Leigh Duncan has been writing about the fundamental differences between experiential marketing(EM) and customer experience management(CEM) and that how often both the concepts are misunderstood. The post on Five experience fundamentals brings out the essence of CEM very well.
I firmly believe experiential marketing is quite not the same as customer experience management. If we put ourselves in a customer's shoes, the entire organization's practices, offering and delivery makes all the difference to us. Marketing is just one aspect which shapes the view of a brand or a company in a customer's mind.
CEM is more "true" to customer management. It kind of looks at the overall customer interaction process and makes it real. EM is still in the realm of wooing, demonstrating, bringing it alive, showcasing the difference etc. I feel experiential marketing still, is mostly relevant in the pre-acquisition stages of a product. Hence, it is not a complete concept by itself for marketers to manage customers. CEM is all about looking at the entire customer value chain and looks at "value creation", "value building" and "value extraction" processes at every step.
Organizations have to practice and embrace CEM and not EM, as EM is still a small subset of CEM in my personal opinion. CEM involves all the departments of a company, to say the least. It will also have to include all channels/business associates, as they too play an active role in the customer experience management process.
Increasingly, the role of a CMO(Chief Marketing Officer) will become that of a "customer experience architect", where every department involved in dealing with a customer will have to be co-opted into this group.
Because, the entire company owns the customer! CEM understands and appreciates that better!