The Best Of Customer Experience Matters, Volume #2

It’s hard to believe, but this is my 100th post. So let me start with a big thank you to everyone who has been reading, linking to, writing about, and passing along my blog…

As I did on my 50th post (The Best Of Customer Experience Matters, Volume #1), I decided to mark this milestone with a retrospective of my last 50 entries. So here’s a look back at the major themes in those posts:

• Trends for 2008. In my Trend Watch series,  I examined 52 trends and predictions published in The Economist, The McKinsey Quarterly, Advertising Age, Business Week, and Trendwatch.com. In Trend Watch 2008 Wrap-Up, I organized my 14 favorites into four areas: 1) Consumer Needs, 2) Online Opportunities, 3) Required Skills, and 4) Strategy & Culture. A couple of those: “Emergence Of The “Renaissance Marketer” and “The responsible company: Performing with purpose is the new challenge.” To mark the new year I also came up with Ten Customer Experience Resolutions For 2008.
• My 2008 research agenda. Since my research findings make their way into this blog, I thought that you might be interested in my research plans. So I wrote a post called What’s On My 2008 Research Agenda which highlights my areas of focus and also looks back at my 2007 research. It turns out that I was the top-read analyst at Forrester last year and my top-read report (which is also Forrester’s top-read report) was Experience-Based Differentiation (EBD). So my blog will continue to be heavily influenced by EBD. You may want to Rate Your Customer Experience Skills With The EBD Self-Test.
• Customer experience rankings. Based on a survey of nearly 5,000 US consumers, we created Forrester’s 2007 Customer Experience Index which ranked the customer experiences of 112 firms across 9 industries: Banks, Credit Card Providers, Health Plans, Insurance Firms, Internet Service Providers, Investment Firms, Retailers, TV Service Providers, Wireless Phone Carriers. In what was our first year for these ranking, Costco and Borders came out on top and Charter Communications and Medicaid came out on the bottom. Look out for this ranking again next year.
• Advice for reaching Gen Y. In what has turned out to be a very hot research area, Ross Popoff-Walker and I published a report called “The Gen Y Design Guide” The post Designing Experiences For Gen Y provides some tidbits from the research about how Gen Yers (ages 18 to 27) are different from older consumers and advice on how to design experiences for them. I even got to incorporate lyrics from Soulja Boy’s “Crank That” in the post (how Gen Y of me!).
• Customer experience advice for banks. The last 50 posts are loaded with specific advice for banks. As a group, large banks did poorly our customer experience rankings and could really benefit from focusing on customer experience in 2008.  Here are some posts that were specifically aimed at banks: Banks Have A Gen Y Blind Spot, Customer Experience Execs Help Banks, Two Words For Vikram Pandit (Citigroup CEO): “Customer Experience”, and Chase Can’t Advertise Its Way To Customer Friendliness.
• Words of wisdom. I like to incorporate insights from different sources. Here are some words of wisdom included in the past 50 posts: Colin Powell On Customer-Centric DNA, Babe Ruth On Customer-Centric DNA, and The Customer Is Not Always Right.  My favorite advice came from Walt Disney On EBD, who said: “You can design and create, and build the most wonderful place in the world. But it takes people to make the dream a reality.”
• Intermittent silliness. In Firms Gone Wild (a.k.a. Dumb Moments In Business), I discussed Fortune Magazine’s 101 Dumbest Moments In Business. It included Nepal Airlines sacrificing two goats to appease the Hindu god of sky protection. In Customer Experience For Dummies, I daydreamed about writing a book. Hooters Energy Drink: Branding Gone Bad looked at comical brand extensions like “Danny DeVito’s Premium Limoncello” (it turns out that “Hooters” in the title really attracts readers). Also in the silly department:  Bathroom + Maslow + Experience = An Interesting Post, Better Customer Experience Excuses, and Four Management Styles: Are You Psychotic?
• Red Sox mania. I would not feel right without including some references to my posts about the World Champions. Here’s what I wrote about the Red Sox: Happy Birthday: Red Sox Are American League Champs!, Red Sox Nation Takes Over The World (Series), and Mashup: Halloween + Red Sox + CxP. That last post includes a nice experience that my family had with Jason Varitek.    

The bottom line: I hope that you’ve enjoyed the first 100!

P.S. Don’t forget to read The Best Of Customer Experience Matters, Volume #1