Customer Experience: The Journey to Oz
"Although your customers may be buying less, they care about how you treat them even more." So said Bruce Temkin, a Forrester vice president and principal analyst, during his keynote yesterday morning at the Forrester Research Customer Experience Forum 2009.
Temkin likened the customer experience journey to Dorothy's travel to Oz, explaining that success comprises three elements:
Heart: It's incredibly important in this environment to raise the level of empathy for customers.
Brains: Times are tough, but don't rush to cut across the board. Think first about what's most important to your business.
Courage: The natural inclination is to hold back and stay safe in this environment, but you need to look for opportunities.
The real customer experience journey, however, is to experienced-based differentiation. That is, "interacting with target customers in a manner that consistently builds loyalty," he said.
Temkin cited three key principals of experienced-based differentiation:
- Obsess about customer needs, not just product features.
- Reinforce brands (who you are) with every interaction, not just communications.
- Treat customers experience as a competence, not as a function.
"It's a lot of work, but it's worth it because customer experience affects the bottom line," Temkin said, citing research released today in the report "Customer Experience Boosts Revenue," that shows a high degree of correlation between customer experience and loyalty across all industries. According to the report, a $10 billion dollar company could average an increase of $284 million for a modest shift in customer experience. "We're talking about real money," he added. "Given these results it's absolutely clear that you have an opportunity to differentiate from industry peers [through customer experience]."
Temkin reminded attendees that customer experience isn't just about customer service. "Experience is consistently delivering on brand messages that resonate with customers," he said, citing Costco Wholesale, whose long lines and cavernous aisles may seem like an unlikely model customer experience, but which placed third on Forrester's most recent Customer Experience Index. "When people go to Costco they get the experience they expect nearly every time they go."
Whether traveling to Oz or embarking on the customer experience journey, the most important thing to have, Temkin said: fabulous shoes.
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I'd probably squeeze a bit Bruce's thesis with a saying that customer experience is a pair of fabulous shoes that gets you straight to loyalty. Yes, it isn't about customer service only but the whole set of bottom-up dimensions: leading product and technology coupled with the consistent brand image. Leading product and technology is pretty much about courage and innovation while brand consistency is about keeping up with expectations.
Nice writeup!
This was a great keynote speech. I really enjoyed how he made the analogy of a business's journey to that or Dorothy in the "Wizard of Oz." I also liked how Wayne Peacock of USAA made the analogy to the Perfect Storm during his presentation. Overall, this conference was great. Forrester did an amazing job and I hope to go back again sometime!