If it isn't in a regulation, it's not German - DIN SPEC 77224 Customer Experience Management

Heise online informs us (German) about the new DIN SPEC 77224 specification ( DIN is the German national equivalent to ISO, ISO specifications are automatically adopted by DIN, but being German we have extras) for "Customer Experience Management" (CEM). The Heise article links to an insightful presentation by Prof. Dr. Gouthier that explains the why and how. CEM aims beyond customer satisfaction (which has an ISO definition already: ISO 9000:2008 as part of TQM) at "Customer amazement". Customer amazement is the external face of the internal drive for "service excellence" (Which sadly way too often gets confused with "Processes that nicely fit into some arbitrary metric"). The definition has seven parts:

1. Senior management's responsibility for service excellence
2. Aligning of resource towards excellence
3. Avoidance of mistakes and wastage
4. Capturing of all customer experiences
5. Customer amazement through service innovation
6. Measurement of amazement
7. Measurement of profitability

I'm curious how that will work out. Musing about each of these seven items could turn into a nice blog series. Definitely it will provide new consulting opportunities for the ISO Certification consultants, but (I'm very hopeful) will replace opinionated discussions with a reference model that promises less #fail tags. Of course all these reference models (just ask a front line worker about their ISO9000 or CMMI certification opinion) lend themselves towards toothless management programs, at least if you have read Wild Dueck's opinion in Direkt-Karriere (Sorry German again). Hugh provides the short summary of CEM: