It’s that time of the year again . . . Most of you are well into (if not done with) your 2013 planning — and at Forrester, we’ve also got our eyes on the year ahead.

Ron Rogowski and I have been engaging our fellow analysts in lively conversations about what will happen in the field of customer experience (CX) in 2013. But before we tell you what we think, we want to get your perspective on what 2013 will bring. 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.

Specifically, we’d love to know:

• What will be your biggest CX challenges next year?
• What are your most important CX initiatives and priorities for the next 12 months?
• What are your predictions for the field of CX in 2013?

Please share your thoughts for 2013 in the comments section below, or join the conversation in our customer experience community. We can’t wait to hear from you!

Looking for the perfect gift to show your clients or employees the value of customer experience? How about a copy of Outside In signed by one of the authors? We’ll be happy to oblige, as long as you have a mailing address in the US. You’ll buy the books, and we’ll do the signing and pay to ship them back to you. Here’s how it works:

1. Contact Forrester’s Megan Reinhart (mreinhart@forrester.com) to let us know you’re participating and how many books you’d like us to sign.
2. Go to the Outside In page on 800CEOREAD.com. Buy enough books for your clients and employees and have them shipped to us. 800CEOREAD.com offers books at 43% off, $14.25 each, for bulk orders. Ship to either address, depending on the author you’d like to have sign the books:
   Harley Manning
   60 Acorn Park Drive
   Cambridge, MA 02140
   Kerry Bodine
   150 Spear Street, Suite 1100
   San Francisco, CA 94105
3. When we receive the books, the author will sign them (Harley in Cambridge or me in San Francisco). We’ll also include a short message of your choosing, as long as it’s something we’re comfortable with.
4. We’ll ship them back to you at our expense.
5. You can distribute them to your clients or employees however you’d prefer — by mail or in person.

Happy holidays!

In the dozens of conversations I have each week with companies charting their paths to a better customer experience, the role of employees often comes up. We talk about the importance of employee empowerment and how critical it is that employees feel free to make decisions that are right for customers. We discuss tactics like hiring, socialization, and rewards that can help organizations build corporate cultures that reinforce customer-centric attitudes and behaviors.

But rarely — if ever — does anyone ask me about actually designing the employee experience.

As I’ve said before: Great customer experiences don’t happen by accident — they have to be actively designed. In other words, you need to follow a structured process to ensure that you’re meeting customers’ needs and enabling interactions that are easy and enjoyable for them. While the discipline of design hasn’t yet become mainstream in the business world, companies around the globe — E.On Energy, Fidelity Investments, Mayo Clinic, and Virgin Mobile Australia, just to name a few — have started to embrace the value of design in customer experience. They’re conducting ethnographic research to uncover customers’ hidden needs. They’re bringing customers in for co-creation sessions to develop new experience ideas. They’re iteratively prototyping and testing the proposed solutions.

Customer experience evangelists like to focus on how customer experience aligns beautifully with business metrics like increased revenue, brand equity, and cost savings. That’s all true. And we’ve got the data to prove it.

But the reality is that producing amazing customer experiences can require tradeoffs, like, say, delaying the launch of a key product (and its related revenue) or doubling your development staff (and your related budget) to meet that launch date. These are tough tradeoffs — and they’re ones that companies are often unprepared to make in light of greater business pressures.

Clearly Apple needed to move away from Google Maps. Relying on a competitor to provide such core mobile functionality was not a viable long-term strategy, and someone at Apple decided that the switch would happen in iOS 6. Somewhere along the line, that same someone realized that Maps wasn’t quite ready for primetime — and chose to sacrifice the short-term mapping experience to meet its launch target.

It’s a decision that I believe goes against what Steve Jobs — who always put the customer experience first — would have done if he were alive today. And, for the record, I don’t think Jobs would have delayed the launch. I think he would have cracked the whip to make sure Maps was ready in time.

That’s because Steve Jobs defined a clear customer experience strategy for Apple: providing the most incredible possible experience and commanding a premium price for it. Under Jobs’ watch, nothing left the shelves until it was pixel perfect. It’s what made Apple famous, and it’s what its legions of loyal customers across the world expect.

Henry Ford purportedly quipped that if he had asked customers what they wanted, they would have said, “a faster horse.” It’s a well-trod line, one that’s guaranteed to receive nods and chuckles in any business meeting. We can all relate. After all, nothing’s really changed since Ford’s time. Customers today still can’t tell us exactly what they want or imagine products and services that don’t currently exist. No one in 2009, for example, was screaming for a computer that was smaller than a laptop and bigger than a phone — and yet the iPad has become one of the most successful consumer devices on the planet, spawning dozens of copycats.

But here’s the problem: Ford’s quote is a cop out. It bolsters our self-serving belief that we know what’s best for our customers. We hide behind Ford’s lesson, using it to justify our decision to not ask customers what they really want or need. Perhaps this approach worked in the early 1900s. But today, in the age of the customer, the balance of power has shifted from companies to consumers — and companies can no longer afford to make business decisions based on what they think they know about their customers.

One of the most effective ways to make sure you’re delivering products, services, and experiences that meet your customers’ needs is to actually bring them into your design process. I know this can sound like a shocking suggestion, so let me say it again. You should ask your customers to work with you on developing potential solutions to their biggest pain points. Designers call this co-creation.