customer experience strategy

Business leaders in the financial services (FS) industry are used to tracking success with measures that reflect shareholder, investor and market regulator values like return on equity, net profit, assets under management and capital adequacy ratio. This is the ‘money story’. However, most don’t always know how these important measures are affected by customer experience (CX) and customer engagement, or the ‘customer story’.

Firms Are Failing To Differentiate With CX Today, customer expectations are outpacing brands’ ability to adapt and differentiate with customer experience (CX). Take Australia, for example. Forrester’s Customer Experience Index (CX Index™) data shows how CX quality in Australia languished, and yet again, no brand managed to make it into the excellent category. On average, […]

“Build a better mousetrap, and the world will beat a path to your door.” While Ralph Waldo Emerson may not have said these exact words, the principles remain as true as ever today. Going Beyond Improving Today’s Customer Experience If you’ve been following my blog, you may remember a post from 2016, where I introduced […]

One of our 2019 B2C marketing predictions is that enterprise marketing technology will meld with customer experience (CX) investments to deliver the relevancy and consistency that consumers crave from brands. Real-time interaction management (RTIM) provides critical capabilities that enable marketers to realize their CX ambitions. Forrester defines RTIM as: Enterprise marketing technology that delivers contextually […]

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, […]

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 […]

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 […]

Recently, Forrester published our CX predictions for 2019. Our first prediction was that stagnating CX quality will cause short, destructive price wars. We cited Fidelity’s two new zero-fee investment funds as an example of how this is already starting to play out. We also noted that Vanguard responded to Fidelity by highlighting its many funds […]

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 […]