Forrester Research, a provider of proprietary research and consulting, noted in its 2010 The State of Customer Experience report that a lack of strategy has become the greatest obstacle to an effective customer service experience. 53% of respondents found a lack of clear customer experience strategy as a significant obstacle while only 43% found a lack of budget an obstacle. Compared to last year, funding has become a less significant problem. 

What’s happening with customer experience strategy?

Shifting Priorities

In the same Forrester Research report, 90% of North American companies with annual revenues of more than $500 million thought the customer experience was very important or critical to their company’s strategy. That’s huge. Businesses are taking notice of the ability for customer experience to drive profits. In fact, 85% of consumers will pay more to a company that gives them better customer service according to the Harris Interactive Customer Experience Impact Report, 2010.

It’s no surprise then that Forrester found that 80% of the executive teams they surveyed wanted to differentiate themselves with customer experience.

New Kids on the Block

One major problem with formulating strategy is the lack of experience and maturity in customer experience management. Forrester found a majority of the executive team respondents did not agree with many of the basic statements representing key competencies for Experience-Based Differentiation. Only 49% of the companies had an executive in place to lead customer experience improvement across the company, and of these, only 36% had been in the role for more than 6 months. Companies are making the effort to improve their customer service, but are still quite immature in their implementations. Over time, it is likely greater coordination across the organization and better management processes will develop as companies become more experienced.

The Importance of Leadership

Companies need leaders in order to succeed. Customer experience is no different. Forrester found that companies with customer experience leaders were more ambitious, more disciplined, more active, less encumbered, and more mature in regards to customer experience. In more concrete terms:

• 74% of companies with customer experience leadership had a voice of the customer program vs 48% for leaderless companies
• 80% of companies with leaders had a companywide program focused on improving customer experience across channels vs 24% for leaderless companies
• 83% of companies with leaders had a single set of customer feedback scores used across the company vs 42% for leaderless companies

Recommendations

The report makes two major recommendations to help companies improve their customer experience efforts:

1. Build Customer Journey Maps – Map out the interactions that your customers have with you from their point of view. This will help focus on your company from the outside–from the customer’s perspective.
2. Build a Strong Voice of the Customer Program – Gather clear feedback from your customers and provide to your employees in a consistent and usable form. Make sure the feedback is directly related to your employees’ actions.