OBSERVATIONS

This document was prepared exclusively by CMI and has not been reviewed or endorsed by Forrester. However we think they would like it!

From the 2013 Forrester Forum for Customer Experience Professionals

Customer Experience (CX) is already in the “hype cycle” – expectations are too high and real results are rare.

Forrester analyst Megan Burns reports…

nearly ½ CX professionals intend to use CX for differentiation in their industry and yet,

85% of the same firms “have no systematic approach to determine what a differentiated customer experience even looks like, let alone create one.”

Forrester’s CX index, “CXi,” places only 13/154 brands in the “excellent” CX performance category.

That’s fewer than 1/10 achieving excellence.

CX practitioners would do

well to focus on projects

that can show measureable

results.

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Metrics Matter to Success

There is a disciplined path to CX

maturity: you can’t skip ahead and it can be a tough climb.

Analyst Burns proposes a four-stage “CX maturity model.”

This path to CX maturity is linear, like climbing Mount Everest; you can’t skip past the tough parts to get to the peak. It is possible to get stuck at spots where the challenge exceeds the skills and experience of a team that has not climbed this path before.

You Need An Expert Guide

Progressing to CX maturity will often require

expert guides who know how to navigate the

rough spots by virtue of experience with

other “climbers.”

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Repair

Elevate

Optimize

Differentiate

Reduce/eliminate the occurrence of negative experiences.

Raise awareness of CX across all major business processes; promote “customer experience thinking.”

Become intentional in designing better experiences.

Innovate: re-frame customer problems as experience opportunities and cultivate your ability to discover unmet needs.

Journey mapping is a well-developed and frequently-used CX tool, but opportunity remains to extend its impact.

We need to take Journey Mapping to the

Next Level

Map the entire customer lifecycle.

Current strategy

Next Level

“documents that visually illustrate a customer’s process, needs, and perceptions over the course of her relationship with a company.”

He says that good journey maps have a well-defined purpose, rely on research with real customers, are characterized by clear and helpful deliverables, and include a plan to ensure the results are used effectively.

Analyst Jonathan Brown defines customer journey maps as:

Identify opportunities for innovation and branded

experiences that differentiate.

Mapping specific events or single touch points.

Describing the current state and eliminating pain

points.

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Customer experience innovation is hard. Building differentiating customer experiences will require both risk-taking and a disciplined effort.

Forrester advocates an "outside in" approach to CX which puts customers at the center of your business. To optimize the ‘outside in’ approach you not only have to listen to the customer, but you have to have a deep level of understanding to truly innovate.

As Henry Ford is purported to have quipped, “If I’d asked customers what they wanted, they’d have said ‘faster horses.” Ford’s automobiles were a runaway success precisely because they addressed basic customer needs in a whole new way. Ford had to take a risk. He didn’t just listen to his customers, he understood them and went beyond their current norms of experience.

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Outside In Approach +Taking Risks =

True CX Innovation

Copying “best practices” and

making incremental

improvements won’t

differentiate your company.

You have to take a risk. But

the risk can be reduced by

making sure CX innovation is

anchored to a solid

understanding of customer’s

deeper needs, both functional

& emotional.

CX practitioners are

undervaluing the role of

customer understanding and metrics in their CX efforts.

Analyst Megan Burns delivered a talk entitled “Measure The Customer Experience” where she emphasized why companies need to evolve their CX measurement.

She finds that find many CX professionals tend to delegate—we might even suggest abdicate—customer performance measurement to their internal and/or external market research partners. While practical, we think this approach often results in sub-optimization. The customer performance measurement process becomes unhinged from CX strategy and management practices; it settles into “something market research does.”

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CX Strategy and Performance

Measurement Must Go Hand in Hand

CX professionals need to

invest more in understanding

the options for improving

insight generation as well as

deployment of customer

performance information

across the enterprise to drive

continuous improvement and

increase the value of the

program.

There are a set critical tenets that must be part of a truly successful CX culture and organization.

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Forrester recognizes that organizations that are successfully implementing complex, cross-functional solutions that create a differentiated customer experience have several similar characteristics.

Deploying usable information in an actionable

and ongoing method is crucial to crafting innovative

experiences

Shift the orientation from “reporting performance metrics” to “deploying enterprise-wide learnings.” We shouldn’t expect our customer-facing staff and management to become researchers, but rather “actioneers” who are focused on consistently making the CX experience better.

Ongoing customer feedback is critical to fuel the engine of CX improvements and disruptive innovation.

Successful CX Culture

Communicate the roadmap and deploy the learnings

throughout the organization

Understand the Customer Journey

Measure process and outcomes – Disciplined Business Processes

Understand the moments of truth in every transaction, for every customer, and for the brand to differentiate

Have established enterprise-wide leadership team

CMI is a full-service research firm with a specialization in customer experience. We partner with clients to design, develop, execute and deploy customer understanding, customer performance metrics and insights derived from immersive approaches, advanced analytics and data mining.

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