During a recent Topdown webinar, Forrester analysts Ted Schadler and Craig Le Clair presented a compelling case for the business value of customer experience (CX), reviewed research that uncovered common gaps in CX, and then offered insights into how to close those gaps. Afterward, I provided a real-world example of how those gaps show through to the customer, proposed a reference architecture based on the Forrester research to help close the gaps, and identified one thing everyone can do today to improve customer experience.
We’re now making this educational content available to you, free and on-demand, in a three-part series hosted on this website.
Four Gaps in Customer Experience
In the first 13-minute-long segment, Schadler, an expert on digital experience delivery, provided clear evidence that CX drives business results for all industries and government agencies, especially around customer loyalty. He also reviewed research that shows, despite C-level focus on CX, most organizations have four significant gaps in CX across the entire customer lifecycle and communication channels:
Convenience: Companies often unknowingly make it difficult for customers to do business with them, which hurts CX and loyalty.
Performance: Customers expect companies to respond quickly to their wants and needs at all touch points; anything less degrades the experience and can contribute to churn.
Personalization: Customers want companies to recognize them as individuals and they are disappointed when communications are not relevant to them or contextual to their devices, situations, or individual preferences.
Trust: Customers value privacy and transparency; any perceived violation of this trust can end the relationship, or worse, result in a lawsuit or fines/penalties.
According to Schadler, these gaps are attributable to an organization’s employees, processes and/or digital experience delivery (DXD) technologies. At the end of the segment, Schadler discusses the areas of the customer lifecycle where more attention and investment are required to shorten the distance between what customers want and what businesses deliver.
To see and hear Schadler discuss CX gaps and how to close them, please click here.