Excellent Customer Experience: A Goal of Everest-like Proportions

Megan Burns, Principal Analyst for Forrester Research – who authors its annual Customer Experience Index – borrowed an analogy involving climbing Mount Everest to describe the state of customer experience in today’s world.

In her session, “The Path to Customer Experience Maturity” – at Forrester’s “Boost Your Customer Experience to the Next Level” Forum today at the New York Marriott Marquis – Burns said customer experience has become a “goal of Everest-like proportions.”

Burns explained how it’s been 60 years – May 29, 1953 – since New Zealand mountaineer Sir Edmund Hillary and Nepalese Sherpa mountaineer Tenzing Norgay became the first climbers confirmed to reach the top of Mount Everest.

“Climbing Mount Everest has become a metaphor for going after our most audacious goals,” Burns said. “They planned a route for months and sent out advance teams to set up camp.”

Burns referred to a recent headline – “Mount Everest is Too Crowded” – and the accompanying article explained how 520 people scale the mountain each year – a tiny fraction of the world population.

According to Forrester, 47% of brands want to differentiate themselves through customer experience yet 47% don’t measure customer experience quality.

“Most companies achieve Customer Experience Index grades of ‘OK’ or ‘Very Poor’’’, Burns said. “Many companies either don’t have a disciplined set of practices or they’re done in an ad hoc fashion.”

High maturity customer experiences are done systematically, Burns said.

“There aren’t multiple paths to customer experience maturity,” Burns said.

Burns outline the four phases of customer experience maturity:

Repair: Stop the avalanche of bad customer experiences, prioritize fixes, coordinate implementation, and measure results.

Elevate: Make good customer experiences the norm; share customer insights routinely; integrate insights into core processes; and measure customer experience quality.

Optimize: More sophisticated customer experience tool kit; model relationship between customer experience quality and business results; build strong customer experience design practices; sharpen employees’ customer experience skills.

Differentiate: “This catapults you to the top,” Burns said. “We are willing to think differently; address and resolve customer problems; and review unmet customer needs within entire customer experience ecosystem.”

Burns made the following recommendations to brands: Explore the path; locate yourself on the map; secure your current position; and plan the next phase of climb.

“Our goal is to make all of these practices routine,” she explained.

Burns offered the following phrase to summarize a brand’s goal of customer experience maturity: “It’s not about buying a house. It’s about making it a home.”

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