The Experience Design Scout

Quickly: Medium-sized and large European firms lack process, vision, and internal cooperation to improve their customer experience (CE).

CE is important to firms strategies, but they are not disciplined about it.

I thought I share some of my researching findings from earlier this year: findings from a survey of 101 managers with customer experience management (CEM) responsibilities at European firms with annual revenue of $100 million or more . (The Forrester report is called “Obstacles To Customer Experience Success 2008, Europe”.)

• Unsurprisingly, 9 out of 10 firms believe customer experience (in the simplest way defined as ‘how a company interacts with customers’) plays an important or critical role in the firm’s overall strategy for 2008. 
• 3 out of 10 firms describe their CEM practices as undisciplined.

The lack of discipline shows up by low adoption rates of some key customer experience activities.

• Two-thirds of surveyed firms do not have a company-wide program to improve the experience and service across channels
• Almost a third doesn’t have a single set of customer feedback scores

In terms of day-to-day management, the top 3 obstacles to improving the customer experience are:

1. Lack of cooperation across organizations
2. Lack of a clear customer experience strategy
3. Lack of CEM processes. 

Interestingly, $1B+ companies lack customer understanding significantly more than smaller firms.

Earlier I referred to the six laws of customer experience. One law is that employees are “motivated to do what is measured, rewarded, and celebrated”. Data in this research shows that this is a serious problem for European firms: only a third of firms agree with the statement that employees across the company are recognized and rewarded for improving the experience of target customers.

In terms of customer experience investments, the top 5 items that firms are planning to spend more on in 2008 compared to 2007 are:

1. Web analytics
2. Customer behavioral research
3. Customer satisfaction research
4. Usability labs
5. Focus groups

Only a quarter of firms plan to invest in more services from design and marketing agencies.

My tips:

• Find out where CE (customer service, product satisfaction) stands now. Most firms don’t know where they are in terms of customer success. Just last week we got a request from a large telco to determine the quality of their call center — they had no clue. So, review the experience of your two groups of clients: your customers and your employees.
• Determine where you want to be in two years. Analyze your industry’s future and study what products and services matter to your customers. (Research tip: keep asking the why question until they are fed up with the interview/survey/test.) Interview employees what works and what doesn’t work internally and externally (where they think customers are let down). Then, articulate your experience strategy. Chances are high you need to look at and reengineer your business processes, not just build a pretty-looking website.  Ron at Marketing Whims just wrote a great post about this.

My two cents. I’m interested in your comments!