Forrester's 2013 Customer Experience Predictions. Share Over the past two years, consumer technology adoption and market forces have catapulted the field of customer experience into strategic stature. In 2012, this shift manifested itself privately through sweeping organizational changes at companies in nearly every industry -- and shined publicly through professional organizations, the media, and even in the courts. However, it will be years before customer experience is embedded to the same degree as mature business disciplines like finance, human resources, and information technology. While many firms have been working diligently to improve their customer experience for years, still others remain woefully in the dark about the business value it can bring. The net result is that in 2013 -- and for several years to come -- the customer experience industry will be characterized by efforts that range wildly from systematic change initiatives to desperate shortcuts. • Customer experience professionals will chase employee engagement.
[Infographic] Customer Experience Management in 2012. In 2012, the focus on customer experience was all about delivering a great experience across platforms, channels and touch points. Leveraging key user data is integral, but so is delivering key messages and opportunities back to the user. Delivering CXM Back in the beginning of the year, we declared digital marketing analytics as the future of customer experience. Most companies have a variety of databases that collect various pieces of information about a customer or prospect — and chances are they don't all seamlessly integrate with each other. But technology alone rarely solves the problem — it take a strategic approach in understanding the information and how to use it.
The Mobile Customer Experience It shouldn't be a surprise that mobile plays a large role in how companies manage the customer experience. Can users successfully complete transactions? Useful article? Temkin Group Study Explores How to Calculate ROI of Customer Experience. We first met Bruce Temkin at Oracle OpenWorld 2012 where he talked about understanding the customer and how to easily avoid some common customer experience mistakes.
Today, we'd like to share Temkin's impressive study on the return on investment of customer experience. 5 Steps to Measure ROI of Customer Experience Temkin doesn't offer platitudes. He's a hard nosed researcher with 14 years of experience at Forrester in the B2B, e-Business and customer experience practices. His Temkin Group performed two studies early in 2012 that were then combined and analyzed to come up with the ROI of Customer Experience report. There are five steps for calculating the ROI of Customer Experience, Temkin reports. Establish core customer experience metricsEstablish loyalty objectivesGroup customers based on their customer experience metricsAnalyze relationship between customer experience and loyaltyCalculate value of loyalty change from customer experience.
ROI of CXM: A How To. What's the Difference Between Building a Community and Building an Audience? It always strikes me as a little misguided to hear marketers talk about their "audience. " First of all, unless you are a performer or an orator, the people to whom you are hawking your wares are not an audience except in a metaphorical sense. Second of all, that metaphorical sense itself betrays a misunderstanding of how marketing communication works in the 24/7, surround-sound, socially enabled media environment we all inhabit. If you are thinking of your current or potential customers as an audience, that implies either that you are broadcasting messages for their entertainment or that they have assembled with the express intent of hearing what you have to say. In both cases, you are mistaken because, on the one hand, your messages aren't really that entertaining and, on the other, no one actually seeks outmarketing messages.
A Community Is NOT an Audience A lot of what gets labeled as community building online is a lot more like audience building. The members of the community. Delivering Proactive Customer Outreach During Hurricane Sandy. Share Early Monday afternoon, as Hurricane Sandy was barreling toward the Northeast U.S., my family and I received a robo call at our home from Allstate noting how policy holders like us could access information about hurricane preparations on allstate.com. I also received a similar email from our insurance agent which offered guidelines on preparing our property, creating an emergency supply kit, taking an inventory of our valuables, and tips for storing policy information should we need to file a claim following the storm.
Although some of these steps stand to assist Allstate in streamlining its claims processing efforts, this type of proactive outreach is a really effective way to demonstrate to customers that a company is concerned about their interests when lives are at stake and people are feeling vulnerable. Power companies are also known for providing customers with proactive outreach during storms and Con Edison was no exception. Pin Down Your Customer Intelligence Objectives - Tom Davenport. By Tom Davenport | 11:28 AM August 14, 2012 A few weeks ago I was asked to prepare a workshop for a telecom company that wants to invest more in customer intelligence. My first question was, “Can we take a week to go through all the possibilities?” The problem with customer intelligence is that while everyone wants more of it — and better versions of it — there are many different avenues to take in pursuing it. No organization can pursue all of them at once (and this company didn’t want its workshop to last a week), so the challenge is to narrow down the options fast.
For example, customer data and analysis can help you to acquire new customers, or help keep old ones. What I did, therefore, for the telecom team was to draw up a quick list of capabilities an organization might choose to develop in the customer intelligence domain. Of course, some of these applications overlap, and some are more “infrastructural” than others. More >> The First Step in Creating a Great Customer Experience. Share Great customer experiences are the result of countless deliberate decisions made by every single person in your organization on a daily basis. To align those decisions, employees and partners need a shared vision: a customer experience strategy. When most people talk about strategy, they've often got a roadmap or some sort of plan in mind.
But your customer experience strategy is actually a description of the experience that you want to deliver. Without that beacon, employees are forced to set out on a random walk, and their decisions and actions will inevitably be at odds with each other, despite all best intentions. In Forrester's soon-to-publish book, Outside In, Harley Manning and I illustrate the importance of a customer experience strategy through a case study about the Holiday Inn. So what did Holiday Inn do? Well, I'll tell you what the company didn't do. It rooted that strategy in four brand attributes: inclusive, purposeful, social, and familiar. How to Make Customer Experience the Heart of Your Internet Marketing Strategy. Here's a question for you: How much does customer experience factor into your marketing strategy?
If customer experience (CX) is a new concept for you as a marketer, think of it as the overall experience a customer has with a partciular business, from their discovery and awareness of the brand, all the way through their interaction, purchase, use, and even advocacy of that brand. In today’s wired world, chances are good that the relationship you have with your customers is going to include one or more digital channels -- your website, landing pages, email communications, mobile interactions, social media participation, etc. That’s the increasingly important subset of CXM, something called "Digital Experience Management. " In other words, customer experience is way more than just a friendly voice on the phone. To deliver an excellent customer experience, you have to think like a customer, or better think about being the customer. But how do you "be" the customer when you're, well, not? Customer experience is the new brand — DT. By Phil Whitehouse, General Manager, Sydney We are living out our careers on shifting sands.
But from here, in our offices and behind our desks, it’s easy to lose sight of just how big these changes are. ‘Shifting’ doesn’t quite capture it. It’s human nature to play down the extent of these changes, especially when our careers have been built on the status quo. Our brain is simultaneously tricking itself that it understands complex scenarios more than it actually does, and then prompting decisive action based on these assumptions. It’s a defence mechanism for trying to cope with such dramatic uncertainty. Commentators occasionally draw parallels with the impact of movable type. It’s clear that hoping things will calm down isn’t a strategy for success. But exhibiting style with substance through conventional marketing channels is fine, and helps to establish a brand identify synonymous with integrity, purpose and dependability.
People are messy. Think about it this way. Governance: The Key To Customer Experience Management. Share At its core, customer experience management comes down to governance. But what is governance, really? You've probably got a hundred different governance processes in your organization, none of them exactly the same. The word "governance" may stir up images of executives in closed-door meetings talking about compliance. And yes, teams of senior decision makers are an important component of governance practices at many organizations.
Customer experience governance is about helping you drive accountability by assigning specific customer experience management tasks to specific people within your organization. In Forrester's soon-to-publish book, and tweets at @kerrybodine">Outside In, Harley Manning and I illustrate the importance of customer experience governance through a case study about the software company Adobe. Of course, the good folks at Adobe don't collect all that data just to satisfy their curiosity. Customer Experience Should Be Part of Your Business - Harley Manning. By Harley Manning | 1:00 PM August 29, 2012 What’s the best way to optimize your customer experience? Why not fix it where it happens? Improve the experience on your website. Improve the experience in your retail locations or call centers. But based on our research, this natural strategy doesn’t work because it lacks any understanding of the larger, cross-channel journeys that your customers take.
Create an enterprise-level customer experience team Is the answer to blow up your channel silos and organize your company in a radically different way? As FedEx concluded, the real answer is to create a team of experts with specialized knowledge about customer experience and to place them outside of any silo. Uncover and map customer journeys Qualitative research methods like those used by FedEx reveal customers’ real goals, perceptions, and behavior, including how they choose interaction channels and why they switch channels. More >>