Kerry Bodine, VP and principal analyst, customer research at Forrester, told Loyalty 360 that customer experience has become much more than a buzzword in the loyalty industry.
“We saw more people getting into the customer experience game,” Bodine said, reflecting on 2013. “The number of people coming to our conferences and other customer experience conferences points to how many more people are realizing they need to do something in customer experience and get disciplined in doing that. We’re reaching, perhaps, this critical mass where people are taking this seriously. I feel like it’s reaching this nice roar at this point.”
Bodine said she has seen various companies open themselves up to different ways of working and different ways of thinking, while some even bring customers in for workshops.
“They’re taking it and going another level deeper where they’ll have 1-on-1 work sessions with customers,” Bodine explained. “There has to be a mindshift change at the top levels of organizations. We’ve seen customer experience bubble up at different companies at different levels of the organization. Top-level executive teams are really trying to get this. They often get it because of the efforts of these lone wolves within an organization who have worked tirelessly for months or years. Grassroots efforts are starting to pay off.”
Customer-centricity
Customer-centricity has been such a major buzzword this year, but Bodine believes it’s very hard for people make customer-centric decisions every day when they are burdened by so many pressures.
“They have the pressure of keeping costs down or driving additional revenue, which might seem at first blush a contradiction of the customer experience,” she said. “That’s why culture is so important. It’s not a silver bullet, but when you have a customer-centric culture and have rewards that celebrate people for doing the right thing, then you have that culture in place, and that’s when some of those decisions become much easier.”
But in many companies, Bodine said, there is a huge disconnect between marketing and customer service or customer support departments.
Customer Service
“They’re diametrically opposed parts of the organization,” she said. “Everything in the call center is run on a cost basis purely and on operational efficiency, and then marketing is out there trying to convince people how amazing the experience is. Customer service is just as critical a part of the customer journey as anything else. It’s an under-tapped opportunity to drive customer loyalty. The call center runs differently, different metrics, a different mindset, and getting that aligned and delivering a great experience there is key.”
Mobile
The big joke has been “next year will be the year of mobile, and they’ve been saying that since 2006,” Bodine said. ““I think 2013 was a breakthrough year for mobile in terms of a lot of devices that came to be and in terms of services reaching that critical mass.”
For example, Uber -- a venture-funded startup and Transportation Network Company based in San Francisco that makes a mobile application that connects passengers with drivers of vehicles for hire and ridesharing services – puts power in consumers’ hands through their mobile devices, Bodine said.
“It’s game-changing for consumers and the collaborative economy as well,” she said. “Especially as people are thinking about sharing resources and interacting with each other. Mobile has been instrumental in terms of how we’ll see some larger economic shifts, especially under the backdrop of people not being satisfied by large corporations.”
Social Media
“Marketers and organizations in general have been largely reactive,” Bodine said, referring to the use of social media. “Facebook became a big thing so everyone was trying to figure out how to be relevant. Then there was Pinterest and Twitter. It’s been very reactive. Marketers are largely waiting for the next big move. They’re waiting for something to be developed rather than being proactive about how customers are social and how they can fit it into their business strategies.”
Technology
“The main reason why a company builds a mobile app is because XYZ person says we need a mobile app,” Bodine said. “There’s a major knee-jerk reaction for many companies whereby they think they have to keep up with the Joneses.”
Bodine isn’t against mobile apps at all.
“I think they’re great,” she said. “The problem is it’s often a technology-first approach, instead of figuring out what are our customers trying to do away from desktop or laptop computers that’s relevant to our company, and how can we use technology to help them do that. There are tons of low tech solutions to customer problems, but there is always this knee-jerk reaction based on the latest and greatest technology. Whatever it is, it’s a hammer looking for a nail all the time.”
Instead, Bodine said companies should focus on their customers, what they need, and try to provide that for them.
“I think companies haven’t spent smartly,” she said. “A lot of tech investments have been completely wasteful, or haven’t been optimized due to a lack of understanding about what customers needed and how technology can be deployed to resolve that.”
2014
Bodine said marketers seeking to improve their customer experiences will have to get much smarter about the investments they make. Likewise, technology providers will need to get smarter as to how they identify their clients’ needs.
To drive memorable customer experiences, Bodine pointed to Forrester’s six high-level disciplines that brands must execute proficiently.
Strategy: 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: 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.
Design: The customer experience has to be purposely designed, and 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.
Measurement: Capture all customer touch points and then decide which ones to focus on. 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.
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.