The Customer Experience Ecosystem - pvko.nluuid:618cdf3a-289f-4bbe-… · customer experience professionals must discover how to map their company’s customer experience ecosystem

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The Customer Experience Ecosystemby Kerry Bodine and paul Hagen, February 28, 2013

For: Customer experience professionals

Key TaKeaWays

despite Best intentions, Firms Fail To deliver Great experiencesRoughly two-thirds of US brands deliver experiences that range from just OK to downright poor. Th is happens in spite of making customer experience a top strategic priority and dedicating teams to oversee improvement eff orts.

Tunnel Vision Causes Customer experience problemsImprovement initiatives fall short when employees and partners fail to understand the dynamics that go into creating great experiences. Firms oft en overlook the end-to-end customer journeys and inadequately demonstrate how employee and partner activities aff ect customers.

To improve, Firms Need To Understand Their Customer experience ecosystemsIn order to break from their tunnel vision, companies need to understand the concept of a customer experience ecosystem. To transform, companies need to intentionally design experiences by planning and organizing this complex system of people, products, interfaces, services, technologies, and spaces.

© 2013, Forrester Research, Inc. All rights reserved. Unauthorized reproduction is strictly prohibited. Information is based on best available resources. Opinions reflect judgment at the time and are subject to change. Forrester®, Technographics®, Forrester Wave, RoleView, TechRadar, and Total Economic Impact are trademarks of Forrester Research, Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective companies. To purchase reprints of this document, please email [email protected]. For additional information, go to www.forrester.com.

For Customer experienCe proFessionals

Why Read This RepoRT

Even companies that make customer experience a strategic priority struggle to implement major long-lasting improvements. That’s because they fail to connect behind-the-scenes activities to customer interactions. These firms need a new approach to customer experience management: one that considers the influence of every single employee and external partner on every single customer interaction. Forrester calls this complex set of relationships the customer experience ecosystem. To fully understand how they deliver customer experiences today and create a vision for meaningful improvements going forward, customer experience professionals must discover how to map their company’s customer experience ecosystem and adopt best practices from the emerging field of service design. This report is an update to

“The Customer Experience Ecosystem” originally published on June 22, 2011.

table of Contents

Firms Fail To deliver Great Customer experiences despite Best efforts

The Root Cause of This dilemma: Tunnel Vision

introducing The Customer experience ecosystem

Companies Must Nurture a healthy Customer experience ecosystem

start By mapping the Health of Your Customer experience ecosystem

turn to the Field of service Design to Create a Healthy ecosystem

reCommenDations

help The players in your ecosystem Understand Their Roles

WHat it means

an ecosystem approach Will spur Massive organizational Change

supplemental Material

notes & resources

Forrester interviewed 23 vendors, user companies, and service design consultants, including andrew reise Consulting; Beyond philosophy; Capital one Financial; Charter Communications; Continuum; Dubberly Design office; engine service Design; e.on energy; Fedex; Fidelity investments; Graham Hill; livework; marc stickdorn; medallia; opentext; radarstation; rightnow (oracle); shelley evenson; sprint; tealeaf, an iBm company; us Cellular; Virgin media; and Zilver innovation.

related research Documents

executive Q&a: Design personas and Customer Journey mapsJanuary 10, 2011

service Design Creates Breakthrough Customer experiencesDecember 20, 2010

The Customer experience ecosystemVision: the Customer experience ecosystem playbookby Kerry Bodine and paul Hagenwith Harley manning, allison stone, and molly murphy

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the Customer experience ecosystem 2

© 2013, Forrester Research, Inc. Reproduction Prohibited February 28, 2013

FiRMs Fail To deliVeR GReaT CUsToMeR eXpeRieNCes despiTe BesT eFFoRTs

For roughly two-thirds of US brands, customer experience ranges from just OK to downright bad (see Figure 1).1 Lackluster interactions occur in every channel — and especially when customers cross channels.2 It’s unfortunate that companies in nearly every industry disappoint their customers, even though many of today’s largest firms have:

■ Made customer experience a strategic priority. Companies are waking up to the fact that great customer experiences tie to business results ranging from soft metrics like increased brand equity and customer loyalty to hard numbers like incremental revenue and cost savings.3 Of the 86 customer experience professionals who responded to a recent survey, 93% said that customer experience is one of their firm’s top strategic priorities for 2012.4 We hear these numbers echoed in our daily conversations with executives, who confirm that their companies are developing customer experience strategies and embarking on customer experience transformation initiatives.

■ Dedicated teams to oversee customer experience efforts. Oversight for customer experience is no longer a responsibility that’s tacked onto employees’ day jobs. To create their strategies and execute their transformation efforts, many companies have dedicated full-time staff to customer experience efforts. What’s more, over the past five years, Forrester has observed an increase in the number of companies that have appointed a chief customer officer — a single executive leading customer experience efforts across a business unit or an entire company.5




Figure 1 Distribution Of Customer Experience Index Scores, 2007 To 2013

Source: Forrester Research, Inc.59115

Base: 154 large North American brands scored in Forrester’s Customer Experience Index, 2013;160 large North American brands scored in Forrester’s Customer Experience Index, 2012;153 large North American brands scored in Forrester’s Customer Experience Index, 2011;133 large North American brands scored in Forrester’s Customer Experience Index, 2010;113 large North American brands scored in Forrester’s Customer Experience Index, 2008;

and 112 large North American brands scored in Forrester’s Customer Experience Index, 2007

Source: North American Technographics® Customer Experience Online Survey, Q3 2007, Q4 2008, Q4 2009,Q4 2010, Q4 2011, and Q4 2012 (US)

Poor(score: 55 to 64)

OK(score: 65 to 74)

Good(score: 75 to 84)

Excellent(score: 85+)

Very poor(score: <55)

201320122011201020082007

8%3%

6%10%

11%0%

31%34%

29%26%

25%25%

36%31%

35%30%

26%40%

17%23%

18%21%

24%23%

8%10%

11%13%

14%12%




The RooT CaUse oF This dileMMa: TUNNel VisioN

Many customer experience initiatives don’t meet their full potential — or worse, fail completely — because neither employees nor partners have a complete picture of what the customer experience actually entails or the dynamics that go into creating it. Both internal and external stakeholders:

■ Fail to consider customers’ journeys across all touchpoints. Customers interact with companies across hundreds of discrete touchpoints as they discover, evaluate, buy, access, use, and get support for a company’s products and services (see Figure 2 and see Figure 3). A FedEx research project found more than 200 customer touchpoints, and John Deere Financial discovered 529 spanning multiple product lines. Similarly, Continuum helped Canadian retailer Spence Diamonds identify often-overlooked touchpoints like diamond education materials, ring sizers, gift boxes, shopping bags, and store furniture that affect the journey of buying a ring (see Figure 4). Unfortunately, few companies get to this necessary level of detail, leaving them blind to large and often critical swaths of their customers’ journeys.

■ Fail to understand how their actions affect the customer experience. Behind-the-scenes employees and partners can have an impact on customer experience that’s even greater than that of frontline employees like retail staff and call center agents — often through unintended consequences of their actions (see Figure 5). For example, TV service provider Charter Communications discovered that its business customers were struggling to install a new software service on their routers. Why? Sales reps failed to communicate the tech requirements for the installation during the sales process. And although support specialists had the skills and tools to fix the problem, the firm’s legal counsel determined that it was too risky to allow them to do so.

Figure 2 Steps Within The Customer Experience Journey


Discover Get supportEvaluate Access Use

Leave

Buy

Re-engage




Figure 3 Touchpoint Examples At Each Step Of The Customer Journey


Customer journey step

Discover

Evaluate

Buy

Access

Use

Get support • Inbound interactive voice responsesystem

• Twitter client• Service technician• Online chat

Re-engage

Leave

Touchpoint examples

• Envelope for a piece of direct mail sentto someone’s home

• Email promoting a special event• Display ad• In-store display

• Catalog• Corporate website• Television ad• Facebook• Business card

• Corporate website• Reviews on a third-party website• Physical shopping cart• Brochure

• Product packaging• Retail sales employees• In-store dressing room• Travel agent

• Branded credit card• Kiosk• Salesperson at a cash register• Website shopping cart• Coupon

• Application form for a service• Bill• Receipt• Third-party payment site• Gift certificate

• Instruction manual for a new productor service

• Interface for setting up a piece ofelectronic equipment

• Technician

• Parcel shipper’s door tag• Shopping bag• Gift box• Email containing an access code• Chair in a waiting room

• DVD player• Mobile or tablet application• Cup of co�ee• Piece of clothing

• ATM• Hotel room bathroom• Hospital bed• Car

• Third-party support website• Call center agent• In-store service desk• Email

• Retail loyalty card• Club membership card• Direct mail piece• Magazine insert

• Coupon o� next purchase• Corporate website• Outbound interactive voice response

system

• Facebook• Twitter• Retail manager• Cashier

• Call center agent• Corporate website• In-store service desk• Email




Figure 4 The Spence Diamonds Customer Journey And Related Touchpoints


Source: Continuum; Spence Diamonds




Figure 5 The Impact Of Behind-The-Scenes Employees On Customer Experience


Behind the scenes Impact on customer experience

Finance Beyond Philosophy helped a large UK construction company realize that its stringentcontractor invoicing process was directly tied to building quality issues. When the �rmswitched to a 28-day payment schedule with fewer required forms, it began to attractbetter contractors, who in turn constructed better-quality homes.

Legal In order to simplify its client onboarding process, RightNow identi�ed speci�c areas in its contracts that often resulted in protracted negotiations — then eliminated many of those sticking points. As a result, RightNow shortened its sales cycle,bene�ting both the company and its customers.

Marketing

Humanresources

Due to contractual issues, European train operator Eurostar needed to have a percentageof its train drivers double as on-train customer service managers. This requirementplaced the drivers, who were quite happy with their isolated role at the front of the train,in the direct line of customer attention and inquiries.

Operations Capital One had a large pool of “general servicing” call center agents who handled almostany call type. Ultimately, this model stretched agents too thin. By focusing call centeragents on particular customer segments and needs, the agents improved their ability toanswer customer questions and resolve issues. As a result, customer satisfaction and�rst-contact resolution rates jumped by 25%.

Informationtechnology

When US Cellular customers with faulty phones walked into a retail location for areplacement, they ran into trouble. Why? Store employees didn’t have access to theinventory data or phone replacement system that call center agents used day in and dayout. A relatively simple IT rollout quickly �xed this in-store issue.

Productdevelopment

The product development group at Virgin Media isn’t just responsible for developingnew products. It is also tasked with determining what the experience will be likewhen customers receive the product. For example, should the company rely on agentsto educate customers about features? Or should it create a mobile app for this purpose?

Sprint found that because its marketing department did not tout the bene�ts of itsnetwork in ads — and competitors’ marketing departments did — customers perceivedthe Sprint network to be lagging, regardless of the actual network performance theyexperienced.

iNTRodUCiNG The CUsToMeR eXpeRieNCe eCosysTeM

In order to break from their tunnel vision, companies need to understand the concept of a customer experience ecosystem, which Forrester defines as (see Figure 6):

The complex set of relationships among a company’s employees, partners, and customers that determines the quality of all customer interactions.




These relationships are:

■ Manifested throughout ongoing customer journeys. At each touchpoint along their journey, customers interact with a company’s employees and partners either directly or via some intermediating technology — like a website or a printed invoice. The actions and decisions of all of these players determine the nature of the interactions at each and every touchpoint.

■ Enabled by policies, processes, technology, and culture. Tools like pricing policies, order fulfillment processes, and order entry systems lay down rails for how customer-facing employees and partners operate. Cultural norms establish shared values and behaviors that determine how these tools get used on a daily basis.6

■ Influenced by external forces. Employees, partners, and customers respond to forces from outside of the ecosystem. These include the economic climate, competitive activity, disruptive technologies, and the personal context of the customer — like the extent to which they’re influenced by peers. Although the people in a customer experience ecosystem have little to no control over these forces, they factor them into their day-to-day actions and decisions.

■ Ever-changing over time. Just like a biological ecosystem, the interconnected nature of a customer experience ecosystem means that it’s in a constant state of flux: When one thing changes, there are consequences somewhere else. As employees and partners make decisions and take actions on a daily basis, they continually shift the characteristics of customer interactions.




Figure 6 The Customer Experience Ecosystem


Employees like:• Call center agents• Retail sta�• Flight attendants• Sales reps• Waiters

Partners like:• Third-party retail sta�• Parcel delivery sta�• Outsourced call center agents• Contract technicians• Security guards

On the frontline

Leave

Re-engage

Discover Get supportEvaluate Access UseBuy

Customer

Employees from:• Operations• Legal• Finance• Marketing• Information technology

Partners from:• Interactive agencies• Enterprise feedback vendors• Tech vendors• Management consulting �rms• Recruiting �rms

Behind the scenes

CoMpaNies MUsT NURTURe a healThy CUsToMeR eXpeRieNCe eCosysTeM

Healthy customer experience ecosystems are in balance, with each player’s actions benefitting the other parties in the system. However, the inescapable reality is that all of the parties involved — customers, employees, and partners — will primarily focus on trying to get their own needs met.

■ Customers need experiences that are useful, easy, and enjoyable. In return for their money, customers demand real value — as defined by them — from the company’s products, services, and interactions, like the purchase process on the firm’s website. They also want the company to be easy and enjoyable to work with, as proven by the correlation between these factors and standard measures of customer loyalty.7




■ Companies need to meet their business objectives. Today’s large companies employ up to hundreds of thousands of workers, all with their own set of professional goals. Top executives typically want to drive revenue growth and profitably, but lower-level employees are focused more narrowly. Middle managers might seek cost savings and employee retention, back-office workers might be looking for efficiency, and frontline staff might just want to get through the day without battling angry customers.

■ Partners need to drive results for their organizations too. Partner organizations have their own set of business objectives and revenue targets. Partners like parcel shippers and third-party retailers who work in plain sight of customers will seek to optimize their own customer experiences, which might not align with those of the companies they’re representing. And behind-the-scenes players like interactive agencies and technology vendors might focus on contractual targets — like billable hours or uptime — without understanding how those metrics affect their customers’ customers.

start By Mapping The health of your Customer experience ecosystem

Customer experience professionals must understand and align the needs of all of these players so that the ecosystem doesn’t try to tear itself apart. The first step is to systematically uncover and document the ecosystem’s hidden dynamics. Realistically, it’s impossible to envision every single interconnection in an enterprisewide ecosystem all at once. That’s why Forrester recommends starting small by mapping a subset of the ecosystem that underlies a single but important customer journey. To create this map:

■ Document one painful journey of your most important customer. Start by selecting your primary persona — the customer archetype that represents your most important behavioral customer segment.8 Then document what that persona does, thinks, and feels at each step of one specific painful journey — and each touchpoint that the persona interacts with along the way (see Figure 7). While existing customer journey maps are a good starting point for this exercise, you’ll likely need to dig into greater detail than these documents typically contain.9 To avoid missing issues you’re simply not aware of, invite customers and frontline employees to join this activity. Keep the ideas flowing by keeping the process informal: Use sticky notes on large sheets of butcher paper and encourage iteration.

■ Dig into that journey through in-depth research with customers, employees, and partners. Thorough ecosystem mapping requires detailed knowledge about the customer journey, your organization’s inner workings, and your partners’ motivations — so take the time to research these issues. Before mapping the ecosystem surrounding its signature package delivery service, FedEx conducted a 360-degree research effort to assess the delivery experience. The customer experience team first conducted interactive interviews with roughly 200 customer-facing employees, 240 recipients of residential packages, and 70 package shippers. Each session




included brainstorming on service improvements and ranking of proposed solutions. The team also shipped several-hundred packages to mystery shoppers across the US, who provided objective third-party evaluations of the delivery experience.

■ Collaboratively visualize the sources of your customer’s pain. Recruit players from across the ecosystem to help map out the people, processes, policies, and technologies that affect the customer journey.10 The exact format of this visualization isn’t mission-critical. Andrew Reise Consulting uses its PAID diagram to map customer activities to processes, applications, integration points, and data (see Figure 8).11 Service design agency livework uses a technique called service blueprinting to show connections between the customer journey, specific channels, and activities of internal departments (see Figure 9). Service design agency Radarstation created a custom model to map UK utility company Southern Water’s meter installation process (see Figure 10). And Virgin Media used sticky notes on butcher paper to map activities of internal groups across the customer life cycle (see Figure 11).

■ Conduct root-cause analysis to develop a more complete understanding. After visualizing all of the moving parts in your ecosystem, dig deeper through root-cause analysis to make sure that you haven’t missed anything vital to your understanding of the ecosystem dynamics. FedEx supplemented its ecosystem mapping with fishbone diagramming, and the customer experience team at Virgin Media partnered with in-house Six Sigma black belts to examine underlying processes.12 Even companies without deep expertise in root-cause analysis can use the “five whys” technique. Pick an employee process or a partner sales policy and ask why it is the way it is. When you find the underlying reason — another process or policy — ask why that is the way it is. Continue this process until you’ve dug down five levels — five whys — deep.13

■ Identify people in the ecosystem who aren’t receiving appropriate value. Once you’ve mapped out all of the people and groups who play some role in the experience delivered along the customer journey, assess whether they are currently receiving all, some, or none of the value that they need. If your ecosystem map is displayed on a wall, simple green, yellow, and red stickers will do the trick.14 Charter Communications’ senior vice president of customer experience went through this exercise to examine the problems that customers were having installing his company’s software on their routers. His big “aha” moment was seeing a sea of red stickers dotting the customer journey and a sea of green stickers dotting various roles within the sales organization. This picture clearly pointed to the need to realign sales commissions so that sales reps would feel pain when customers did.




Figure 7 How Companies Select Their Most Important Customer Journey


Company Customer journey Rationale for focusing on that journey

Virgin Media Signing up for service It wanted to galvanize the organization around a journey thatwould start the customer relationship o� on the right foot.

RightNow Negotiating the initialservice contract

It wanted to align an early interaction with one of three branddi�erentiators: being easy to do business with.

FedEx Receiving a delivery Growth in online retail volumes led to a signi�cant rise inresidential deliveries of items with high personal importance forcustomers — like electronic devices, healthcare items, andperishables. However, the varying schedules of residentialrecipients can make them unavailable to provide their signaturesand collect their packages at home.

Sprint Requesting an addresschange

It looked for various types of issues and requests with high callvolumes.It also realized that signi�cant service changes — like networkcoverage and local stores — were likely to accompany thisparticular journey.

E.On Energy Requesting an electricity billaddress change related to abusiness move

It used customer feedback like Net Promoter Score verbatims andexit surveys to pinpoint common experience breakdowns.It also looked for areas to demonstrate �nancial impact, likeobvious process inefficiencies, �nancial drains, and areas of risk.




Figure 8 An Example Of Andrew Reise Consulting’s PAID Diagram


Source: Andrew Reise Consulting




Figure 9 Service Blueprint Created By Livework For Saverbox, An Energy Savings Finance Service


Source: livework; Saverbox




Figure 10 Detailed Diagram Of Southern Water’s Old Meter Installation Process


Source: Radarstation; Southern Water

Red dots indicatecustomer touchpoints.




Figure 11 Virgin Media’s Diagram Of The Customer Journey And Behind-The-Scenes Departments

Turn To The Field of service design To Create a healthy ecosystem

One major difference between natural ecosystems and customer experience ecosystems is that customer experience ecosystems can be intentionally designed. The emerging field of service design is ideally suited for this task. Although the term “service design” conjures up images of customer service, service designers have a much broader mandate: They plan and organize complex systems of people, products, interfaces, services, and spaces.15 Companies looking to redesign their customer experience ecosystems should take a page from the service design playbook and:


Source: Virgin Media

Three di�erent colors of sticky notes representthe roles of marketing, channel, and productgroups throughout the customer journey.




■ Embrace co-creation with all ecosystem participants. Co-creation from a service design perspective involves active participation from employees, partners, and customers throughout the design process. For example, UK-based Engine Service Design ran a series of design workshops with Virgin Media customers and employees representing a cross-section of functions and seniority (see Figure 12). Business teams from Fidelity Investments often share early-stage prototypes with customers in face-to-face meetings in order to uncover hidden needs. Fidelity also engages its customers in design exercises, such as writing their benefits needs as a craigslist ad and comparing benefits enrollment with the perfect first date.

■ Explore new prototyping techniques. The digital prototyping tools that most customer experience teams use fall short for service design projects, which tackle a wide range of physical and intangible touchpoints.16 To examine the usability of a new hotel lobby design for Holiday Inn, Continuum constructed a full-scale foam-core prototype in a warehouse (see Figure 13). Service design agency WorkPlayExperience takes a theatrical approach to prototyping by getting employees and customers to act out service-based interactions together. One company we spoke to even prototyped a new organizational structure by producing a website with videos that gave employees a glimpse of what a day in the life of their new roles would entail.

■ Create unfinished solutions. Because the customer experience ecosystem is always evolving, it’s impossible to design a solution that will be used perpetually down the road. So instead of setting design deliverables in stone, service designers leave room for future tweaks. For example, Gjensidige, Norway’s largest insurance company, worked with service design agency livework to create a standardized note-taking format for claims agents to use during customer calls. The team designed a new printed notepad in Word so that call center execs could easily modify it as the needs of customers and call center agents changed — and could then print new pads on regular-size paper right in the Gjensidige offices.

■ Develop service design skills within their own organization. Unlike traditional agencies, which ultimately depend on their clients’ long-term dependence, service design agencies actively empower their clients to do service design on their own. Oliver King, one of the founders of Engine, has specifically said, “We do service design with our clients, not to them.” When execs from electricity and gas supplier E.On Energy engaged Engine to help them redesign the process for installing 5 million smart meters across the UK, they asked the agency to transfer service design knowledge and tools to a group of nine internal E.On employees pulled from various parts of the organization. So while Engine took the lead on this initial project, its primary role now involves supporting the in-house team and others throughout the company.




Figure 12 Virgin Media Staff And Customers Generate Experience Improvement Ideas Together


Source: Engine Service Design; Virgin Media




Figure 13 Continuum’s Full-Scale Foam-Core Prototype Of The New Holiday Inn Lobby


Source: Continuum; Holiday Inn

R e c o m m e n d at i o n s

help The playeRs iN yoUR eCosysTeM UNdeRsTaNd TheiR Roles

In order for your customer experience ecosystem to function effectively, every single employee and partner must understand their personal connection to the customer experience. Involving employees and partners in ecosystem mapping exercises and service design projects is a good start — but no matter how many people you involve in these activities, you’ll still only reach a small percentage of all of the players. That’s why customer experience teams need to spend time socializing the customer experience ecosystem. To get started:

■ Hang your ecosystem maps in an easily viewable location. Ecosystem maps are much more valuable if they’re in a location where they can spur discussions — or even arguments! Unresolved conflicts between players damage the ecosystem, so get those disconnects out in the open, despite the short-term pain. Find a large wall in a prominent place — like a heavily




trafficked hallway — that will be used by multiple groups. Capital One dedicates entire conference rooms to customer experience process improvements. Associates who “own” a piece of a particular customer journey — like disputing a charge — reside in one room until the process issues have been resolved. Large visualizations, process diagrams, and other Lean and Agile tools adorn the walls to help teams reach solutions quickly.

■ Socialize the ecosystem concept. OpenText’s execs focused three of the company’s five corporate objectives on customer experience and made it optional for employees to align their individual quarterly goals to one or more of those objectives. RightNow (Oracle) has created a one-page document that clearly shows which department is primarily responsible — and which other departments play a contributing role — at each step of the customer journey. One member of FedEx’s customer experience team is focused on sharing customer journey maps with targeted teams to help them understand where the experience breaks down and what their role is.

■ Tie employee compensation to customer experience results. One of the best ways to get employees’ attention is to link their variable compensation to customer experience metrics. Forget a companywide Net Promoter Score — it’s too big for any one person to own. Instead, focus on metrics that each employee can directly control. For example, call center execs and retail managers can use Medallia’s software to view customer feedback on individual frontline employees. And don’t let back-office employees off the hook either. Employees from the legal department could be rewarded based on how quickly they turn around service contracts, while finance staff could get paid based on their percentage of correct invoices.

■ Create incentives for partners to deliver better experiences. Capital One sets target customer satisfaction goals for each of its call centers and rewards those who meet or exceed those goals with a bonus. To help its third-party call center partners meet targets and ensure call quality, Capital One created full-time positions to work on-site with each vendor. These employees help the vendors diagnose customer experience issues, adjust policies, introduce new programs, and direct new training initiatives. Another company we spoke with is piloting a partner certification program that’s based on customer experience metrics. Execs plan to base each partner’s certification level on feedback obtained through the same survey questions the company uses to gauge its own customer experience.




W h at i t m e a n s

aN eCosysTeM appRoaCh Will spUR MassiVe oRGaNiZaTioNal ChaNGe

Customer experience professionals who first understand — and then redesign — their ecosystem will gain a significantly broader perspective of their organization and partner relationships. But the biggest epiphanies will belong to those outside of the customer experience team who don’t currently think about their jobs in this light and may not initially want to. As customer experience professionals work to get everyone onboard, they’ll ignite a massive cultural shift at best — and at worst, a series of major conflicts.

1. Companies will add new roles, like customer journey managers, to support the ecosystem. When execs at RightNow (Oracle) examined their customer experience ecosystem, they realized that new clients needed more hands-on help in order to get the most out of their software purchases — and that no existing employees had the bandwidth to do this job. So the company invested in a group of almost 50 nonquota-carrying client service managers. In addition to frontline roles like this, we expect companies to create a new behind-the-scenes job description: customer journey manager. These employees will be responsible for improving the quality of interactions that span key customer journeys — and most importantly, for coordinating with cross-functional departments and external partners to prioritize and make changes.

2. Business strategists will look to the customer experience team for input. Business strategists will quickly realize the benefit of ecosystem mapping. That’s because mapping exercises will surface not only troublesome processes and policies but also business opportunities. For example, one company found that its call center agents were shredding customer applications if they couldn’t immediately provide service to those customers. The customer experience team at another company discovered that its support group was providing a valuable (and profitable!) service to some, but not all, customers. However, this service wasn’t widely promoted internally or with customers, so few people knew about it. Now the company has begun to enhance the service and roll it out to a broader customer base.

3. Marketing will shift away from out-of-context advertising blasts. With a deeper understanding of the hundreds of potential touchpoints through which they can interact with customers, marketers will be able to craft meaningful and context-relevant ways to promote products and services. American Express already does this. When call center agents hear that a customer has a specific need or situation, they’ll quickly explain relevant card benefits and features — essentially marketing the card by helping customers get more value out of it. American Express customers who receive such help show an average increase of more than 10% in “Recommend to a Friend” scores. This approach — the right message at the right place and time — will lessen marketers’ dependence on out-of-context messages delivered through vehicles like TV ads and direct mail.




4. Execs will revisit company mission, vision, and values. No matter how collaborative they try to be, customer experience professionals will run into groups that refuse to take responsibility for the negative impact that their decisions and actions have on the customer experience. These situations will require escalation, sometimes to the highest level of the company. In some cases, executives will clear the way through mandate, reorganization, or dismissals. But in cases where top execs side against customers, cognitive dissonance will kick in. As a result, we anticipate that many companies will re-examine their corporate mission, vision, and values in an effort to determine if the kind of company they say they want to be really aligns with the types of decisions they’re prepared to make.

sUppleMeNTal MaTeRial

Methodology

Forrester conducted the North American Technographics® Customer Experience Online Survey, Q4 2010 (US), which was an online survey fielded in November 2010 of 7,728 US individuals ages 18 to 88. For results based on a randomly chosen sample of this size (N = 7,728), there is 95% confidence that the results have a statistical precision of plus or minus 1.4% of what they would be if the entire population of US online individuals ages 18 and older had been surveyed. Forrester weighted the data by age, gender, income, broadband adoption, and region to demographically represent the adult US online population. The survey sample size, when weighted, was 7,717. (Note: Weighted sample sizes can be different from the actual number of respondents to account for individuals generally underrepresented in online panels.) Please note that this was an online survey. Respondents who participate in online surveys have in general more experience with the Internet and feel more comfortable transacting online. The data is weighted to be representative for the total online population on the weighting targets mentioned, but this sample bias may produce results that differ from Forrester’s offline benchmark survey. The sample was drawn from members of MarketTools’ online panel, and respondents were motivated by receiving points that can be redeemed for a reward. The sample provided by MarketTools is not a random sample. While individuals have been randomly sampled from MarketTools’ panel for this particular survey, they have previously chosen to take part in the MarketTools online panel.

For Technographics Clients: how To Get More Technographics data insights

Forrester’s North American Technographics Customer Experience Online Survey, Q4 2010 (US), of 7,728 US individuals ages 18 to 88 includes many additional parameters by which you can analyze the data contained in this report. Please contact your data advisor at [email protected] if you would like to see the data cut by:




■ Demographics. The mean age of the total sample was 43.6, with 44 being the mean age of males and 43.4 being the mean age of females.

If you do not currently subscribe to Forrester’s Consumer Technographics services, please contact your account manager at [email protected].

Companies interviewed For This Report

Andrew Reise Consulting

Beyond Philosophy

Capital One Financial

Charter Communications

Continuum

Dubberly Design Office

E.On Energy

Engine Service Design

FedEx

Fidelity Investments

Graham Hill

livework

Marc Stickdorn

Medallia

OpenText

Radarstation

RightNow (Oracle)

Shelley Evenson

Sprint

Tealeaf, an IBM company

US Cellular

Virgin Media

Zilver Innovation

eNdNoTes1 To assess the state of customer experience in 2012, Forrester asked more than 7,506 US consumers

about their interactions with a variety of companies. Based on their responses, we calculated Customer Experience Index (CXi) scores for 154 brands in 14 industries. This year’s rankings show that only about 40% of brands earned excellent or good CXi scores and the rest ranged from OK to very poor. See the January 15, 2013, “The Customer Experience Index, 2013” report.

2 Using our heuristic evaluation methodologies, Forrester routinely evaluates the user experience of web, email, and phone interactions as well as the cross-channel interactions that span these channels. In 2010, none of the 35 websites we reviewed for research purposes passed our tests. For research in 2009, we reviewed phone, email, and cross-channel interactions of 16 firms: Only Nike passed our phone and email evaluations, while all 16 failed the cross-channel portion of our exam. See the February 4, 2011, “Best And Worst Of Website User Experience, 2010” report, see the May 27, 2009, “Best And Worst Of Email Interaction Design, 2009” report, see the May 20, 2009, “Best And Worst Of Phone Self-Service Design, 2009” report, and see the March 6, 2009, “Best And Worst Of Cross-Channel Design, 2009” report.












3 To help customer experience professionals prove the business value of a better enterprise customer experience, we built simple models that show how revenue increases when a company’s CXi score goes up. See the March 26, 2012, “The Business Impact Of Customer Experience, 2012” report.

4 To assess the state of customer experience in 2012, Forrester surveyed 86 customer experience professionals from around the globe. More than three-quarters said that their firms aim to differentiate based on customer experience. See the April 24, 2012, “The State Of Customer Experience, 2012” report.

5 Forrester studied more than 200 executives in charge of enterprisewide customer experience to create a composite profile that includes their titles, tenure in the job, backgrounds, and where they report in their organizations. See the February 25, 2013, “How Chief Customer Officers Orchestrate Experiences” report.

6 A customer-centric culture is a system of shared values and behaviors that focus employee activity on improving the customer experience. Customer experience leaders have three tools they can use to craft a culture that is truly customer-centric: hiring, socialization, and rewards. How leaders apply these tools depends on their organization’s customer experience strategy, which clarifies the type of people they need and the behaviors these employees must exhibit. See the November 19, 2010, “How To Build A Customer-Centric Culture” report.

7 Using data from more than 7,500 consumer surveys, Forrester examined the correlation between the customer experiences delivered by more than 150 US firms and the loyalty of their customers. Our analysis shows that good customer experience correlates to consumers’ willingness to repurchase, reluctance to switch, and likelihood to recommend firms across all 14 industries we examined. See the March 26, 2012,

“The Business Impact Of Customer Experience, 2012” report.

8 Design personas are models of the key behaviors, attributes, motivations, and goals of a company’s target customers. A persona is created from primary research with real customers and takes the form of a vivid narrative description of a single person who represents a behavioral segment. See the January 10, 2011,

“Executive Q&A: Design Personas And Customer Journey Maps” report.

9 When executed well, customer journey maps can help customer experience professionals plan improvement projects and communicate with employees across their organizations. Unfortunately, journey maps often fall short due to missing content, overwhelming detail, and poor visual design. See the October 15, 2010,

“Assess The Effectiveness Of Your Customer Journey Map” report.

10 Conducting this activity with customers, employees, and partners not only helps develop a more complete understanding of the journey but also creates individual buy-in on the role that each group plays.

11 The PAID diagram essentially combines a customer journey map with two other documents that typically already exist within an organization: process workflow diagrams and technical architecture diagrams.

12 Fishbone diagrams, named because they take on the visual form of their namesake, show the causes of a specific problem. These causes might include issues with personnel, processes, equipment, materials, data, and environment. For more information on this technique, visit the iSixSigma website. Source: Kerri Simon, “The Cause and Effect (a.k.a. Fishbone) Diagram,” iSixSigma, February 26, 2010 (http://www.isixsigma.com/index.php?option=com_k2&view=item&id=1416:the-cause-and-effect-aka-fishbone-diagram&Itemid=200).












13 Although this type of analysis is referred to as “five whys” and commonly goes five levels deep to get to the root cause of a problem, practitioners sometimes get to the root cause in fewer levels or, conversely, have to go more than five levels deep to find the root cause. For a basic discussion of this highly useful technique, visit the iSixSigma website. Source: “Determine the Root Cause: 5 Whys,” iSixSigma (http://www.isixsigma.com/index.php?option=com_k2&view=item&id=1308:determine-the-root-cause-5-whys&Itemid=200).

14 When the UK recently mandated that water billing switch from estimated to actual use, utility company Southern Water faced a massive meter installation project — and turned to service design agencies for help. See the December 20, 2010, “Service Design Creates Breakthrough Customer Experiences” report.

15 Because a service design effort seeks to design end-to-end experiences and the underlying business systems that support them, any company embarking on a service design project should expect to re-evaluate its corporate strategy and organizational structure. See the December 20, 2010, “Service Design Creates Breakthrough Customer Experiences” report.

16 Prototypes are attractive tools for customer experience teams because they expose design assumptions and drive ideation. They also help communicate ideas, create consensus, and gather user feedback. Prototypes can range from sketches on a napkin to carefully rendered screen flows and visionary demonstrations of a concept or experience. See the May 13, 2011, “Six Tools To Consider For Creating Prototypes” report.





Forrester Research, Inc. (Nasdaq: FORR) is an independent research company that provides pragmatic and forward-thinking advice to global leaders in business and technology. Forrester works with professionals in 17 key roles at major companies providing proprietary research, customer insight, consulting, events, and peer-to-peer executive programs. For more than 29 years, Forrester has been making IT, marketing, and technology industry leaders successful every day. For more information, visit www.forrester.com. 59115

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