would otherwise be.

CRM is becoming the backbone of organizations because it provides the much-needed service of compiling all customer information into easy-to-use lists and groups. Businesses that use it can find their interactions filled with detail, and others that leave it behind may risk losing customers as a result.

The full report can be found here.