News & Notes: Forrester Customer Experience Forum June 23rd, 2009 by Christopher Musico

As Forrester Research’s Customer Experience Forum continues on its second — and last — day here at the Grand Hyatt New York right next door to Grand Central Terminal, the sentiment here seems to be one of not if customer experience is necessary, but rather when — and how. Fostering a quality customer experience no longer seems to be a nice-to-have, judging by the tone and subject matter of the keynotes and other presentations here. Bruce Temkin, a vice president and principal analyst at Forrester, had a keynote address yesterday (my story on the speech is here) on the beginning steps companies should take.

In other news, Forrester announced the inaugural winners of their Voice of the Customer (VoC) Awards. Out of 40 applicants, only three companies took home the prize:

• Experian;
• Progressive; and
• Vanguard.

Speaking of “voice of the customer”, I sat in on a related track session yesterday: “Building a World-Class Voice of the Customer Program.” While the panel discussion was informative, I picked up on something rather interesting. Only one question in the entire 45-minute talk dealt with the literal audio of a customer conversation. Every other question asked by the attendees dealt with how to parse the information found in social media. This was not only evident to me, but also Natalie Petouhoff, a senior analyst at Forrester who sat with me at the session. Is this the direction VoC is taking? Are we glossing over speech analytics and going straight to social media? I’d love to get your thoughts on this.

Another question I have stemming from this conference: What exactly is customer experience? I haven’t found a catch-all, agreed-upon definition just yet. This is something I plan on exploring when I begin writing my December 2009 feature for CRM magazine on the topic, but I want to know what you believe it to be.

Tags: Bruce Temkin, CRM, CRM magazine, customer centricity, customer experience, customer experience management, Experian, FCXP09, forrester, Grand Hyatt New York, maturity, Natalie Petouhoff, Progressive, Social media, Vanguard

5 Comments »

5 Comments

Christopher, In regards to your comment about using text and speech analytics on social network, — please. Seriously, we still have not mastered it at the basic, go-through-our-data-and-get-something-useful level, and we are now introducing it into social media. speaks more to the problem EVERYONE is having with scaling social media, and that most people are just starting to think about. speech or text analytics is not going to solve the problem or not knowing how to listen to customers – it is going to amplify it. you know the old saying, right? take an old, outdated, bad process and simply throw fast technology at it. now you have a fast, bad, outdated process that shows your weak spots 10x faster. this is what is happening with social media now. everyone rushes into it, not knowing why or how, and then they stall somewhere down the line when they get results and don’t know what to do with them. where is the alignment with their feedback management strategy (which probably does not exist in the first place)? or the alignment of objectives for the corporation (I know companies that are determine to grow revenues, instead spend hours and money trying to save on customer service via SocMed — sure, there are results, but not what the company is trying to do). making matters worse, most of the so-called “experts” and “gurus” for social media are neither, nor have they ever spent a single day doing strategic thinking for organizations. it is all about rushing into new channels without forethought or “you will be left out” or “your customers are talking about you, do you not want to listen”. did we not learn our lessons from the rush to email, chat, sms and the other channels in customer service/marketing/sales? sorry, this is another example of companies and people rushing to something they don’t understand, and handicapping a new channel or media before it even takes off. the adoption levels for the previous channels we rushed to and left on the side of the road is barely topping 15-20% now, after peaking around 60-65% at the hype. we should look back before leaping forward. thanks for a nicely laid out post. as you can see, it generated at least one reaction :) esteban Comment by Esteban Kolsky — Twitter: @ekolsky — June 25, 2009 @ 3:10 am

I’ve defined customer experience as: “The perception that customers have of their interactions with an organization.” Take a look at my blog post called “What The Heck Is Customer Experience?” http://experiencematters.wordpress.com/2008/08/06/what-the-heck-is-customer-experience/ Comment by Bruce Temkin — Twitter: @btemkin — July 1, 2009 @ 9:40 pm

Esteban, Bruce — thank you both for your valuable comments to my blog post. Esteban, I think that you raise a great point — one of the questions I wish I could have addressed in more detail with my June feature on social media was whether or not we were putting the cart before the horse. My May feature on multichannel contact centers addressed the fact that many contact centers are still searching for the best ways to properly integrate commonly used channels like phone, Web, email, and chat — before even considering social media. I think it will be something we’ll have to monitor as we move forward. Bruce, thank you as well for your definition and the reference point. While you have a very clear definition of what customer experience is, I believe that many companies are still grappling with it. It’s something I’m definitely going to address in my December feature on customer experience management, which I’ll begin working on in early August. Comment by Christopher Musico — — July 2, 2009 @ 8:38 am

It’s sad that it takes hard economic times for companies to finally see the need for a quality customer experience, when it should have always been that way. Comment by Ben — — July 6, 2009 @ 12:40 am

Everyone should read up on CRM as soon as possible, with out it your business is ” in Fact ” crippled. Comment by Customer Relationship Management — Twitter: @crmscribe — July 6, 2009 @ 7:17 pm

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