customer engagement

Apple and Goldman Sachs are partnering to deliver a new credit card. The industry seems to be quick to dismiss the partnership, especially the rewards program — but we think they’re missing the bigger picture. There’s an awful lot more at stake here than credit card rewards. The bigger concern for digital banks, traditional banks, […]

Ah yes, anyone suffering from a chocolate hangover? Or an excess of corny romanticism? Let’s face it, we all love “love” — but with Valentine’s Day a week behind us, the last thing you probably want right now is more advice on relationships. Before you toss aside some of that abundant advice about personal relationships, […]

This morning, I came across a story about Warby Parker’s new “virtual try-on” capability. It seems the eight-year-old eCommerce company is dipping its toes back into augmented reality (AR). The rub is that the auto-magical feature is only available to people on Warby Parker’s iOS app for iPhone X or later. I guess Android and […]

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 […]

Forrester’s customer experience Forums are in their 10th year — from our first one in 2009 in New York, they’ve grown and spread to San Francisco, London, Singapore, and other cities around the world and have become yearly destinations for CX pros far and wide. CX Europe 2018 is just 12 days from now — Tuesday and Wednesday, […]

It’s frustrating when a customer exhibits purchase intent but doesn’t buy because of friction in the customer journey. It’s worse when a store manager or contact center agent is unaware of a digital promotion. Nearly 40% of CMOs say that a lack of consistent customer experience (CX) prevents greater online sales revenue. Empowered customers now […]

In the past few months, my colleague James McQuivey has written several blogs about the exciting times we live in. In these posts, he focuses on how technology is fundamentally changing the way we interact with the world around us and how that change is grounded in evolution. His research shows that our uniquely evolved […]

Customer experience leaders grow revenue faster than CX laggards, drive higher brand preference, and can charge more for their products. Based on a survey of more than 110,000 US adult customers in 2018, Forrester’s Customer Experience Index (CX Index™) methodology measures how well a brand’s customer experience strengthens the loyalty of its customers so that […]

When Piloting Colocation, Measure Impact To Location, Customers, And Operations It’s been interesting to see creative real estate colocation ideas such as the recently announced pilot for ALDI in 10 Kohl’s stores. As Kevin Mansell, former CEO of Kohl’s, explained, “We believe the opportunity to leverage our real estate through this effort has benefits.”[1] But […]

It is such a pleasure to be back at Forrester, especially now when our firm is actively embracing and helping you, our customers, leverage new technologies to innovate and differentiate your business. After three years leading technology strategy and market development for Microsoft Azure and Equinix, what brought me back were three things: The value […]

You have to feel bad for marketers: For years, they’ve tried to keep pace with changing buyer behaviors and adapt to the cross-device and cross-channel habits of their customers. To guide their progress, they’ve fallen back on familiar routines: benchmarking against past performance, optimizing short-term results, and pushing people through the sales funnel. The problem […]

The world is changing and with it, consumers’ expectations of experiences and communication from brands. The paradigm for customer engagement is shifting from large, monolithic experiences that serve everyone to smaller, more contextual experiences served to consumers in just the moment they need them. Marketers must adopt the right strategy, operational best practices and technology […]

Like a football team captain at a junior high dance, Amazon just sauntered up to a big group of people and started dropping hints about its sweet moves on the dance floor . . . Okay, that’s not exactly what’s happening here, but it sure felt like that to many bank executives who heard the […]

Chatting, by definition, is meaningless, trivial talk – but web “chatting” is anything but; it is starting to transform digital customer experiences. And it works. Customers want to use chat. Forty-five percent have used it to interact with a live agent in 2017. The companies that get it are moving towards a holistic chat strategy […]

On March 12, Salesforce announced its intent to acquire CloudCraze, a B2B eCommerce application. This savvy and long-anticipated move nicely rounds out its broad CRM portfolio and supports B2B customers through their engagement journey. This eCommerce application is a fundamentally different one than Salesforce’s  B2C eCommerce acquisition of Demandware. This is because B2C engagement is […]

  Retailers recognize and are investing in the link between great associate experiences and great customer experiences. They are enhancing the employee’s ability to engage customers better by providing training and education, implementing technologies to make the associate’s job easier, and some retailers like Walmart are even increasing associate wages. Retailers understand that by creating […]

Building the business case for your digital investment is hard, so you need to drill into the specifics of any given process you intend to digitize. Digital track-and-trace solutions contribute to ROI in many different ways. The main strategic reasons for using them are: More effective risk management. Many countries are putting in place regulations […]

Good news for luxury brands – Luxury will see continued growth for online sales and for in-store sales that are influenced by digital touchpoints, per Forrester’s newly updated Global Luxury Retail Sales Forecast 2017 to 2022. So that’s great – but, as we saw in our research last summer, many luxury brands still have work […]

At the packed NRF Big Show #NRF2018 in New York last week, many retailers looked at vendors touting new tech, including AI, AR/VR, and more, all in the name of improving customer experiences. But most of those same retailers know that, before leaping into that arena, they first need to bring existing systems up to […]