customer experience

Many attendees of our B2B Marketing 2018 Forum remarked how the energy was high and the focus was driven — the marketing and sales leaders who joined us in Austin were on a mission to overdeliver on business expectations for their practice and figure out how to manage the conflicting priorities that 31% of respondents to […]

For some time, the burning question has been: Will robots replace humans? While the proliferation of robotic process automation (RPA) has reduced headcount in the back office, it’s a different story for customer service and sales. In a Forrester survey, 46% of companies said sales and marketing are leading the investment in and adoption of […]

The US population is growing and aging. The volume of patients and the prevalence of chronic conditions are rising. Payers and providers alike are feeling the strain of healthcare’s antiquated system and the damaging effects it has on quality of care and revenue. As a result, the US healthcare market is going through a much-needed […]

On November 5, in line with tradition, a huge array of sparkling displays took place across the UK to celebrate Guy Fawkes night (“Remember, remember, the fifth of November . . . ”). As days get shorter, Bonfire Night is also a friendly reminder that it’s that wonderful time of the year (again) when we […]

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 […]

My colleague Alex Causey and I have now finished “The Forrester Retail Wave™: European Mobile Apps, Q4 2018,” the second Retail Wave we’ve done. This year, we evaluated the functionality and usability of six European retailers’ mobile apps. For retailers with a pan-European presence, we selected one European market in which to evaluate the retailer’s app […]

Forrester’s Customer Experience Index (CX Index™) research shows that, year on year, retail performance is still not reaching levels of “excellence.” Instead, retailer performance clusters around the “OK” level. There are of course bright sparks, with retailers such as John Lewis outperforming peers, but even those standouts are only reaching “good.” So what is holding […]

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, […]

To shift from brand monologues to two-way dialogues, many brands are embracing live chat and piloting marketing initiatives on new conversational interfaces such as chatbots and voice-based assistants. However, conversational marketing is not new: It is simply based on listening to your customers, incorporating feedback into your marketing strategy, and communicating back to them in […]

In the spirit of Halloween, I’m going to write about the bogeyman of almost every industry out there: GAFA. In the last few years, I have answered many versions of the same question: what will Google (insert Apple/Facebook/Amazon) do to us (insert financial services/healthcare/retail/media)? This fear is grounded in some reality. All four firms are […]

“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 […]

Context And Timing Is Critical For Robots And Humans To Work Well Together

When your CEO asks you for your digital strategy, you could go away and huddle up with your team for a month and produce some voluminous document full of TLAs, only to have it sit on the shelf for the next two years. Instead, simply give your CEO a copy of your business strategy. After […]

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 […]

About half of the 51 XD providers we surveyed recently — agencies and consultancies such as Astro Studios and Work & Co that provide experience design (XD) services — are also: Developing their own products. Founding startups and maintaining equity stakes in them. Investing in startups with either money or their talent in the form of […]

I am very excited to have been invited for the third time to give the opening keynote speech at One to One, a great marketing conference taking place on October 10–12 in Biarritz in the southwest of France. To summarize my talk in a few points, I have shared some global marketing trends and how […]

In about a month, I will have the honor of presenting my research on “The Ethics Of AI: How To Avoid Harmful Bias And Discrimination” to attendees at CX Europe 2018. The event will take place in London on November 13 and 14 and will feature several of my esteemed analyst colleagues, as well as […]

Employee engagement surveys help employee experience (EX) and customer experience (CX) pros keep a pulse on how employees feel about the company and leadership, their jobs and career paths, tools and training, and their roles in delivering a great customer experience. Recently, we hosted a discussion where we brought together EX and CX leaders to […]

Nary a day goes by without someone talking about their efforts to build a platform. We cannot argue: Platforms can contribute massive value to customers, the ecosystem, and the company that creates the platform. More so, as a consumer, I rely on platforms for so much of my working life that I often don’t even […]