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The Yellow Brick Road To Customer Experience Maturity July 13, 2009

Posted by Bruce Temkin in Customer experience, Customer-centric DNA, Forrester's Customer Experience Forum.
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I’ve written about how my opening keynote speech at Forrester’s Customer Experience Forum was based on Dorothy’s journey in The Wizard Of Oz. Given the story that I was telling, I presented the five stages of customer experience maturity as a yellow brick road.

As part of the discussion, I highlighted two components for each stage: 1) key focus and 2) cultural change. Since this part of my speech spanned several slides, I created this single graphic to capture the key content for my blog.

5 stages of CxP maturity_2

The bottom line: It’s time to map out your trip along this yellow brick road.

Health Care Needs More Empathy July 2, 2009

Posted by Bruce Temkin in Customer experience, Forrester's Customer Experience Forum.
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6 comments

The US healthcare system needs a major makeover. Costs are skyrocketing, institutions aren’t geared for chronic care, and customer experiences aren’t very good. But there’s some hope.

Retailers and medical providers are applying retail strategies to health care. After closing a majority of its walk-in clinics, Wal-Mart is rebuilding the business through partnerships with hospitals, Cleveland Clinic is working with CVS drugstore clinics, and the Mayo Clinic operating a couple of Express Care clinics. These retail locations aim to increase the convenience and decrease the costs of some health care interactions.

In Forrester’s Customer Experience Forum, I led a panel of customer experience executives that included the Chief Experience Officers from both CIGNA (Ingrid Lindberg) and the Cleveland Clinic (M. Bridget Duffy, MD). It was great to see such dynamic executives leading customer experience transformations inside of these institutions.

Lindberg’s team found that the language used by the large insurer (which is common across the industry) was a huge barrier for individual consumers. So they created a list of words and acronyms not to use with members. By simply changing the words they saw a 156% increase in understanding. The visibility of customer experience at CIGNA has been raised to the point that it’s a monthly topic for the senior executive team.

The customer/patient experience effort at the Cleveland Clinic can be seen in the first few pages of it’s 2008 Annual Report:

ClevelandClinicAnnualReport

This quote shows Cleveland Clinic’s commitment to more than medical outcomes. Duffy explained how each of the doctors at the Cleveland Clinic gets a scorecard at the end of the year with volume metrics and quality and safety metrics. The scorecard now includes patient satisfaction and loyalty scores.

The bottom line: Health care needs more leaders like Lindberg and Duffy

Editorial note: Bridget Duffy left the Cleveland Clinic.

The Customer Experience Journey To Oz June 28, 2009

Posted by Bruce Temkin in Customer experience, Forrester's Customer Experience Forum, Managing in a recession.
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My opening keynote speech at Forrester’s Customer Experience Forum was titled “Charting Your Customer Experience Journey Through Tough Times.”  I made a lot of references to Dorothy’s journey in The Wizard Of Oz.

Dorothy had to overcome a lot of obstacles (flying monkeys, cranky witches, etc.). It turns out that the key ingredients to her success are also the key ingredients for a company’s customer experience efforts in these tough economic times:

  • Heart (Tin Man): These economic times are unsettling for customers and employees. So companies need to raise the bar on their empathy to cater to the changing needs of customers and to build engagement with employees.
  • Brains (Scarecrow): It’s easy to make sweeping across the board cuts to respond to a tough economy. But companies need to think more deeply about their business to distinguish what’s really important (and shouldn’t be cut) from those things that are not important (and can be cut).
  • Courage (Lion): While the natural tendency is to get into a defensive mode during a recession, companies need to prepare for the future and strengthen their business. I referenced this quote from John F. Kennedy:

The Chinese use two brush strokes to write the word ‘crisis.’ One brush stroke stands for danger; the other for opportunity.

There’s some debate as to the accuracy of JFK’s interpretation of the Chinese characters, but the sentiment is absolutely correct! 

I ended my presentation with a rewritten version of the song “Somewhere Over The Rainbow.” Here are the lyrics:

SomewhereOverTheHorizon

Click here to download the song (.wav, 13.5MB)

There was a lot more in my speech, like the Yellow Brick Road of customer experience maturity. So I’ll be writing more about my comments and other parts of the forum over the next week.  Stay tuned!

The bottom line: Don’t wait for a wizard to improve your customer experience

Customer Experience Boosts Revenue June 25, 2009

Posted by Bruce Temkin in Customer experience, Customer loyalty, Forrester's Customer Experience Forum.
24 comments

Earlier this week I published a research report called Customer Experience Boosts Revenue. In the report, I analyzed consumer data to figure out how a change in customer experience affects loyalty and how that can affect revenues. It built off of my earlier analysis about how customer experience correlates to loyalty.  Here are a couple of slides that I used to introduce the research at Forrester’s Customer Experience Forum:

Here are some of the key findings:

  • The difference in loyalty between companies in the top quartile of customer experience (when measured against industry averages) and the companies in the lowest quartile:
    • 14.4% more customers willing to buy another product
    • 15.8% more customers reluctant to switch
    • 16.6% more customers likely to recommend
  • I also examined the revenue change from a 10 point increase in a firm’s Customer Experience Index. It results in a $284 million change for every $10 billion in revenue (average across 12 industries):
    • Additional purchases: $65 million
    • Reduction in churn: $116 million
    • Word fo mouth: $103 million 
  • Here’s some of the industry-specific data:
    • Five largest revenue changes: Hotels ($311 million), credit card providers ($308 million), banks ($305 million), wireless carriers ($305 million), and TV service providers ($302 million)
    • Most change in additional purchases and reduction in churn: Hotels and banks.
    • Most increase from word of mouth: Airlines and wireless carriers

The bottom line: Customer experience is a great investment.

Congrats to VoC Winners: Experian, Progressive, and Vanguard June 22, 2009

Posted by Bruce Temkin in Customer experience, Forrester's Customer Experience Forum, Voice of the customer.
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Well, it’s been a wild day; the Grand Hyatt was hopping today as we kicked off our Customer Experience Forum.

My opening keynote speech seemed to go over really well. I weaved the story of the customer experience journey together with the story of Dorothy’s journey in the Wizard Of Oz. I actually ended my speech with a rewritten version of the song “Somewhere Over The Rainbow.” I also showcased some data from my new report that went live today called “Customer Experience Boosts Revenue.” I’ll talk more about my speech and that research in future posts.

For now, I want to congratulate the three winners of Forrester’s 2009 Voice Of The Customer (VoC) Award: Experian, Progressive, and Vanguard. We received 40 strong nominations, so these winners did a really great job. They all were adept at the four key elements of a VoC program: Listening, Interpreting, Reacting, and Monitoring and were able to identify significant business results from those efforts. You can download their nomination forms from Forrester’s customer experience blog.

There were so many outstanding nominations, that we named 11 finalists:

  • Cardinal Health
  • CIGNA
  • Experian
  • Gaylord
  • Hyatt Place
  • iRobot
  • Logitech
  • Oracle
  • Progressive Insurance
  • Symantec
  • Vanguard

Voice of the customer is a critical component for just about any customer experience effort. And the trends indicate that VoC will become even more important in the future. A lot of the advances in VoC are coming from innovative work from a number of vendors. That’s why one of the questions we asked was: ”What technology vendors or service providers are critical to your success?”

Here’s a shout out to the vendors that were mentioned by the 11 finalists:

Bain and Company, Burke Research, CAHPS, Clarabridge, Cognos, Convergys, ECHO, Healthways, iModerate, JD Power, Lotus Notes, M/A/R/C, Medallia, Microsoft, National Committee for Quality Assurance, NICE, Opinion Lab, Oracle, Radiano, RightNow Technologies, Satmetrix, Somentics, TeaLeaf, Vovici, and Webtrends.

The nominations were loaded with great insights, so I’ll be writing a lot more about what we found.

The bottom line: Congratulations to all of the winners, finalists, and the vendors that helped!

Customer Experience Forum Here I Come June 20, 2009

Posted by Bruce Temkin in Customer experience, Forrester's Customer Experience Forum.
3 comments

After months and months of planning, it’s exciting to be on the verge of Forrester’s first ever Customer Experience Forum. The event, called The Customer Experience Journey: Keeping Momentum In The Downturn, starts this Monday at the Grand Hyatt in NYC. Maybe I’m too close to all of the planning to be objective, but I think the event will rock!

For one thing, we’ve blown past our projections for attendees and sponsors. That’s pretty amazing in this economy. We’ll probably have more than 700 people on-site including Forrester employees and the press, so the place will be hopping.

I’m giving the opening keynote speech which is titled “Charting Your Customer Experience Journey Through Tough Times.” I’ve given hundreds of speeches, but I’m more excited about this one than any of the others that I’ve given. It’s loaded with cool insights, fun content, and it will also showcase some brand new research. On Monday, we’ll be publishing my new report called “Customer Experience Boosts Revenue” which estimates the additional revenue generated by improvements in customer experience across 12 industries. I’ll definitely be blogging about that report down the road.

At the end of the day on Monday, I’ll be announcing the winners of Forrester’s Voice Of The Customer Award. We received 40 strong nominations, so the winners really did a great job.

On Tuesday, I’m thrilled to be leading a panel discussion with some very dynamic customer experience executives:

  • M. Bridget Duffy, M.D., Chief Experience Officer , Cleveland Clinic
  • Aisling Hassell, Vice President, Customer Experience and Online, Symantec
  • Ingrid Lindberg, Customer Experience Officer, CIGNA

Those are my appearances on the main stage, but there’s also a lot more that I’m excited about. Moira Dorsey, a Forrester research director, will be giving the opening keynote on the second day called  ”The Future of Online Experiences: Prepare Now For Recovery.” And Harley Manning, another research director, will undoubtedly keep the entire event fun and entertaining in his role as host.

We also have a number of fantastic industry speakers on the main stage:

  • C. David Cush, Chief Executive Officer, Virgin America
  • Wayne Peacock, Executive Vice President, Enterprise Business Operations, USAA
  • F. William McNabb III, President and Chief Executive Officer, Vanguard
  • Martin A. Nisenholtz, Senior Vice President, Digital Operations, The New York Times Company
  • Chuck Cordray, Senior Vice President, General Manager, Hearst Magazines Digital Media
  • Sohrab Vossoughi, President and Founder, ZIBA Design

There are also four tracks loaded with great content in these areas: Designing Great Web Experiences, Mastering Cross-Channel Experiences, Building A Customer-Centric Culture, and Reinforcing Brands With Every Interaction.

The bottom line: I’m looking forward to the Big Apple!