Forrester Research chief marketing officer Victor Milligan put it best when he said: “Customer experience has rapidly moved from an ideal to an operational mandate.”
Today, it’s all about the consumer. So much so that a new Forrester report, “Winning in the Age of the Consumer,” said if companies aren’t transforming to be more customer focused, failure is imminent.
In a blog post on the topic, Forrester analyst Michael Gazala said serving and retaining customers is the only imperative in this world of increasingly advancing technology and economic imbalances.
“Chastened by a weak economy, presented with copious options, and empowered with technology, consumers have more market-muscle than ever before. The information advantage tips to consumers with ratings and review sites,” Gazala said. “They claim pricing power by showrooming. And the only location that matters is the mobile phone in their hand from which they can buy anything from anyone and have it delivered anywhere.”
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This new customer-driven shift is altering every industry, according to Gazala. Cable and satellite operators lost nearly 400,000 video subscribers in 2013-14 as consumers opted instead for Netflix, and commercial bank alternative Lending Club has facilitated more than $6 billion in peer-to-peer loans, Gazala offered as examples.
“Now that most B2B buyers would rather buy from a website than a salesperson, we estimate that one million B2B sales jobs will disappear in the coming years,” he said.
The only way to “win” in today’s age of the consumer is to mind these four “mutually reinforcing market imperatives” in order to become more customer-obsessed, according to the report: for speed, tap into mobile connections; for intelligence, set up systems to gather customer knowledge; for impact build a better customer experience; and to become flexible, embrace digital transformation.
And part of being customer focused is creating the right experience, no matter the platform.
As Milligan puts it, “CX [customer experience] can’t be an attitude, tagline, or one-time corporate initiative. It has to be a different way of doing business, a new kind of operating model.”
In his own blog post, Milligan shares what he calls five observations from the front lines for nailing CX:
- Change your perspective: “We have a sense of how customers are supposed to traverse different touch points and a sense of the experiences we want them to have. But that’s not the starting point. CX is about the customers, on their terms and in their voice. Sounds basic, but that fundamental reorientation requires a surprising level of tenacity and discipline.”
- Improve your visibility: “Like many firms, we relied on customer satisfaction (CSAT) and advocacy metrics to understand what our customers thought about us. But those metrics provide no insight into understanding customers’ actual experience based on the most powerful human element of all—emotion. Without that visibility, one is blind. And being blind is scary if you are seeking to drive CX gains. Think of being a CFO without a business intelligence environment. CX analytics that consider the quality of the customers’ experience will be like BI—indispensable to any mature understanding of CX.”
- Connect experience to operations: “It’s not just that CSAT or advocacy tools miss the mark for CX; they also don’t tell you how to make systematic and surgical improvements to drive continuous improvement. There are real changes to make to people, process, and technology that drive real impact. Guessing is not a plan. To spend real money (and your political capital for that matter), you need to be able to model different investment scenarios to see how they will pay off.”
- Have a lot of seats at the CX table: “Marketing, sales, product, finance, and technology are all part of our company’s sustained CX program. This is not a one-time ‘tiger team.’ We look at CX holistically and make decisions and investments accordingly.”
- Parallel-process: “In the beginning, there is always tension between “analysis paralysis” and getting quick wins on the board. The way we overcame that tension was focusing on outlier areas that our clients called out directly. We had a high confidence that we could move the needle and get some early wins, and practically speaking, it allowed us to practice working as a team, avoid over-scoping projects, and take action.”
“In a world where empowered customers are influencing the fate of companies, CX is a business discipline that all executives will need to understand, if not master,” according to Milligan. “It goes well beyond understanding satisfaction or lifetime value. CX measures something very different: our value to our customers.”
