customer engagement

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 […]

What do consumers, Bruce Springsteen, and a Nobel Prize laureate have in common? They all understand the concept of fairness. And they understand that consumers reward and punish companies based on perceived fairness. Nobel Prize winner Richard Thaler found that if a company raises prices or cuts wages for the sole purpose of better profit […]

More than 5 years ago Forrester introduced the Age of Customer as a new 15 to 20 years era which saw the increasing customer empowerment in front of brands and companies. For companies, the first step in this era turned into improving the customer experience and the customer journey through an omnichannel strategy,  identifying the […]

Google after second shot disrupting healthcare-and Apple-with Health 2.0 announcement  Google made several announcements Wednesday around new hardware, software, and developer tools. Capitalizing on the demand for digital healthcare solutions, Google rolled out its HealthX API platform through Apigee at Health 2.0 in Santa Clara. The platform provides endpoints for developers to build HIPAA compliant […]

Luxury consumers around the world are embracing new technology and adding these digital touchpoints – including, of course, their smartphones – into their shopping behaviors. But overall, luxury brands have been far too slow to respond to their customers’ rising digital expectations. Luxury brands, tier one through to aspirational, are now scrambling to bolster their […]

Thanks to the rise of empowered consumers, products and experiences that once seemed improbable, such as (literally) instant delivery, are now integral to our lives. But this era of innovation has also seen its fair share of flops: From Pokémon Go to Google Glass, technologies that looked like promising disrupters stalled quickly or generated more […]