customer insights

It’s early February. Punxsutawney Phil predicted an early spring this year, and there is hope (and warmth) in the air.[i] But it’s not always rosy for you as a data, analytics, and insights leader. You tirelessly toil to get value from your enterprise data and try to apply those insights at scale to impact business […]

When sociologist Jane Jacobs artfully depicts crowds on a city sidewalk, she may as well be describing consumers. In Jacobs’ words: “Under the seeming disorder . . . is a marvelous order. It is a complex order . . . This order is all composed of movement and change . . . ensembles all have […]

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 […]

Sensor-based technologies have been around for a while now — remember all the beacon hype? — and are now rapidly gaining traction. In-store sensor technology and, more importantly, its contribution to understanding our in-store customers and businesses, is at a point where it is now truly digitally transforming physical stores and the experiences delivered to customers. […]

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 […]

The relentless march of digital transformation has not left the physical world untouched — particularly when it comes to understanding and engaging with customers. First, customers digitally connected to brands via PCs, then mobile devices, and now via a continuous tidal wave of emerging owned IoT devices (e.g., wearables, connected cars, etc.) and non-owned IoT devices […]

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, […]

Feeling overwhelmed with all the data that your teams must wrangle before even getting to data science? Feeling like you have more than enough dashboards and tools? Feeling like you don’t have any more room in your complex data and analytics environment for yet another platform? Feeling like you can’t keep up with the exploding […]

Enterprises are sitting on mountains of unstructured data — 61% have more than 100 terabytes, and 12% have more than five petabytes! Luckily, there are mature technologies out there that can help. First, enterprise information architects should consider general-purpose text analytics platforms. These are capable of handling most, if not all, text analytics use cases, both […]

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 […]

The American showman P.T. Barnum understood the value of online consumer reviews well before the arrival of the internet when he said, “Nothing draws a crowd quite like a crowd.” While consumer reviews generate buzz, they stop just short of being a circus because they’ve won immense levels of consumer trust. But two of the […]

Today I’m on stage in New York speaking to hundreds of marketing executives at our Consumer Marketing Forum 2018. I’m there to unveil the 2018 US Benchmark Data Overview, which for the first time ever we are making available to all Forrester clients. See the report here: The Consumer Tech Stack. The research is exciting. […]

The mundane exercise of measuring and analyzing marketing performance has gotten a much-needed boost over the past few years thanks to the development of advanced test and learn approaches, attribution modeling, and, even marketing mix modeling. Advanced marketers with rigorous marketing performance standards  must consider advancing their marketing insights, by bridging the gap between marketing […]

Facebook made an announcement yesterday titled “Making Ad Metrics Clearer” that says, in part: We’ve heard that businesses want more insight into our measurement tools and metrics. So today, we’re introducing new labels on some of our metrics to clearly show how they are calculated . . . The centerpiece of its announcement is new […]

In a blog post immediately following this year’s Super Bowl, my colleague Joanna O’Connell said that ads in this year’s big game could be summed up as “trying too hard with mostly nonsensical and underwhelming results.” Of all the ads that played during the game, the winner of this year’s Try-Hard award was certainly Ram […]

We said this a year ago, but alas, we have to say it again. There’s a big insights-to-actions gap out there.  Firms continue to invest in data, people, and technology, but in 2017, data and analytics pros reported basing fewer business decisions on data (45%) than in 2016 (49%).  If you don’t feel pressured by […]

Why The Right Web Analytics Platform Is (Even More) Business Critical Forrester just recently published The Forrester Wave™: Web Analytics, Q4 2017. In it we rank the leading web analytics platform provides including Adobe, AT Internet, Cooladata, Google, IBM, Mixpanel, and Webtrekk. “Why should I care?”, you may ask.  After all when it comes to […]

Like many digital native startups, data analytics underpinned peer-to-peer eCommerce site Etsy’s operations since the company was founded in 2005. In their early days , their struggles to achieve true customer understanding led to poor digital experiences for its sellers and the failure to accurately capture customer preferences. Etsy turned this around by building out […]

Organization are slow to change but technology changes quickly. If you leave the organization as is many won’t catch up with the change, and the technology maturity gap will widen between them over time. I saw this described in breakout panel at Strata Data in New York a few weeks ago. Unfortunately, the speaker left […]