The Forrester Blog

I happened to notice an article yesterday on nytimes.com titled Choosing a Marketing Plan: Traditional or Social Media. It's a case study on E. P. Carrillo, a cigar manufacturer and distributor run by the Perez-Carrillo family. It reminded me of a conversation I had with an agency I visited a few months ago. The article begins by outlining the problem:

We all know there’s a big difference between wanting to deliver good customer experiences and actually taking steps to do it. But most companies haven’t crossed that divide. Executives consistently tell us that customer experience is important to their overall strategy, yet most also admit that their firms don’t have a clear understanding of target customers or systematically incorporate customer needs into their decisions. That leaves employees to design experiences based on things like personal opinions and internal politics.

New technologies follow a pattern. They start by imitating older technologies before they evolve to their true forms. The first automobiles looked like horseless carriages. It wasn’t until the Vintage Era of the 1920’s that cars evolved to a form that we’d recognize today with features like front-engines, enclosed cabs, and electric starters. Televisions started off copying radios -- they looked more like an armoire with a small screen stuck on the front.

Here are the industry results for the 2010 Customer Experience Index...

The industry CxPi data shows that: