customer experience

Forrester’s 2018 Customer Experience Index (CX Index™) results continue to show that companies are struggling to create and sustain a human connection with their customers. This is not a question of delighting customers as an endgame or some fluffy sense of emotional attachment; this is a crass and clear story of financial risk. Taking a step […]

A few weeks ago, I opened my inbox to find an email from The New York Times telling me it had updated its homepage, saying it wanted to give its subscribers a “seamless experience: Whether you visit on your phone, tablet or computer, you’ll now see the same groups of stories across all of your […]

Marketing technology (martech) vendors are heavily pitching AI. However, AI per se is not new and won’t solve CMOs’ problems overnight. In fact, many marketers use AI without even knowing it, when they use AI-powered algorithms for programmatic ad buying! The reality is that AI will scale existing data-driven marketing approaches and give modern CMOs […]

You know that people’s experiences with your company, your products, and your services make all the difference in whether they decide to stay with you or switch to a competitor. It’s why you strive to make those experiences seamless and immersive — but that’s a tall order, which is why we’re tackling the problem head on […]

CX surveys are the butt of jokes in dinner party conversations and comedy sketches. On social media, people gleefully tweet examples of surveys gone wrong. Just type the three words “CX,” “survey,” and “fail” into a Twitter search . . . But this is no laughing matter if you are in a CX role. Bad […]

Conversational computing has our attention. We have been talking to machines since as far back as 1961, when the world’s first digital speech recognition system, the IBM Shoebox, was released. The Shoebox could recognize digits and a grand total of 16 words. Cut to half a century later: Humanity is trying hard to fall in […]

Let’s face it, most CX measurement programs could use a revolution — AI or otherwise. Because CX measurement programs are: Crumbling. CX measurement relies too much on surveys. But transactional surveys capture only between 2% and 7.5% of interactions. And survey response rates are declining (not surprising, because firms flood customers with CX surveys that feel like […]

Apple’s Tim Cook announced stellar earnings yesterday, exceeding analyst estimates but not surprising us at Forrester. We have predicted for a while that Apple was poised to become the world’s first trillion-dollar company (at the moment of this writing, the company’s market cap stands at $982 billion). Apple’s products are outstanding, and its revenue outlook […]

Great customer service helps control costs as companies squeeze out operational efficiencies. It also fuels sustainable top-line revenue growth by providing differentiated experiences that keep customers loyal to your brand. We just finished assessing 20 of the most important technologies in customer service in terms of their maturity and business value. Here are some of […]

Of course you should use journey maps to define CX metrics — it’s the only way to define outside-in CX metrics that: Capture important pain or peak points. Measure the right CX drivers. Align operational metrics with customers’ expectations (e.g., how you measure delivery times). But why are only 39% of CX pros using journey maps […]

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 […]

Every day, executives lean in and light up when we describe the virtues of operating with true customer obsession, vowing to make a change . . . . . . and then they return to their reality. The entrenched design of their companies’ organization holds them back. Our research asserts that any modern organization needs […]

There’s a vast population that many companies can’t reach because they design experiences without accessibility in mind — it’s large and growing by the minute. And these potential customers have money to spend: Over 1 billion people worldwide have a disability, and they have over $1.2 trillion in annual disposable income. That number balloons to […]

The barrier has never been lower for retail shoppers to compare offerings and try new companies. Superior customer experience (CX) helps foster loyalty, and at the end of the day, CX leaders grow revenue faster than CX laggards. However, we found that most retailers continue to struggle at delivering great experiences to their customers. Forrester […]

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 […]

Forrester’s 2018 Customer Experience Index (CX Index) for US brands reveals a worsening CX leadership gap: Not a single brand has risen to the top of our rankings and continued to move upward, and the overall quality of US customer experience is stagnating. The report is based on Forrester’s CX Index™ methodology, which measures how […]

Tying CX performance to monetary incentives backfires. Every time. Often in spectacular, unforeseen ways. And while we have seen some firms take the leap into a world without monetary CX incentives, tying accountability for CX to money is still a common shortcut in CX transformations. Unfortunately, that weakens employee morale and creates bad CX. In […]

Tying CX performance to monetary incentives backfires. Every time. Often in spectacular, unforeseen ways. And while we have seen some firms take the leap into a world without monetary CX incentives, tying accountability for CX to money is still a common shortcut in CX transformations. Unfortunately, that weakens employee morale and creates bad CX. In […]