Watch Out…Customer Experience Innovations Can Come From Where You Least Expect Them

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Megan Burns

Last week I posted some of the most frequently asked questions we get about the Customer Experience Index, 2012. One question I didn’t include but should have is “Who got the highest score in my industry?”

I scanned the list of industry high scores and wasn’t surprised to see names like USAA (banks, credit card providers, insurance providers), Apple (consumer electronics manufacturers), and Southwest Airlines. But there were names we don’t hear about as much in customer experience like Morgan Stanley Smith Barney (investment firms), Bright House Networks (ISPs), US Cellular (Wireless service providers), and Dish Network/EchoStar (TV service providers)*. 

To me this says that brands trying to differentiate on the basis of customer experience need to look in a variety of places for possible competitive threats and standard-setters, not just the most obvious ones.  History is full of examples of small firms that could transform more quickly than their larger competitors or introduce a disruptive innovation that no one saw coming. I expect both those scenarios to play out in customer experience over the next few years. The question is just where and when.

As part of our research in 2012 you can be sure we’re going to look into what these lesser talked about brands are doing to raise the bar in their industries, but in the meantime here are two of my favorite examples of CX innovations that came from places I would have never thought to look:

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Pharmacy Customer Experience Flaws -- Why Communication Is Key In Healthcare

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Liz Boehm

The other day I was at a major retailer’s pharmacy refilling a prescription. While I waited for my refill, a woman came in to refill her three prescriptions. She was clutching a $10 bill, and seemed to know exactly what she needed and what it would cost. The pharmacy tech found her scripts and informed her that she owed $17.35. The woman was shocked. She verified that the right scripts were in the bag and then asked what had happened. Two of the scripts, she said, were $4 each, and the other was usually $1.99. The pharmacist explained that one of the prescriptions had been taken off the $4 generic list.

The customer was both angry and scared. This was her essential heart medication, after all. Her frustration was understandable — the cost of one of her prescriptions had just nearly tripled, from $4 to $11.35. Likewise her fear. Prescription refill rules mean she can’t have a stockpile of pills at home to tide her over until she could find a more cost-effective option — not to mention that she might need to get a new prescription from her doctor or deal with the delay of transferring her script to another pharmacy. 

And, worse, no one had told her. She thought she had taken care of everything to manage her health — getting to the pharmacy, bringing her money, taking her pills faithfully as prescribed. She asked the pharmacist why no one had told her. He mumbled that they don’t do that.

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Improve, Transform, Or Sustain: What’s Your Path To A Better Customer Experience?

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Kerry Bodine

If you’re reading this post, there’s probably at least one person in your company (you) who’s already working to improve your customer experience in some way.  That means your company’s CX efforts fall somewhere on the curve below.

Improve:  This is where most companies start their customer experience initiatives.  Typically, a small group implements a voice of the customer program, prioritizes customer feedback, and routes it to different parts of the organization so that they can make changes.  Some employees might adopt new customer-focused work practices, but these efforts remain ad-hoc or siloed.  The net result is incremental customer experience improvements.

Transform:  At a certain point, some companies decide that they want to leverage customer experience in order to create a jump in customer loyalty, accelerate growth, and differentiate themselves from competitors.  When that happens, incremental customer experience improvements are no longer sufficient.  The company begins to change just about every part of the business — including processes, policies, technologies, and incentives — to focus on the needs of customers.

Sustain: For companies that decide to take the path towards transformation, this is the end goal.  Once a company puts customers at the center of all business operations, employees need to figure out how to sustain the new ways of working so that they can continue to deliver a great customer experience indefinitely.

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Frequently Asked Questions About Forrester's Customer Experience Index, 2012

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Megan Burns

Since publishing our Customer Experience Index, 2012 last week, we've gotten a flood of questions about the research, methodology, and results. I'm putting the finishing touches on a full Forrester report that answers the ten most common questions but thought I'd give everyone a sneak preview with a blog post summarizing a few of the answers.

1. Who are the people rating the brands in Forrester's Customer Experience Index?

To produce the CXi each year, Forrester conducts an online survey of US individuals ages 18 to 88. This year, there were 7,638 such folks who answered the survey during October 2011.  We weighted the data by age, gender, income, broadband adoption, and region to demographically represent the adult US online population. The sample was drawn from members of MarketTools' online panel, and respondents were motivated by receiving points that can be redeemed for a reward.

2. Which touchpoints are consumers rating when they answer the CXi questions?

The short answer to this question is "any touchpoints they used to interact with the brand." We don't direct consumers to think about any specific touchpoints as they rate their interactions. Instead, we want them to consider all of their interactions with that brand over the past 90 days, regardless of how they happened.

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Forrester’s Fifth Annual Customer Experience Index Shows Excellence Is Exceedingly Rare

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Megan Burns

Today we published Forrester’s 2012 Customer Experience Index (CXi). It’s our fifth annual benchmark of customer experience quality as judged by the only people whose opinion matters — customers. The CXi is based on research conducted at the end of 2011 and reflects how consumers perceived their experiences with 160 brands across 13 industries to be.

For those new to the index, let me explain how it works. The process has three steps:

  1. We ask more than 7,600 consumers to identify companies they do business with in 13 different industries.
  2. We ask them to tell us how well each firm met their needs, how easy the firm was to work with, and how enjoyable it was to work with. We ask these questions at the brand level to get a sense of their overall experience with the company regardless of channel.
  3. For all three questions, we calculate each firm’s CXi score by subtracting the percentage of its customers who reported a bad experience from the percentage who reported a good experience. The overall CXi is an average of those three results.
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Bad Reasons For NOT Having A Chief Customer Officer

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Paul Hagen

I recently updated our research on enterprisewide customer experience leaders, who we refer to as “chief customer officers” or CCOs. While they often don’t have that exact title, we identified around 600 individuals who carry a mandate to improve the end-to-end customer experience at their company. We did some deeper research on close to 200 of them in order to understand the general profile of these people as well as how their positions are structured within their companies.

Forrester has witnessed a marked increase in the position over the past six years. And for good reason: Competitive forces are shifting dramatically in what we call the “age of the customer” (from Forrester report "Why Customer Experience? Why Now?"). Firms struggle to compete on product innovation alone, as global outsourcing and cloud-based computing lower barriers to entry and create scores of substitutes. Customer power has grown, as 73% of firms trust recommendations from friends and family, while only 19% trust direct mail (from Forrester report "Consumer "Ad-itudes" Stay Strong"). Firms have turned to customer experience as a way to differentiate in this commoditized world, which has led to the surge in CCOs. In my new report, I profiled key characteristics of CCOs as well as models for the kinds of organizations they oversee.

At the same time, as high-profile firms like Fidelity, The Washington Post, and General Motors have put in place senior customer experience leaders over the past year or so, I’ve been struck by the wide assortment of reasons that firms use to rationalize NOT putting a chief customer officer in place.

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Forrester’s 2012 Customer Experience Predictions

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Kerry Bodine

2011 was a pivotal year for the field of customer experience. A major increase in the number and types of consumer technologies had a wide-ranging impact on daily life: People controlled their TVs with tablets, asked their phones questions, and played video games without using physical controllers. The extensive reach of these changes — and the screaming pace at which they happened — triggered a corporate awakening to the value of great customer interactions.

Brisk consumer technology adoption may have been the ultimate driver of many customer experience initiatives in 2011. But an increasingly competitive industry landscape, the ever-increasing power of consumers, and a slippery economy will be the major drivers of customer experience efforts in 2012.

In our latest report, Ron Rogowski and I outline what these market drivers mean for customer experience professionals in the year ahead — and what they’ll need to do to keep up. The report includes predictions for how organizations will change the way they work, what types of interactions they’ll focus on, and the resulting implications for customer experience vendors. For example:

  • C-level execs will officially name customer experience as a top strategic priority. Toward the end of 2011, we started hearing of more companies in which the CEO or board of directors decreed customer experience to be a top strategic priority. For example, the chief information officers at several large telecom companies recently told us that, for the first time ever, customer experience was one of their top concerns. We expect this trend to accelerate in 2012, much to the delight of customer experience professionals who have been clamoring for executive support for years.
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Want To Know How Your 2012 Customer Experience Plans Compare To Others? Take Our Benchmarking Survey To Find Out.

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Megan Burns

Calling all customer experience professionals! It’s that time of year again . . . time for Forrester to take a snapshot of what’s going on inside customer experience programs around the globe.

Want to see how your company’s 2012 plans stack up? All it takes is 10 minutes. Complete Forrester’s Q4 2011 Customer Experience Survey, which will ask you a few questions about:

  • Your company’s goals and objectives for customer experience in 2012.
  • How your organization manages customer experience on a daily basis.
  • The customer experience categories you plan to funnel budget into for 2012.

Once the survey closes in mid-December, we’ll analyze the data and write a summary report titled “The State Of Customer Experience, 2012.” We’ll send you a copy of that report when it publishes in January — even if you’re not a Forrester client.

Thanks in advance for helping with our research. This data will fuel not only this report but also much of our other research throughout the coming year.

(By the way, this survey is for customer experience professionals who are working to improve customer interactions with their own companies. Agency employees, technology vendors, and consultants should take a pass on this one. There will be surveys for you later in the year.)

Help Forrester Make Its 2012 Customer Experience Predictions!

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Kerry Bodine

It’s that time of the year again . . . Most of you are well into your 2012 planning, and at Forrester, we’ve also got our eyes on the year ahead. 

But first, we’re taking a look back. Ron Rogowski and I recently revisited our 2011 customer experience predictions report and chatted about what’s happened over the past 10 months.

In some cases, our predictions were accurate (if we do say so ourselves). For example, we said that tech vendors would engage in an “all-out war to own the customer experience management space” and that it would create a “confusing marketplace that will not shake out in 2011.” We also said that “customer service will gain popularity as a key opportunity for engagement.” Given our ongoing research and client conversations, we think these predictions were spot on.

And on a few points, we missed the mark. When we wrote our last doc, people had just started hacking the Kinect for Xbox 360 to create fun demos like real-time light sabers and digital shadow puppets. We wrote, “In 2011, we'll see companies start to leverage this technology, too, with healthcare (think guided physical therapy exercises) and marketing (a la interactive product demos) diving in first.” Well, we haven’t exactly seen a tsunami of activity in this area. But were we way off? Or did we just jump the gun? Only time will tell!

In either case, the fun continues.

Ron and I are collaborating again on our 2012 CX predictions report — and we want to know what you think. So here’s your chance for fame and fortune — or at least the opportunity to be mentioned in a Forrester report! If your ideas or comments contribute to our final analysis, we’ll add you as a contributor to the research.

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Making Customer Experience Relevant Behind The Scenes

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Paul Hagen

“Customer experience is everyone’s business” is a mantra that I often hear from customer experience leaders. Of course, it’s true. The entire purpose of a company as an entity is to provide value to customers in exchange for a payment. Every activity that the company performs is part of the ecosystem that delivers the perceived value that a customer receives.

But connecting the dots to those behind the scenes from IT to logistics planners and compliance individuals challenges many customer experience leaders . . . as well as the leaders of those behind-the-scenes departments. I’m feeling this challenge poignantly right now as I prepare a keynote speech for Forrester’s joint Infrastructure & Operations and Security Forums coming up in a few weeks. Let me share a few pointers that I’ve gathered from customer experience leaders who helped guide my thinking:

  • Translate the language. As customer experience professionals, we have built a vocabulary to describe the tools and methodologies of our practice in the same way every other department has created its own language. Customer experience leaders have to translate these practices into the beliefs and behavioral norms of the departments if they are going to change the way things are done. Change agent, champion, or customer advocate programs at firms like John Deere, Philips Electronics, Intuit, and Fidelity are great mechanisms to provide these translators.
     
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