The Age of the Customer
Posted by Dave Capuano on Tue, Oct 25, 2011
I read a report last week from Forrester’s Kerry Bodine and Mora Dorsey called “Why Customer Experience, Why Now?” If you haven’t read it, check it out here. The paper is very informative, and walks through the different “ages” of companies, including the “Age of Manufacturing” and the “Age of Information.” The majority of the paper focuses on what Forrester calls the “Age of the Customer.”
The age of the customer is where “focus on the customer matters more than any other strategic imperative.” Bodine and Dorsey discuss the impact of commoditization, the dissolution of industry boundaries, and the power customers have today.
The authors also discuss the business value of the overall customer experience, which is critical to driving funding for customer experience efforts. Bodine and Dorsey highlight how an outstanding customer experience can be used to bolster brand equity, boost revenues, garner loyalty, and drive down costs.
In every business, serving customers well is critical to success, many organizations understand the importance of an excellent customer experience, but struggle with embarking on formalized efforts to build a robust customer experience program. In the end, the goal is not only to implement a program, but to create a strategy that can be deployed throughout the organization.
One of the areas Bodine and Dorsey discuss in the paper is “customer experience ecosystem mapping.” Just last week, our own VP of Customer Experience, Nancy Porte, got the chance to present a Webinar with Andrew McInnes from Forrester. The Webinar focused on customer centricity. Within that discussion, the Webinar covered customer journey mapping, in which an organization lays out company interactions from the customer’s perspective. The range of tangible and quantitative interactions, triggers, and touch points are shown in sequence – and some mapping extends the experience to include intangible and qualitative motivations and emotions. To learn more about journey mapping and the overall customer experience we are offering free access to this recently recorded webinar.
As a marketer, all roads lead back to one of the four points Bodine and Dorsey discuss regarding the customer experience: brand loyalty. Customers have brand and financial influence in today’s connected world, and are flexing their muscles every day – across every possible channel. The enterprises that are successful in the market are customer experience driven. As highlighted in the Forrester paper, improving customer experiences are driving millions in revenue gain across a wide variety of industries. Some of the world’s most successful and visible brands today infuse the customer voice into their business – recognizing and replicating the factors that create deeply loyal customers.
Remember: every time a customer interacts with your business there is an opportunity to form an impression about your brand. As such, it is critical to put careful thought into the way you want to interact with customers and elicit their feedback.