Forrester’s Customer Experience Forum 2011

Can you believe it’s time for the Customer Experience Forum 2011 already?

In an effort to make it easier for everyone to find all forum related content, this document will act as a central location, providing you with the following information:

• Links to forum related Forrester community discussions
• Links to forum related Forrester blog posts
• Key takeaways from many of the forum sessions

In addition, feel free to add your comments directly to this document if you want to add something to the discussion.

I will be updating the content in this document both during and after the forum, so check back for new information.

Looking forward to seeing everyone at the forum!

Rich Gans (@Richard_Gans)

Community Manager for Forrester’s Customer Experience Community

Continue the discussions from the forum through Forrester community discussions:

• How do you overcome barriers to developing and implementing a digital customer experience strategy? - NEW
• How are you empowering your employees to offer customers great customer experiences? - NEW
• How are you using social to inform and support your customer experience initiatives? - NEW
• What tactics are you using to ensure your customers are being treated properly? - NEW
• What questions would you ask the Chief Customer Officer at USAA on stage?
• What questions would you ask three interactive design leaders?
• What qualitative customer research techniques are you using?
• What’s the best way to make customer experience metrics actionable?
• A moderator walks up to a  panel of chief customer officers and asks…
• Communicating a customer experience strategy
• What are the key questions around innovation in customer experience?

Read Forrester blog posts related to content and speakers from the forum:

• Executive Q&A With Robert Deluce, President And CEO Of Porter Airlines
• Executive Q&A with Jeff Harvey of SAP
• Executive Q&A With Wayne Peacock Of USAA
• Want To Win A Voice Of The Customer Award? Prove Business Impact
• Results Of Forrester's 2011 Voice Of The Customer Awards
• Executive Q&A with Jim Bush of American Express
• Why CMOS Must Learn To Understand The Customer Experience Ecosystem

Key takeaways from forum sessions - Day 1:

What is the right customer experience strategy for your company? - Paul Hagan, Principal Analyst, Forrester Research

• The lack of a customer experience strategy is one of the biggest barriers companie share in improving their customer experience.
• A customer experience strategy must do 3 things:
  1. Describe the intended experience
  2. Guide activities and resource allocation
  3. Create experiences that meet or exceed customer expectations.
• Ultimately,a customer experience strategy should derive from their company strategy and brand promise.

A relentless focus on its members - Wayne Peacock, Executive Vice President, USAA

• There are 3 imperatives to creating a great customerexperience:
  1. Know your customer – what do they really want and need.  Wayne Peacock said the most important thing he does to ensure the experience is done right is stay connected with USAA’s members (e.g., listening in on member calls regularly).
  2. Organize around your customers – for example, customers see buying a car as buying a carand not as a grouping of multiple products (e.g., auto loan + auto insurance,etc). USAA trains customer service professionals across the experience, NOT by product.  USAA looks at how customers approach an event or need and how to solve it rather than look at the products they have to sell.
  3. Make it about a bigger mission - When you deliver on your promises, and do the right thing, you create lasting relationships.
• By focusing on a core segment and doing thatwell you also end up satisfying the expanded audience as well
• Advice for people becoming Chief Customer Officers:
  • You need to have a compliment of persistence and resiliency. Recognize that things may not go right everyday, but you have to come back the next day and try to make things right.
  • You need the ability to envision and communicate the customer experience strategy over and over again to be successful.

In addition, here are a couple quotes from Wayne's speech to highlight the above findings:

• "USAA has been and will continue to be successful because we are a mission driven org. with a calling bigger than ourselves" – Wayne Peacock, USAA
• "Make it about a bigger mission. Have a purpose. Inspire passion. Be authentic." - Wayne Peacock, USAA

Continue this discussion in Forrester's customer experience community: What tactics are you using to ensure your customers are being treated properly?

Mad Men Or Math Men: Defining Customer Experience In A Digitally Connected World – Nick Primola, Citizens Financial Group and Tim Suther, Acxiom

• Nick: You insight, everywhere – advertisers and brands have to project the insights of their customers and brands in a more insightful way.$112B is wasted each year on advertising, grounded on sub-optimal customer targeting and alignment.
• Nick: Beware false signals - context alone is inadequate, how customers feel is inadequate; mixed together it's relevant.
• Tim: Get to know what’s inside your black box: Where can you listen for a need and respond with a solution.
• Tim: Demonstrate “Know Me”. Ensure each interaction is informed by multi-dimensional data.
• Tim: Leverage your database marketing allies. Align data systems and technology.

How Social Media Drives Consumer Understanding – Zach Hofer-Shall, Analyst, Forrester Research

• Social media is too big to ignore. Your customers are there and they expect you to be there too.
• Listening to social media is only the first step, customer experience professionals must learn from and act on social media to drive customer understanding, but too few do this today.
• Moving beyond listening is hard because it requires you to deal with messy social data. It is too big, in too many languages, and in odd forms, to easily manage.
• Customer experience professionals must not keep social insights in a silo. The real value of social media comes from combining online insights with broader customer understanding initiatives. Use social to inform and support VoC programs and don't look at social media alone.
• Continue this discussion in Forrester's customer experience community: How are you using social to inform and support your customer experience initiatives?

The Ins And Outs Of Customer-Centric Culture – Elizabeth Boehm, Principal Analyst, Forrester Research

• Customer-centric culture is a system of shared values and behaviors that focuses employee activity on improving the customer experience.  Culture helps shape employee behavior towards supporting your company’s customer experience strategy, but only a strong culture drives desired actions.
• Customer experience professionals have 3 core mechanisms by which to shape and strengthen customer-centric culture:  Hiring, Socialization, and Rewards.
• For each culture building mechanism, there are both formal and informal tactics through which to build customer-centric culture.  Most companies focus on the formal tactics, but the informal tactics such as storytelling, celebrations, and rituals and routines are just as important.
• Forrester believes that everyone in a company is responsible for delivering the right customer experience based on strategy.  Customer experience professionals should focus cultural initiatives on both front and back-office employees.

Fundamentals Of Digital Customer Experience Strategy – Moira Dorsey, Vice President and Research Director, Forrester Research

• The proliferation of devices and improved connectivity presents a challenge and an opportunity for businesses. Firms struggle to know where to invest their precious resources. But if done right, brands can deepen and enrich their relationships with customers.
• Firms need a plan that guides the activities and resource allocation needed to deliver experiences that meet or exceed customers' expectations within and across digital interaction points.
• A relentless focus on customers and brand (who and how) will determine investments in content and touchpoints (what and where).
• Firms need to do the right kind of research, determine the importance of each touchpoint to their businessand customers, prioritize their initiatives, and build a roadmap for digital customer experience transformation.
• Continue this discussion in Forrester's customer experience community: How do you overcome barriers to developing and implementing a digital customer experience strategy?
  

Customer Experience Measurement Fundamentals – Adele Sage, Analyst, Forrester Research

• Customer experience measurement systems should include high level measurements of customer experience quality, which can only be measured via customers’ perceptions of their interactions.
• Diagnostic data, including what happened during the interaction, outcomes of the interaction, and detailed perception metrics, can then point to what to do to make experiences better.
• Data analysis like segmentation and correlation help companies identify strengths and weaknesses of the experience, which factors have the biggest effect on overall experience quality, and how quality affects the business.
• To make the most of your customer experience metrics, establish a metrics review process, set targets that provide context for interpreting the data, and supplement measurement with additional research to understand how to fix the problems.

Crafting Your Customer Research Plan – Vidya Drego, Senior Analyst, Forrester Research

• Customer (experience)     research uncovers why and how people do things and their perceptions and     emotions around their experience.
• This type of research is     critical to designing with the customer at the heart of the experience.
• It takes a mix of     exploratory, evolutionary, and evaluative techniques to do this right.
• Any research effort     needs a crisp problem statement, the right methods to frame the problem,     and time to evaluate the findings for key insights.

How Companies Raised Their Customer Experience Index Scores – Megan Burns, Principal Analyst, Forrester Research

• Between 2010 and 2011, twenty-three brands raised their score in Forrester’s Customer Experience Index (CxPi) by 5 or more points. Forrester spoke with several of these firms to uncover the secrets to their success.

• The companies we spoke with had one thing in common - rather than just fix acute customer experience issues they set out to make customer experience a core competency. How? By doing things like centralizing customer experience governance, creating or enhancing their voice of the customer (VoC) programs, tapping into to the voice of the employee (VoE), and establishing a set of consistent customer experience metrics across the enterprise. These steps helped them figure out which changes would have the biggest affect on overall customer experience quality.

• The specific changes each company made to drive improvement varied. Five redesigned their websites, one introduced new mobile apps, and others improved their IVRs, call centers, and store experiences. Throughout all these projects, though, the common thread was the use of a customer-centric design process. Every change made either fixed a known customer pain point or met customer needs uncovered during primary research.

• Companies looking to replicate this kind of success should benchmark their current customer experience capabilities, create a plan to close any gaps, then use the resulting data and infrastructure to pinpoint the customer experience improvements that are going to move the customer experience quality needle most.

The Building Blocks Of Differentiating Digital Experiences – Jonathan Browne, Senior Analyst, Forrester Research

• The top three reasons that clients cite for hiring external agencies are (1) to get agency expertise, (2) )to augment resources and (3) to ensure the right outcomes for customers.
• Consistently applying a user-centered design process doesn’t mean always arriving at the same solution. Create differentiating solutions depending on the customers’ needs
• External agencies can act as a catalyst for building a user-centered culture, but the drive should come from the most senior executives.

Improving The In-Store Customer Experience – Kevin A. Peters, President of North American Retail, Office Depot

• Make sure you know what your business is doing and how your customers are being treated, not by reports, but by experiencing it yourself
• Make sure you’re measuring things that really matter to the customer.  If you measure the wrong thing the results are predictable.
• “We need our customers more than they need us – we must act on it”
• Continue this discussion in Forrester's customer experience community: What tactics are you using to ensure your customers are being treated properly?

Key takeaways from forum sessions - Day 2:

The Customer Experience Ecosystem - Kerry Bodine, Vice President & Principal Analyst, Forrester Research

• Natural ecosystems comprise complex interdependent relationships that change overtime.  Customer experience ecosystems are quite similar.  Your customer experience ecosystem is the complex set of relationships among your company’s employees, partners, and customers that determines the quality of all customer interactions.
• There are hundreds of unique touchpoints through which customers interact – either directly or indirectly – with your internal employees and external partners on a daily basis.
• If you want to improve your customer experience, you can’t just put band-aids on broken touchpoints.  You need to understand your customer experience ecosystem and take control of it.  To do this, Forrester recommends a process we call ecosystem mapping, which helps companies uncover hidden interdependencies.
• You need to co-create your customer experience ecosystem by actively engaging employees, partners, and customers throughout the design process.
• You need to socialize the ecosystem to help all internal employees and external partners understand how they personally affect the customer experience.

A Relationship-Driven Approach To Service – Jim Bush, Executive Vice President, American Express

• “Treat the customer as you would like to be treated”
• “Unleash the power of the people you have”
  • Empower your employees to let their personalities shine – invest in their training, reward them for good service (e.g., American Express rewards front line employees for the right behavior 20%+ all for the goal of making it easy for the customer), provide front line employees with the knowledge they need to be accountable and empowered
  • American Express’ customer care team members believe in helping their customers and bring it to life. Amex invested in their call center employees to help them better understand how to listen to customers.
• “Great service is great business”
  • American Express' ‘people’ focus led to 20-25% increased card member spend, 6x lower attrition value, and 10% decreased service margin.
• Continue this discussion Forrester's customer experience community: How are you empowering your employees to offer customers great customer experiences?

The Porter Airlines Experience: Redefining Air Travel – Robert J. Deluce, CEO, Porter Air

• Deliver services that meet the needs of your expanding customer base
  • "People want things like they used to be...but better" - Robert Deluce
  • Porter's point of differentiation: A dignified travel experience
• People now see traveling as a chore – Porter is emphasizing service to take customers back to the time when people enjoyed flying and even dressed up
  • Some of the things they offer to create this experience: free glass of wine, free beer, more leg room, flight attendant wear retro style uniforms with pill box hats
  • Porter Airlines is geared toward increasing passenger comfort and creating a stress free flying environment
• Make sure to deliver on your promise - Porter's promise is to offer great service.
  • "We don't pretend to be something we are not" - Robert Deluce
  • 86% of passengers report they are extremely satisfied or satisfied with their service. Porter has been winning in this category for the last 3 years and has the highest score in the airline industry Ipsos has seen (they conduct the satisfaction survey).
  • Robert said this high customer satisfaction comes from delivering on their promise of offering simple and civilized air travel
  • "Each team member has been specially selected & trained to put travelers first with impeccable & innovative service" - Robert Deluce
• Don't jump to conclusions that offering better service will be out of your budget.
  • When asked how Porter can afford to offer so many amenities, Robert said it's amazing how some of the amenities they offer are really not that expensive when amortized over a large customer base.
  • "A smile from an employee costs nothing to deliver" - Robert Deluce
• People don’t judge you on days when every thing goes right, they judge you on days when things can go wrong to see how you handle the situation and how you deal with your customers – this is a point of differentiation for them.
  • “You are only just as good as your last flight” – Robert Deluce
  • We tend to be judged on those days that don't go good. It's how we handle it that customers will remember
• Porter airlines name says it all: definition of “porter”:to carry, assist, lighten the load, to deliver with dignity. Speed,convenience, service.

Why The Marriage Of Web + Customer Relations Creates A CX Even A Grandmother Would Love – David Dentry, General Manager, Customer Relations, Nikon

• 5 strategies to create a great customer experience:
  • Look at the customer experience from a broad perspective.
  • Don’t silo data or processes – don’t look at it within silos/from individual cases.  Instead, map out all the touchpoints from the customer to make sure it all fits into your complete vision of the customer experience
    • All customer data is available to Nikon customer service reps so they can better tailer the customer experience
    • Nikon was able to use customer feedback and personas to optimize their web experience and provide a better customer experience - e.g., for their camera lens shopping site
  • Constantly evolve.
  • Ask customers! – “they will tell you much more than you want to know” – they’ll give you honest feedback, but you have to take action on that feedback. “You can’t be afraid of what your customers have to say”
  • Design for and test with real users.
• If you have to teach your customers how to interact with your systems , then your systems are bad – think of grandma as your lowest common denominator user.
  • If Grandma understands and enjoys your customer experience, then you’re on the right track.
• "If you can solve the customer's problem,they will almost always overlook any communications issues." - David Dentry

Assessing The Business Impact Of A Better Customer Experience – Megan Burns, Principal Analyst, Forrester Research

• Customer experience affects a company’s top and bottom line. On the revenue side, positive word of mouth and an easy purchase process helps getmore new customers. Existing customers who rate their experiences with a firm high are more likely to consider the firm for their next purchase and less likely to switch to a competitor. Good experiences can also save money by preventing problems from happening in the first place, keeping customers in lower-cost self service channels, and preventing the need for repeat calls by solving a customer’s issue the first time.

• While many think that modeling the ROI of a specific customer experience improvement is complicated, it doesn’t have to be. Simple models are often enough to assess whether or not a change is worth making. The key is to be specific about what you want to change and how it is going to affect what customers and employees do. For example, if an IVR is updated to use clearer language and put the most common options first, customers are more likely to hear the option they need and stay within the IVR. That prevents them from having to talk to an operator, which in turn saves money.

• The part of the process that gives customer experience professionals the most anxiety is deciding just how much improvement a particular change will bring. They’ll never know for certain, but can use a series of different approaches to zero in on a likely range of improvement.They should run a series of “what if” scenarios that include a best, worst, and likely case option.

• While understanding the financial impact of customer experience is important, it’s not the only thing you need to make the case. Customer experience professionals should shore up their financial business case with tactics that appeal to executives on an emotional level. These tactics can include direct quotes or video of customers struggling with bad experiences and examples from other companies that allay fears about the risk of doing something new.

How Large Firms Use Ethnographic Methods To Drive Experience Improvement – Vidya Drego, Senior Analyst, Forrester Research

• Wells Fargo uses ethnographic research to uncover what’s meaningful and relevant to customers – in their own words. A 2008 study on retirement informed a simple experience model which prompted a customer-centric strategy focused on three key segments:reactors, poolers, and maximizers.
• Frog design uses co-creation as a catalyst to form new collaborative relationships between their customers and their customers’ customers.
• Bentley Design and Usability Center helps clients study their clients at the time of their actual experience to help reduce bias.

Innovation To Drive Experience-Based Differentiation – Elizabeth Boehm, Principal Analyst, Forrester Research

• Innovation in customer experience is fostering incremental improvement and radical reinvention of your firms’ products, services, and brand experiences to meet and exceed the changing needs of target customers.
• Innovation is critical to delivering on strategic objectives, but it also helps shape shifts in strategic thinking as new innovation insights are uncovered.
• Innovation organizations come in many shapes and sizes.  Generally there is a tradeoff between close alignment with core business, which leads to more incremental (sustaining) innovation, versus independent organizations which have the flexibility to pursue more radical innovation (disruptive innovation).

Divorce The PC To Differentiate Your Mobile Experience – Julie Ask, Vice President and Principal Analyst, Forrester Research

• Delivering contextually relevant experiences will be key to convenience:
  • Consumers will adopt and use mobile services that are convenient. For Customer Experience professionals, this means delivering experiences that offer immediacy where valued, simplicity and context in mobile services. Forrester defines context as “the sum total of what your customer has told you and is experiencing at his moment of mobile engagement.”

• Contextual information is evolving quickly:
  • Contextual information available about an individual is growing quickly. New, information-collecting sensors are appearing in phones. Meanwhile, consumers are using their mobile phones for a growing list of activities from reading books to opening car doors. Customer Experience pros must evolve their abilities to design, test, evaluate, and refine how context is used to deliver convenient experiences that do not infringe on consumers’ privacy.
• Adept use of context will deliver competitive advantages:
  • Customer Experience professionals who guide their organizations towards mastering the use of context will gain competitive advantages by offering the right services, content and prices at the right moment. Initial benefits will include higher conversion rates on leads with longer term opportunities in incremental revenue from new services.

By The Numbers: Measuring The Impact Of Getting The Insurance Claims Experience Right – Ellen Carney, Senior Analyst, Forrester Research

• Insurers are tackling simultaneous business goals to improve customer experience and insurance claims processing — doing the right things for policy holders the right way for the insurer.
• While insurers have done a good job on one part of the claims process — receiving the claim notice from the policy holder — they’ve done little to introduce transparency into the process, never mind using new technology to capture new data about claims and then use it to make insurance people like adjusters smarter and insurance processes more visible to the claimant.
  • But vendors like Enservio, FINEOS, and Symbility are developing new data-driven solutions to provide better, more actionable insights using data from claims experiences ranging from structure, casualty, and contents.
• One key tool to help insurers get their arms around the magnitude of the claims challenge is customer journey maps that depict the parties involved in the claim process and helping claims teams identify process and people gaps to lead to unhappy customers

Take Your VoC Program To The Next Level – Vidya Drego, Senior Analyst, Forrester Research

• All three participant programs are organized around a core customer survey as the nucleus of their voice of the customer program.
• The goal is to continue to allow customers to tell them what they want to say, not just what the organization wants to hear.
• ExactTarget and Cisco are both looking at text analytics to help them mine relevant insight from vast amounts of unstructured VoC data.

The Rise Of The Chief Customer Officer – Harley Manning, Vice President and Research Director, Forrester Research

• On average, chief customer officers (CCOs) have been in their jobs for two years or less time.
• Very few have backgrounds in customer experience. Instead, they have backgrounds as general managers, marketers, and sales leaders.
• CCOs are heavily concentrated in the business services, IT, and financial services industries, although you can find them in many other industries, as well.
• The majority of them sit on the executive management team at their firms, and they are highly likely to report to the chief executive officer (CEO) or the head of a line of business.
• They spend their time evangelizing customer experience, creating a shared understanding of customers, defining customer metrics, breaking down organizational barriers, building a customer-centric culture, and demonstrating a long term financial impact.

Next-Generation Digital Financial Services – Alexander Hesse, Senior Analyst, Forrester Research

• Most financial services firms’ websites don’t take advantage of the full potential of the Web today.
• Financial services executives need to develop a new generation of digital financial services that is SUPER (simple, ubiquitous, personal, empowering, andreassuring).
• Financial services executives should use SUPER as a guideline for their next generation digital financial services technology roadmap.