age of the customer

There is a customer experience (CX) imperative taking over in healthcare. To drive success, healthcare organizations (HCOs) must be able to understand how good — or bad — experiences are and where to focus improvement efforts. Watch the video below to understand the role voice of the customer (VoC) programs play to effectively drive CX improvements. […]

After New York City, San Francisco, Sydney, Singapore, and London, Forrester hosted its first event dedicated to customer experience (CX) in Paris. It was a great pleasure for me to host about 150 leaders in a unique venue: the Parc des Princes (PSG’s football stadium!!) for a networking event to discuss CX trends and best […]

What everyone will remember most about “Super Bore LIII” is not the game or the ads but the post-game tit for tat between Big Beer brands Anheuser-Busch InBev (ABI) and MillerCoors (MC).   In Case The Game’s Dullness Induced You Into A Media-Blocking Stupor . . . Here’s what happened: ABI aired three Super Bowl […]

After more than two years of loyalty program limbo and “will it or won’t it” debates, Marriott unveiled the name of its unified loyalty program: Bonvoy. This final step in the world’s largest hospitality merger brings together over 100 million members, billions of records, and 6,700 properties in over 130 countries. For Marriott, the stakes […]

The Journey From Energy To Experience In the summer of 2017, I, along with my Forrester colleagues, wrote up the results of our year-long endeavor to build an analytically sophisticated, data-driven framework for emotion-led branding. In my report entitled “Emotions Fuel Your Brand Energy,” I outlined three components of a brand’s “energy” and its ability […]

Virtual Care Alleviates Key Pain Points In The Care Journey Don’t you miss summer? That time of year when there isn’t a flu epidemic or polar vortex sweeping across the country. Unfortunately, we are in the “darkest hour” of seasonality, when you and your family feel the need to wear a HAZMAT suit to avoid […]

Only 16% of CMOs are responsible for leading the execution of their firm’s digital transformation. Now is the time to rethink your role. Too few CMOs actively lead or are deeply involved in digital transformation. CIOs, COOs, CXOs, and CDOs have filled the gap but don’t represent the voice of the customer or bring the […]

When sociologist Jane Jacobs artfully depicts crowds on a city sidewalk, she may as well be describing consumers. In Jacobs’ words: “Under the seeming disorder . . . is a marvelous order. It is a complex order . . . This order is all composed of movement and change . . . ensembles all have […]

Customers demand that marketing coordinate with sales, service, and commerce to deliver better experiences. That’s why enterprise marketing technology (martech) is melding with customer experience (CX) to deliver consistency and relevance (see Forrester’s “Predictions 2019: B2C Marketing” report). Martech is a direct line to consumer touchpoints, and marketers should embrace and leverage it to drive […]

Each thing you see at CES may be wondrous, but after you’ve seen five variations of the same hundred things, the net effect is clutter and confusion. Let me help sort things out. I’ve had a week away from mood-lit Alexa-enabled toilets, from fierce ping-pong-playing robots, and from the jingle-jangle morning of walking through unending […]

Omnichannel investments, including in-store pickup and endless aisle, continue to be top strategic investment for digital business professionals at retail organizations. Forrester predicts that digital touchpoints will influence 55% of total European retail sales by 2022, so a retailer’s digital presence continues to play a significant role in influencing consumer purchase decisions, both online and […]

Luxury brands have gone from relative inertia over digital strategies to a flurry of activity, including technology upgrades, partnerships, and even acquisitions. Back in the summer of 2017, we warned that luxury brands were out of time when it came to improving their digital customer experiences and internal operations. Digitally mature and savvy luxury consumers […]

Brands are jumping into the messy arena of polarizing issues with greater fervor — and Gillette just raised the stakes. After 30 years of sitting on the sidelines, Gillette is passing its razor like a baton, with an overture that overtly calls masculinity into question. Within 72 hours of launch, Gillette’s “We Believe” TV spot skyrocketed […]

Every company faces a central dilemma: how to resolve the standardization and differentiation of its business apps to win, serve, and retain customers. That’s why we are still getting a lot of questions about this report. We have been wondering how much the move to cloud, mobile, and embedded machine learning or artificial intelligence will […]

There are three things that matter in real estate: location, location, location. It is the real estate agent’s mantra and is largely believed to be the most important factor to consider when buying property. In the same vein, location has the power to affect your business: how it operates, total sales, which customers to target, […]

Shifts in consumer lifestyle and expectations have given innovators the opportunity to enter the healthcare space and capture market share with their modern, enhanced patient experiences. Instead of standing on the sidelines, CVS and Aetna have banded together to compete with healthcare disruptors. Today, CVS and Aetna finally closed their long-expected merger ringing in at […]

There we were . . . a round table of CX leaders from across Southeast Asia, senior executives with years of experience running large, successful teams and chipping away at the journey to turn our organizations into customer-obsessed enterprises. We shared our recent wins and successes and learned from each other how to go faster, […]

Our Predictions 2019 guide, “Transformation Goes Pragmatic,” is live. What do we mean by pragmatism? A sense of realism, practical steps, a desire for tangible outcomes. It’s a good description for what we are seeing in a market that carried ambitious strategies into 2018 but ran afoul of internal headwinds. Don’t get me wrong, the […]

The hype around big data got several things right, one being that data volumes are big and growing quickly. Digital transformation — as well as the growing adoption of IoT and the ubiquity of the device (AKA, “mobile phone”) that we all carry with us — has accelerated the growth of data. Having successfully put that data […]