customer experience strategy

I didn’t want to leave 2018 without noting a milestone for all of us here at Forrester who cover customer experience. It was 20 years ago, all the way back in September of 1998, when we inaugurated our customer experience research by publishing our first report about CX. That report, “Why Most Websites Fail,” introduced […]

Let’s face it: 2018 was not a fabulous year for customer experience. On average, CX quality was flat, with Customer Experience Index (CX Index™) scores showing little movement for the third year in a row. And what little movement that did happen was toward the middle of our scale, where 62% of brands bunched up in […]

Very quietly last month, Path, the social media network founded by Shawn Fanning (Napster) and former Facebook executive Dave Morin, closed its doors after 18 years. What differentiated Path in the early days was that it limited the number of users’ connections to the seemingly arbitrary number of 150. Adding any additional contacts required that […]

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, […]

“Love and marriage, love and marriage They go together like a horse and carriage This I tell you, brother You can’t have one without the other” – Frank Sinatra The New Yorker once wrote of Sinatra that “he sounds the way you would sound if you could speak the things you feel.” In my line […]

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 […]

“Say, Tom, let me whitewash a little.” “No — no — I reckon it wouldn’t hardly do, Ben. You see, Aunt Polly’s awful particular about this fence . . . it’s got to be done very careful; I reckon there ain’t one boy in a thousand, maybe two thousand, that can do it the way it’s got […]

Experience design (XD) providers we surveyed told us that among emerging technologies, clients most often ask them about machine learning, chatbots, the internet of things (IoT), and augmented reality (AR). Providers also reported that chatbot-related terms “intelligent agents” and “voice interfaces” drew significant interest, as well. However, the providers’ revenue is coming more from machine […]

Voice is marketing’s most significant paradigm shift this decade — one that has far-reaching implications for how brands engage customers and prospects. Read Forrester’s latest report on voice to learn why voice will flourish, what that means for your brand, and how to get ready to win in the world of voice. Get Ready For The […]

Voice is marketing’s most significant paradigm shift this decade — one that has far-reaching implications for how brands engage customers and prospects. Read Forrester’s latest report on voice to learn why voice will flourish, what that means for your brand, and how to get ready to win in the world of voice. Get Ready For The […]

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 […]

CX professionals often fall victim to the top-down HiPPO approach to prioritization; HiPPO being an acronym for the “highest-paid person’s opinion” — when priorities are set by the CEO or other senior management based on gut and experience rather than actual underlying data. Case in point, Hilton Hotels’ digital team often received “suggestions” from executives around […]

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 […]

Back in 2009, Forrester launched its first customer experience forum. We picked New York as the location because for years we’d put on a financial services event there, and we knew that our attendees from the banking, brokerage, and insurance industries all had CX on their minds. We didn’t know how well the new event […]

How do you differentiate your brand in highly competitive markets, especially when competitors promptly copy anything that works? Learn from HaiDiLao, China’s most popular chain of hot-pot restaurants. HaiDiLao evokes positive emotions from customers with memorably crafted human interactions. The company empowers its staff to personalize experience delivery as customers or scenarios demand. Let me […]

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 […]

Direct-to-consumer (D2C) commerce is not a new concept for branded manufacturers, but there is certainly renewed interest and more options to choose from. With consumers ever more digitally connected, branded manufacturers are enticed by direct digital commerce benefits, like better sales margins, increased product control, and richer customer relationships. A new Q&A report explores questions […]

Rik Reppe, advisory partner at PwC’s The Difference, summarizes the crux of most CX practices today by saying, “[As a CX pro] you may have 1,000 projects you could do, 100 projects you should do, and 10 projects you can do.” So which ones do you do – and more importantly, which ones do you say no to? For a customer experience (CX) […]

Why Should You Care? Ever seen puppies on ads? How about babies? If you have, chances are that you weren’t seeing much of anything else. When I first collaborated with Nielsen Consumer Neuroscience, they shared a straight-forward eye-tracking heat map of an audience watching a commercial involving shelter pets. The dogs were adorable. And everything […]