We all understand the need for rich, responsive, personalized customer experience (CX) — right? Well, not so fast! The data argues a different point, suggesting that many firms fail to deliver real-time CX.

Based on Forrester’s 2019 customer obsession data, 55% of enterprises are still either customer-naive or just customer-aware — delivering beginner-level CX. What’s that, you ask? Beginners:

  • Deliver point engagements, not end-to-end experiences. Beginners deliver CX solutions for only one or two organizations — like sales, marketing, customer service, fulfillment, or product development. They engage agencies that can’t handle end-to-end CX’s technical, data, and business complexities.
  • Satisfy yesterday’s customer needs, not testing and discovering what works right now or even anticipating their future needs. These beginners see their customers as reasonably static, with needs that can be periodically mapped but which don’t require continuous attention.
  • Ignore partners’ involvement in CX instead of driving ongoing partner engagement. They don’t continuously define and deliver real-time, end-to-end experiences.

If you truly want to compete, work with your CIO to deliver real-time, end-to-end CX. Strive to be an adaptive enterprise, realizing over three times industry average revenue growth. This ecosystemwide effort requires three things: leveraging market insights of where your customers are going; accelerating innovative delivery off of a flexible, platform-based technology platform; and working with future-fit, change-enabled employees and organizations. As Gary Hamel of the London Business School put it, the adaptive enterprise proactively demonstrates ” . . . the capacity to reconfigure [the firm’s] underlying business concept by dramatically rethinking its core mission, its primary value proposition, its core competencies, the markets or industries in which it competes, [and] its end customer.”

Learn more about FeedbackNow, Forrester’s real-time CX solution.