During his opening remarks today at the “Boost Your Customer Experience to the Next Level” Forum at the New York Marriott Marquis, Harley Manning, Vice President, Research Director, Forrester Research told attendees that in Forrester’s annual Customer Experience Index of more than 150 brands, only 8% received “excellent” grades.
To achieve that status, Manning outlined the six high-level disciplines that brands must execute proficiently to ultimately drive memorable customer experiences:
Strategy: Manning said a brand’s strategy must be specific, clear, and memorable. The strategy discipline is critical because it provides the blueprint for the experience a brand designs, delivers, manages, and measures.
Customer Understanding: Manning said a brand’s ability to understand and identify customer expectations is crucial in supplying a great customer experience. The customer understanding discipline is a set of practices that creates a consistent shared understanding of who customers are, what they want and need, and how they perceive the interactions they're having with a particular brand. This “bedrock” discipline comprises real, actionable insights about customers.
Design: The customer experience has to be purposely designed, Manning explained, and brands should test the most promising solutions. The practices in this discipline help brands envision and implement customer interactions that meet or exceed customer needs. It spans the complex systems of people, products, interfaces, services, and spaces that customers encounter in retail locations, over the phone, or through digital media like websites and mobile apps.
This discipline weeds out bad ideas early and focuses customer experience efforts on changes that really matter to customers.
Measurement: Capture all customer touchpoints and then decide which ones to focus on, Manning said. This discipline is a set of practices that allows brands to quantify customer experience quality in a consistent manner across the enterprise and deliver actionable insights to employees and partners.
Governance: This set of practices helps brands manage customer experience in a proactive and disciplined way. This is critical because it holds people accountable for their roles in the customer experience ecosystem and helps prevent bad experiences. Has to be part of job responsibilities.
Culture: This discipline demonstrates the power of empathy. It comprises practices that create a system of shared values and behaviors that focus employees on delivering a great customer experience. Arguably, the most powerful of the six disciplines because it incorporates practices from the other five and makes customer experience excellence become a brand habit.